Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 Page 5

  When family therapists say families should spend more time doing things together, this really isn’t what they mean. Try Yahtzee instead. And don’t attempt any citizen’s arrests while playing.

  Source: wkrn.com, Associated Press, newschannel5.com

  They’re Always in the Last Place You Look

  We’re the last people in the world to say that when it looks like one of your kids is missing, you shouldn’t ask for (and receive) a full-blown search and rescue party. There isn’t a parent alive who doesn’t live in fear of their kid just disappearing, and then facing gut-gnawing anxiety until the child is found safe and unharmed. So, please, if the kid has gone missing, call out the cops. And the dogs. And the neighbors. And the psychics. But please, before you do all that, you might want to check behind the sofa first.

  “Ann,” of Morecambe, Lancashire, England, had lost track of her three-year-old right round teatime (that’s late afternoon, for the Yanks); she assumed that her sister, who had gone across the street with her seven-year-old, had also brought the younger child with her. But when Ann went to retrieve her children, the youngest was nowhere to be found. Naturally, Ann was concerned (well, frantic, actually) and called the police.

  Thereupon commenced an admirable flurry of activity from the local constabulary and the neighborhood residents. They even called in a helicopter to hover over the area and to broadcast a description of the little girl. For three hours police and neighbors searched to no avail. And then, someone had the bright idea to look behind Ann’s couch. There was the sleeping three-year-old wrapped in a blanket. What was the kid doing, sleeping behind a couch? Well, you know kids. They’re always doing something weird. And apparently the kid was a deep sleeper: “My house was swarming with police and [she] didn’t wake up once,” Ann told reporters.

  Total cost of the search-and-rescue? About $50,000. “I was so relieved she was safe and well but did feel bad about that,” Ann said, of the cost of the baby-finding mission. Let’s hope they don’t send her the bill, or that three-year-old might be out of a college education.

  Source: Scotsman.com, The Sun (UK), Morecambe Today (UK)

  But You Can Get the Lithograph for Just $25K!

  If you’ve ever put a preschool picture by one of your kids on the fridge, you know while you might believe the picture is priceless, a genuine art appraiser might—and no offense to your kid—beg to disagree (unless by “priceless,” you meant to imply “worthless”). With that in mind, come along down under, to Australia, and to an “art auction” at the ritzy St. Catherine’s school, in Toorak, Melbourne.

  The “artwork” in question: a large, colorful painting done by members of the preschool class at St. Catherine’s—lots of animals and people in typically preschool representations. It wasn’t a Picasso, in other words (unless Pablo was having a terrible day). But millionaire John Ilhan’s young daughter wanted it, or so he said in an interview with the Herald Sun newspaper, so he made an offer for it.

  And that’s when another parent stepped in and (as Ilhan tells it) informed him that she had deeper pockets than he. And then to prove it, she raised the bid on the painting. Well, apparently Ilhan was not the sort of man who made millions—even in Australian dollars—by turning down a challenge. So he and the woman promptly started a bidding war until finally Ilhan decided that thing had “got seriously out of hand.”

  The final bid? It was $75,000 in Australian dollars (about $53,000 U.S.), and Ilhan’s nemesis got the painting. That chunk of change would be enough to buy art from actual Australian artists—famous and good ones, even. But you know how excited people get when they have more competitive spirit (and money) than sense.

  Interestingly, the bidding war actually seems to have been more about the getting than the having, since the winning bidder eventually returned the artwork to the school. It seems unlikely that the artwork would ever sell for that much again. But then again, maybe it will. Now it’s famous, and there are always collectors who are willing to one-up someone else. Let’s hope the fame doesn’t go to the young artists’ heads. In the meantime, maybe you’ll want to get that refrigerator art appraised after all.

  Source: Herald Sun (Australia)

  long-term storage?

