Uncle John's Presents: Book of the Dumb Read online

  THE 411 ON 911

  Contrary to the view held by the classic rap group Public Enemy, most of the time calling 911 is not a joke—it’s a good number to call in an emergency.

  “Harvey,” a 22-year-old resident of West Palm Beach, Florida, decided that 911 also had another function: personal entertainment. So he called. And he called. And he called. All told, in the space of two months in 2003, he called 911 nine hundred times—200 times on June 23 alone.

  And what would he say when he called? Well, sometimes he’d say a cop had been shot. Sometimes he’d say he wanted to shoot a cop. And sometimes, when he couldn’t think of anything to say, he’d just hoot into the 911 operator’s ear like an animal. You would think that after the first hundred or so calls, the 911 folks would catch on and ignore him. But it’s not like that. Unlike in the famous story of the boy who cried wolf, every 911 call has to be checked out. So every phone call Harvey made took resources away from the people who really were having heart attacks, battling kitchen fires, or being devoured by wolves.

  Maybe Jimmy Is a Big White Rabbit

  So it was only a matter of time before the police descended upon Harvey and nabbed him for unlawful use of the 911 system (a misdemeanor). Harvey claimed that his “friend” Jimmy was the one making the phone calls and that he’d give Jimmy a good talking to. But when the calls didn’t stop, the cops went back to Harvey, and an investigation uncovered that “Jimmy” was the name of Harvey’s parrot. Admittedly, this would explain the animal sounds. Nevertheless, it appears that the police believe it was the guy with the opposable thumbs who was making the calls.

  So heed Harvey’s lesson: play with 911, and the cops will show up, all right. They just won’t be there to help you.

  Source: Associated Press

  CRISPY CASH

  The guy who robbed the Perkins Family Restaurant in North Charleston, South Carolina, was smart enough to bring a blowtorch to cut a hole in the restaurant’s safe. But he wasn’t smart enough not to let the blowtorch set fire to the money inside the safe. Surveillance tapes show the burglar, wearing a T-shirt over his head to hide his identity, rushing to the kitchen sink to get water to put out the flaming cash. Three thousand dollars was stolen, most of it, police suspected, at least partially burned, which would make it difficult to spend. All that heroic effort for nothing.

  Source: Charleston Post and Courier

  DUBIOUS DECOR AWARD

  Since September 11, 2001, airports everywhere have been answering the call for better security by adding new scanning measures for luggage, being more vigilant about the identities of passengers, and buying fake plants.

  What? You’re not exactly sure how the purchase of fake plants aids in the global struggle against terrorism? Well then clearly you’re not a member of the Airport Authority of India (AAI), which in May 2003 allocated roughly $2.7 million to replace the live plants at India’s many airports with more than 22,000 fake ones.

  The thinking was that live plants need to be watered, which means extra staff trolling about the airport—extra staff that could be infiltrated by terrorists. Eliminate the live plants and you eliminate gardeners wandering around, and that’s one less possible point of entry for the terrorists. But you have to have some sort of greenery—otherwise the airports would just look industrial and creepy. Fake plastic trees solve the problem.

  Voodoo Economics

  The thing is, the Airport Authority of India didn’t have $2.7 million just lying around to buy fake plants. (Who does?) So its members came up with some real out-of-the-box thinking: why not take the money that had been allocated for boundary walls and fire safety and buy fake plants with that? Because, you know, the terrorists wouldn’t just try to sneak into the airport over the fences. That’d be too obvious. And once you’ve eliminated the “terrorist gardener” scenario, you’ve also apparently eliminated much of your need for fire safety.

  The AAI’s potted-plant decision was such creative thinking that when the Indian Express newspaper asked India’s federal civil aviation minister Syed Shahnawaz Hussain about it, he was taken entirely by surprise. Hussain promised to investigate immediately. In the meantime, enjoy your flight to the subcontinent! And especially enjoy those fake plants.

