Chutzpah: AUDACITY of STUPIDITY....News of the Weird

NOTE: click blogpost title above to get linked to NEWS OF THE WEIRD, bar none...the best site if you really need a laugh.

No other site, delivers the laughs for me.

You can also check out "The Darwin Awards" site...featuring stories of stupidity by humans who should not have their DNA passed down to another generation.

If you NEED TO LAUGH, THEN YOU GOT TO VISIT THESE TWO SITES.





_______________________


http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/index.html



Questionable Judgments:



Remo Spencer, who works at the Wal-Mart in Great Falls, Mont., was arrested in April and charged with stealing eight laptop computers and seven iPods from the store's inventory. He aroused suspicion when he offered those items for sale on Wal-Mart's employee bulletin board. [Billings Gazette, 4-21-09]


______________________




In March, a judge in Jefferson County, Texas, probated the 90-day DUI sentence for Jeffrey Latham, 37, on condition that he not drink alcohol, and he ordered Latham to report to the probation office.

Two hours later, Latham showed up as scheduled, drunk, and was promptly shuttled back to court. [Beaumont Enterprise, 3-13-09]

____________________




Recently the Washington Supreme Court ruled that Seattle had for two years improperly charged water customers for servicing hydrants when the city should have covered the service from general tax funds, and it ordered customer refunds averaging $45.

However, Seattle then discovered it had insufficient general funds to pay for hydrant service and thus imposed a water surcharge of $59 per customer, according to a February KOMO-TV report.

The most likely reason the surcharge was higher is that the city had to pay $4.2 million to the attorneys who filed the account-shuffling lawsuit. [KOMO-TV, 2-13-09]


____________________________


After three years of providing worker-training grants to a San Francisco-area multimedia coalition that includes a maker of sexualized torture videos, the California Employment Training Panel cut off funding in April, claiming that it had not realized the nature of what an outfit called "Kink.com" does.

The coalition protested the panel's decision, pointing out that Kink is a law-abiding, tax-paying entity that employs 100 local people and keeps California adult video "competitive in the international marketplace" by training employees in video editing, Photoshop and other multimedia skills.

A typical Kink.com production may feature paid, consenting women bound, gagged and supposedly electrically shocked. [SF Weekly, 4-22-09]



______________________________




East St. Louis, Ill., policeman Kristopher Weston apprehended a murder suspect about 20 minutes after the crime in April, which was such a nice piece of police work that the mayor called Weston before the city council to commend him.

Five minutes after Weston left the room, the council got down to regular business, the first order of which was to approve a list of police and firefighter layoffs due to budget shortfalls, and on the list because of low seniority was Officer Kristopher Weston. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4-15-09]

__________________

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw090510.html


A 58-year-old man was arrested in Baltimore in February for allegedly stabbing his 19-year-old son after an argument over the son's refusal to remove his hat during church service. [Fox News-AP, 2-24-09]


________________________




Not Ready for Prime Time:


A 16-year-old boy was arrested in Centerville, Utah, in April as he roamed a neighborhood at night trying to break into several cars.

The last one he tried was the private vehicle of a sheriff's deputy, who was still in it, in uniform and finishing a phone call after coming off his shift.

After arresting the kid, the deputy reported that the boy had been so stunned when he saw the deputy inside the car that he immediately soiled his pants.

Said the deputy, "You could smell him." [Deseret News, 4-21-09]

________________________

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw090503.html



Bright Ideas


Coming Soon to Reality TV: The CMT cable channel has scheduled an August start-up for "Runnin' Wild ... From Ted Nugent," in which the rock singer, hunter and uninhibited gun advocate will spend five episodes training three novices on how to survive in the woods, and then, in the final episodes, Nugent and his 18-year-old son will go hunt them down, with the last one to avoid capture declared the winner. [Press Release from TedNugent.com, 4-2-09]

___________________



In April, police in Copley Township, Ohio, were called to a restaurant where Erik Salmons, 39, was allegedly intoxicated and annoying customers. Officers declined to arrest him but did insist that he call someone for a ride home, and Salmons complied.

However, at home, Salmons decided that he was insulted at being thought of as intoxicated and so drove himself to the police station and demanded a breathalyzer test, which of course he failed, and he was arrested. [Akron Beacon Journal, 4-7-09]
________________________

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw090426.html


When Alcoa Inc. prepared to build an aluminum smelting plant in Iceland in 2004, the government forced it to hire an expert to assure that none of the country's legendary "hidden people" lived underneath the property.

The elf-like goblins provoke genuine apprehensiveness in many of the country's 300,000 natives (who are all, reputedly, related by blood).

An Alcoa spokesman told Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis (for an April 2009 report) that the inspection (which delayed construction for six months) was costly but necessary: "(W)e couldn't be in the position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people." (Lewis offered several explanations for the country's spectacular financial implosion in 2008, including Icelanders' incomprehensible superiority complex that convinced many lifelong fishermen that they were gifted investment bankers.) [Vanity Fair, April 2009

_________________



Joseph Milano, owner of Goomba's Pizza in Palm Coast, Fla., was in the federal witness protection program for squealing on Bonanno crime family members in New York but lost his anonymity in January when he was arrested for allegedly pistol-whipping a customer who had dared to criticize his calzone. [New York Daily News, 2-7-09]

__________________


http://www.newsoftheweird.com/archive/nw090419.html


The GAO report came two months after the German Interior Ministry reported to Parliament that over a 10-year period, it had lost 332 secret files that were in fact so secret that no one in the Ministry could recall what was in them. [The Local (Berlin), 12-13-08]

___________________



A News of the Weird Classic (May 2001)


Inexplicable:


Police in West Vancouver, British Columbia, assured residents in April 2001 that they had stopped a three-year petty-crime spree in an upscale neighborhood when they arrested multimillionaire Eugene Mah, 64, and his son, Avery, 32.

Police said the two were responsible for stealing hundreds of their neighbors' downscale knick-knacks, such as garbage cans, lawn decorations and even municipal recycling boxes, and hiding them at their own luxury home.

Mah's Vancouver real estate holdings are reported at about US$13 million, but among the recovered goods were such tacky items as one neighbor's doormat and, subsequently, each of the 14 doormats the neighbor purchased as replacements. [Canadian Press, 4-26-01]