  There are many different types of burial practices in the world, performed by all the various cultures that exist on this globe of ours. There are mausoleums, graves, cremations, funeral pyres, burials at sea, and even the option of leaving your body to science so medical students can get more familiar with your internal organs than you ever were. All of them are beautiful in their own way, except maybe that one with the medical students, but even that has some instructional value. But as far as we know, no culture advises sticking your father’s corpse in an air-conditioned storage locker for three months.

  And yet, that’s what “Len” did after his father passed on (from natural causes) in a motel in Osceola County, Florida, in March 2004. To be fair to Len, even he knew that jamming dad into a storage locker wasn’t the right thing to do. But Len was in a bind: he’d heard that funerals are expensive these days (and they are: the average one goes for about six grand), and he didn’t have that kind of cash lying around. But he did have the $68.48 a month for a 5-by-10-foot storage locker. So, after wrapping up pop in a drop cloth and a garbage bag and telling his mom that he was taking her deceased spouse to a funeral home, he slipped his father into the locker. For three months.

  We realize you’re probably not a forensic scientist or anything, but take an educated guess here: what do you think happens to a human body after three months in a storage locker? If you guessed “I’m pretty sure it would start to smell—really bad,” you’re ready for a guest shot on CSI Miami. Indeed, dad’s decomposing body started to smell—really bad. The managers of the storage facility (who did not know what was in the storage locker) kept calling Len to tell him he needed to check his storage space because it smelled like something died in there. Perhaps, they were thinking maybe just a rodent.

  Realizing he couldn’t keep dad in storage for much longer, Len made a decision. To come clean and properly bury dad? Well, no. His next step was to transfer dad from the storage locker to a rented U-Haul truck (“Adventures in Moving” indeed!) and then park that truck in front of his own house. Len failed to appreciate that a body that smells bad in an air-conditioned storage locker doesn’t smell any better in the back of a U-Haul baking in the sun. Soon the neighbors started complaining about the smell. After confiding in a friend, Len eventually came clean to the authorities and cut a deal with them to properly put his poor dad to rest.

  It turns out that if you can’t afford to bury someone, generally speaking your local authorities can help you find a way to do it, since it’s not a good idea to leave bodies lying around—stuffed in storage lockers or otherwise. Give it some thought before you have to lie to the storage facility manager about what you’re keeping in that space you’re renting.

  Source: Local10.com, wftv.com, Orlando Sentinel

  does the duffel bag cost extra?

  We’ve got a personality test for you. You’re at the beach, when a guy comes up to you with an infant in a duffel bag and asks you if you’d be interested in buying. Do you:

  1.Haggle on a price;

  2.Smile weakly at the guy’s clearly lame sense of humor and walk away briskly; or

  3.Call the cops on the sick loser?

  No, no, you don’t really have to answer; we know all of you picked 3 (right?). And the reason for this is pretty obvious: sure, it’s funny when Monty Python sells off a passel of children for medical experiments in The Meaning of Life, but in the real world, the idea of jocularly suggesting to strangers that you’d be willing to part with your baby, who you keep in a duffel bag, is creepy and wrong. Everybody know this.

  Well, almost everyone. Then there’s “Joe,” a young Pennsylvania father. Joe and his wife were at the beach in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, with their four-month-old son, when the wind whipped up and started
blowing sand around. To protect their child from the elements, the couple advisedly placed their infant in an open duffel bag. And that’s when Joe got the “bright” idea of walking up to total strangers, showing them the incongruous sight of a baby in a bag, and asking them if they’d like to buy the baby. What yuks!

  Yes, a good time was had by all, or at least by one, until the police showed up, charged Joe and his wife with child endangerment, and briefly put the baby in the care of Child Protective Services. It seems that approaching random strangers and telling them that you’re interested in unloading your baby to them makes people call the police to tell them all about you because they believe you. They have no idea you’re just some idiot with a really bad sense of humor. They don’t know you at all. That’s why they’re called “strangers.”