  Source: Ananova

  WHERE WAS SMOKEY THE BEAR WHEN WE NEEDED HIM?

  Cigarettes start forest fires, and of all people, we expect a fireman to know that. So it’s with some measure of disappointment that we note that a fire in British Columbia was caused by a fireman improperly flicking his cigarette while installing a satellite dish in his backyard. To the fireman’s credit, as soon as he realized what he’d done, he ran to his neighbors’ to warn them of the approaching wall of flame. But when you’ve started a large fire that causes 8,500 people to flee from their homes and destroys 65 homes, owning up to it is still a little weak. In the aftermath, the fireman wasn’t sure if he should go back to the fire station: “I’m not sure if they want me to work there anymore.”

  Source: Canadian Press

  HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY, EXCEPT IN CIRCUMSTANCES LIKE THESE

  Preface: drinking and driving—bad, bad, bad. Don’t do it. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re pulled over by the cops for a routine traffic stop and the cop asks you if you’ve been drinking. Acceptable answers include “Of course not,” “Not since that liver replacement,” and, in a pinch, “You’d have to ask my lawyer.”

  An unacceptable answer would be what “Dieter” told the cop who pulled him over in Essen, Germany, in July 2003: “Twenty beers at most if you want me to be perfectly honest, officer. But that’s it, really.” In Dieter’s case, this caused the officer, no doubt impressed with our man’s honesty, to administer a breath test, which appeared to confirm the mighty amount of alcohol in Dieter’s bloodstream. Dieter gets a lot of credit for unstinting adherence to the truth, but he also got his license revoked.

  Raymund Sandach, a spokesman for Essen police, had this to say about Dieter: “I’ve no idea why he told them. Maybe because he was drunk.”

  Source: Reuters

  I’D KILL FOR THIS PART!

  Esteban,” an actor in Colombia, really wanted a part in director Emilio Marlle’s new film. He was sick of his lot in life as an actor on a Colombian soap opera, Milagros de Amor, and was ready to move up to the big time. Not satisfied with the traditional ways of getting a role—setting up an audition, sending a tape, showing the studio head risqué pictures—Esteban decided to try something different. Something daring. Something felonious.

  While director Marlle was shooting another feature, Esteban walked onto the film location and, armed with a prop gun and wearing a mask, proceeded to kidnap Marlle off the set of the film. Marlle found himself being hustled toward a getaway car when Esteban ripped off his mask, revealed himself as an actor, and explained how much he’d really like to work with Marlle on his next film.

  Marlle didn’t call Esteban’s agent; he called the cops. And then he told UOL Tabloide in no uncertain terms that the two of them would be unlikely to work together, ever: “That ass**** almost killed me,” Marlle said. “I have not chosen the actor for this part yet and I hope that other actors don’t follow his example.”

  As for Esteban, no doubt he’ll be looking forward to his next role as That Good-Looking, Dumb Actor Guy in a Nasty Colombian Prison. It’s the role of a lifetime!

  Sources: UOL Tabloide, Ananova

  ON THE OTHER HAND, WOULD YOU WANT THIS GUY ON YOUR JURY?

  Jury duty: one of your constitutional rights, sure, and juries are nice to have around if you should ever be found by the police with a suitcase of counterfeit twenties, a badger, a wad of duct tape, and no compelling explanation. Be that as it may, jury duty’s also a bit of a pain. Really, if you’re going to have to miss work, better you should miss it while on the beach tanning yourself into coppery lizardhood, rather than sitting in a box with 11 fellow citizens, trying to stay awake while you listen to some miscreant’s lawyer tr
y to explain how it was the badger’s suitcase, not his client’s. That’s why so many of us will try to find a way to skip jury duty.

  “Ted” of Alto, Michigan, was one of those people. His excuses for skipping jury duty in April 2003 were many. His car was in the shop. He had work. He had a kid to watch. But rather than offer up any of these perfectly valid excuses in the hopes of getting off the hook, Ted pursued a crafty alternate strategy: he just didn’t go.

  The Wheels of Justice Grind Away Unfortunately this strategy did not dissuade the Kent County Circuit Court from its attempt to make Ted participate in a hallowed tradition. The court called Ted to find out where he might have been during those missing three days. Ted called the court back, got the answering machine, and unleashed your basic barrage of obscenities into the machine. Ted later maintained that he was unaware his tirade was actually being recorded, perhaps assuming, and one could say not unjustifiably, that the name “answering machine” implies only that the phone is being answered. However, this still leaves open the question of what Ted was doing hollering obscenities into a phone if he thought no one was listening. Or, alternatively, if he thought he was on the phone with a live person, why yelling at them would be any better.

  Not surprisingly, Ted eventually found himself at the courthouse—not to serve jury duty, but to explain to Judge Donald Johnston why he decided to shirk his obligations as a citizen. Ted quickly annoyed the judge. “Basically, he said he was too busy to be bothered with jury duty,” Johnston told Grand Rapids Press. Judge Johnston decided Ted wasn’t too busy for a trip to the stony lonesome, and sentenced the jury-ditching Ted to jail time: three days, probably not coincidentally the same number of days Ted ditched jury duty.

  “I never thought I’d end up in jail,” said Ted, from jail. He then blamed his stint in the big house on the judge having a bad day, and noted that he still had no intention of spending time in a jury box. He appears to have missed the irony that he was saying this from a completely different sort of box, the sort of box one usually sees only after spending time in front of a jury.

  Source: Associated Press

  JUST SAY NO, EXCEPT TO US

  When you’re a professional tennis player, there are lots of things that you’re not supposed to put into your body—and the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) will happily test what comes out of your body to make sure they’re not there. One of these banned substances is the anabolic steroid nandrolone. Anabolic steroids can artificially increase your muscle mass and thereby increase your performance, and for that reason they’re banned.

  In March 2003, Czech tennis player Bohdan Ulihrach tested positive for nandrolone, and the penalty from the ATP was swift and harsh: a two-year suspension, a fine of over $66,000, and the loss of 100 ranking points (which seems like adding insult to injury, considering he wasn’t allowed to play). But that’s the breaks when you do drugs.

  But did he? In May, the ATP noticed that an unusually high number of urine samples from players were coming back with nandrolone in them.

  Is It in You?

  ATP looked into it and found the culprit: an electrolyte-replacement product given to tennis players by ATP trainers.

  Or to put it more simply: the reason players were testing positive for steroids was because the ATP was giving it to them. Oh, accidentally, of course. Even so, this is just the sort of move that makes conspiracy theorists twitch with delight. It’s also why in July 2003, new ATP guidelines forbade its trainers from handing out certain electrolyte tablets and vitamins.

  As for Bohdan Ulihrach, he was reinstated and declared eligible to play. And for everyone else, the ATP said that the small amounts of nandrolone players ingested won’t have long-term effects.

  Source: Reuters

  A BIG CROC

  The University of Florida’s sports teams are famously known as the “Gators”—named after the state’s famous reptile inhabitant. So it was more than mildly embarrassing when the university’s 2003 football guide was published with a crocodile, not an alligator, on the cover. Can’t tell the two species apart? You’re not alone: neither could the agency hired by the university to find a picture for the guide’s cover. “We asked for an alligator, we paid for an alligator and unfortunately we did not get an alligator,” said a university spokesman. Check out the Everglades, people.

  Source: Associated Press

  “One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothin’ can beat teamwork.”

  —Edward Abbey

  WAIT TILL YOU HEAR WHAT THEY CALL THEIR HARD LIQUOR!

  You’d think that the citizens of the tiny German town of Krov would be thrilled at the prospect of a new multimillion-dollar community center opening in their town. But no—a substantial number of the town’s 2,500 citizens, including the mayor, were hopping mad about it. Why? It’s all in the name.