  After a nice long conversation with Joe and his wife, the local police were eventually convinced that they didn’t actually have baby-sellers on their hands, just people with a mal-adjusted sense of what’s funny. “Right now we’re leaning toward a conclusion that it was not an authentic offer,” a police spokesman told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “But if he thought he was being funny, it sure wasn’t very humorous.” Well, it’s kind of funny now. Just not in the way Joe intended.

  Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, Associated Press, ABC News

  Someone Left the Rake Out in the Rain

  Timmy,” who was twelve, was misbehaving in school. So naturally Timmy’s mom knew that she had to discipline her child to make him understand the consequences of his actions. And of course, that’s fine: the parent who won’t discipline his or her own child creates a problem child for the rest of us.

  Timmy’s mom’s choice of discipline: Timmy had to rake the leaves in the front yard! Well, that’s tough but fair; it’s physical labor and something most kids don’t enjoy, but at the same time it’s something useful, and at least the boy will get some fresh air. So, on balance, a reasonable punishment. Get raking, Timmy!

  Oh yeah, one other thing, said Timmy’s mom. Timmy would be raking the leaves completely naked. In the rain. With high winds. While the temperatures are in the 40s.

  And it’s here, alas, that Timmy’s mom lost us. And apparently, she lost the rest of the neighbors in her Virginia neighborhood, too, since one of them called the police to complain that a twelve-year-old was out naked in the rain. Timmy was still in the front yard, rake in hand, when the cops rolled up. Shortly thereafter they rolled away with Timmy’s mom in tow because she’d been charged with felony child neglect, which, speaking of appropriate discipline, can get you five years in the Virginia pen.

  Source: Freelance-Star (Fredricksburg, VA)

  The Really Stupid Quiz

  Dumbing in the Family

  One of the stories below has good relations with the truth. Two of them are shady second cousins. Which is which? That’s for us to know and you to guess.

  1.The “evil twin” concept, beloved by Hollywood, got a real life workout when Tim Garrity of Dallas, Texas, was cited for disturbing the peace when witnesses saw his truck and a man matching his description tearing up and down residential streets in the early morning hours. But Garrity was home sleeping next to his wife at the time of the events. However, Garrity’s identical twin brother, Charlie, who lived with their parents less than a mile away, had keys to both Tim’s house and his truck. Upon questioning, Charlie initially denied borrowing the car, but admitted to a drunken joyride after persuasion from his mother, who, as Dallas police officer Wayne McDonald said, “smacked him upside the head and told him to tell the truth.”

  2.Kids sure love their video games, but some kids like their video games more than others. A lot more. Like, to a dangerously unhealthy degree. Like “Soo,” a Hong Kong thirteen-year-old so wrapped up in his computer game that he hardly noticed when midnight rolled around. His dad noticed the time and came in to tell Soo to give it a rest. Well, Soo didn’t want to give it a rest, so dad did that parental thing dads do, and went over to the wall socket and unplugged the computer. And then Soo did that thing kids do when dads do the parental thing, which was to go into the kitchen, grab a knife, and go after his father with it. Oh, wait, that’s not actually what most kids do. Silly us. Well, dad managed to overpower Soo, the police were called and no one ended up getting hurt. But we suspect that’s it for video games for Soo. And rightly so.

  3.Aaah . . . the miracle of birth! Typically, it’s a typical time for celebratation but an atypical time to get arrested. That’s what happened in St. Louis, Missouri, when several relatives of a delivering woman were arrested at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center. The mother-to-be had requested that several family members be allowed to observe the birth; the request was initially granted, but “The family members would keep getting in the way,” said nurse Juanita Ocampo, who assisted the doctors. “They were all really casual about it, like they were at a cookout, not a birth.” The doctor eventually asked the room to be cleared of everyone except the woman’s husband, but the relatives, feeling insulted, became hostile. How dare the doctor try to remove distractions from the baby’s delivery? Of all the nerve! The doc then paged hospital security, who called in the police who escorted the relatives out of the delivery room, so the doctor, could like do his job and stuff.