  You see, Krov, which is in the Mosel region of Germany, has a popular local wine that’s known as “Krover Nacktarsch.” This nicely textured wine is described as “smooth and tasty” by sellers and brings the town some fame in wine circles. So the Krov city council wanted to name the new community center after the wine. Thus the name Nacktarschhalle.

  What’s the Big Deal?

  Well, Nacktarsch, translated saucily into English, means “naked ass.” This concept is cheekily illustrated by the label of the wine variety, which typically shows a wayward kinder, his lederhosen down around his chubby ankles, being spanked by his parent.

  Nacktarschhalle, by extension, means “Naked Ass Hall,” and that’s what got Krov’s mayor, the august Elmar Trossen, all riled up. “Can you imagine being invited to a wedding reception or holding a classical concert at the Naked Ass Centre?” he complained. Regardless, the Krov city council voted 11 to 4 for Nacktarschhalle. Naked Ass Hall it is.

  So the next time you’re in the Mosel region of Germany and you’re invited to come on down to the Naked Ass Hall, try not to get too excited. It’s not what you think.

  Source: Ananova

  BEWARE THE UNDERPANTS!

  Flying underpants were blamed for a car crash in Germany. Apparently a van full of naked guys tossed their underwear into a passing car on the autobahn. The underwear landed on the driver’s face (eeewww!), and the driver, temporarily blinded by the skivvies, proceeded to ram into a truck directly in front of him. No one was hurt, and the naked van guys got away. Police admitted they couldn’t imagine why people were driving around naked on the autobahn in the first place.

  Source: Reuters

  “The only thing that ever consoles a man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.”

  —Oscar Wilde

  HANDS DOWN, THE STICKIEST TAX SITUATION YET

  On the one hand, you can’t blame “Clive.” He was an unemployed factory worker, down on his luck, looking for the benefits he was legally owed by Britain’s Inland Revenue bureau. You certainly can’t say he didn’t make an effort to deal with the bureau: he made more than 200 attempts to get in touch with them about his benefits, to no avail. Finally, it came to the point where he damn well needed those benefits. He had kids to feed.

  However, sticking your hand to someone’s desk with superglue is probably not the most effective way to make your point. This is what Clive did in May 2003. He walked into the Bridgwater, Somerset, office of Inland Revenue and talked to members of the staff there about his predicament. When they told him that they couldn’t help him, Clive took his hand, slathered it with superglue, and slapped it down on a desk. Then he told the staff he’d remove it—and himself—when he got the benefits he’d come for.

  That Was Jive, Clive

  Reasons why this is dumb: first and most obviously, the whole point of superglue is that it’s extremely adhesive, so while slapping down the hand was quickly and easily done, getting it back up without removing large chunks of one’s fingers is something of a challenge. (Clive might have then been able to cla
im disability, but considering why he was at the Inland Revenue office in the first place, it’s not like he could expect the payment anytime soon.)

  Second, as Clive well knew, the wheels of bureaucracy grind ever so slowly, and when one has super-glued oneself to a desk, it’s difficult to take a little time off for a potty break.

  Third, they could have just called the cops and hauled Clive, desk and all, to the slammer.

  Sticking Up for Himself

  The last part, at least, Clive had prepared for. In fact, as he told the London Times, he had fully intended to get arrested. “I wanted to embarrass the Revenue and to get them to do something for people like me,” he said. “I’m just a hardworking man who was hammered into a corner. Sticking my hand to a table is not the sort of thing I do for a hobby.”

  So overall, a dumb move. And yet, it worked.

  A half hour later, Clive was unstuck and out of the office with a check for £400. But be warned, all you benefits seekers: this is one of those dumb moves that probably works only once.

  Sources: London Times, Ananova

  “If you leap into a Well, Providence is not bound to fetch you out.”

  —Thomas Fuller