  Turn to page 329 for the answer.

  The Annals of Ill-Advised Television

  today’s Episode: The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer

  Starring in this Episode: Chi McBride and Dann Florek

  Debut Episode: October 5, 1998, on UPN

  The Pitch: Desmond Pfeiffer (the “p” is pronounced, and played by McBride) is a black, British gentleman in the 1860s who is exiled from Britain for cheating at cards. Desmond moves to the U.S. and finds employment as a butler in the White House of Abraham Lincoln (Florek). Think of it as Benson, only during the Civil War.

  It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time Because: UPN, with its tiny viewership, was carving out a niche with “urban” comedies, and this seemed up their alley. Plus show creators Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan had won Emmys for writing and producing The Golden Girls.

  In Reality: The NAACP got whiff of the idea that Desmond would be deriving yuks from slavery and called for a boycott of the show, which pretty much stripped the show of any “urban” credibility it might have. UPN, somewhat panicked, pulled the pilot episode and started the series with another episode instead. Not that it mattered, as television critic Philip Michaels commented on Teevee.org: “No, Desmond Pfeiffer isn’t racist. It is, however, unspeakably lame.” Another misstep was to portray Abe Lincoln as a sex-starved, dim-bulb who engaged in “telegraph sex” with strange women; one could argue that, in theory, the show was satirizing the events of the Clinton White House, but it would be a pretty weak argument.

  How Long Did It Last? Four episodes, with the final episode airing October 26, 1998. Nine episodes were completed; five, including the pilot, never aired.

  Were Those Responsible Punished? Some. Desmond creators Fanaro and Nathan went on separately to make bad movies: Fanaro wrote the senior-citizen crime caper flop The Crew while Nathan wrote and directed the punishingly awful flop Boat Trip. McBride went on to act in a better TV series (Boston Public) and was most recently in the summer movies The Terminal and I, Robot. Dann Florek retreated back in the Law and Order universe that had made him famous; he plays a captain on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

  CHAPTER 5

  Edu-ma-cation

  “Teach your children well,” says the song. Well, that’s not what happened in this chapter; in this chapter, we’ve got people teaching children very, very poorly. Although to be fair, the kids do their part as well. But hey! They’re kids. They have an excuse. The adults in this chapter, on the other hand, we have to wonder about. How did they get out of high school? (We have some theories, but they’re not very nice.)

  The Class Ended With a Bang

  In Orlando, Florida, there’s this great program for kids called, “The Game o
f Life, The Game of Golf,” that aims to introduce underprivileged youngsters to the sport. But an additional part of the class involves teaching kids to make smart life choices—like, for instance, being careful around loaded weapons.

  Enter “Agent Smith,” from the Drug Enforcement Agency (better known to us as the DEA) and his .40 caliber duty weapon. During the class, Agent Smith took out the gun, removed the magazine, and then pulled back the slide to clear the chamber—indeed, he had one member of the audience of about fifty adults and children come up and confirm that there was no bullet in the chamber.

  As a brief interruption, we’d like to say that we don’t know much about handguns and the handling thereof, but we do know not to ever, ever take anyone else’s word on whether a gun is loaded or not. They could be lying, they could be idiots, or they could miss that one last little bullet. Treating every gun as if it’s loaded is the smart way to go. Now, back to the action.

  Once the audience member confirmed there was no bullet in the gun, Smith released the slide—which caused the bullet in the “unloaded” gun (surprise!) to blast out of the barrel and imbed itself in Agent Smith’s thigh (it was only a flesh wound). A spectator who brought her nephew to the class related to the Orlando Sentinel: “My first thought was that it was part of his presentation. I thought it was a blank and he was trying to make a point about how easy it is to fire, to get the kids’ attention. But then I looked at the agent’s face and he looked surprised.”