Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 (17 page)

Source:
The Clarion Ledger
(Jackson, MS)

 

L
et's say you've been given a 100-year-old gold coin worth $1,000,
because, oh, it was “$1000 century-old coin day” at the local minor league ball park. What you should do next is take that coin home, lovingly encase it in plastic or a wall safe, and tell the children that if they so much as breathe on it that you'll ground them until they're eighteen. What you should not do is leave it around like so much loose change. Because if you do, you may do something stupid with it.

As did “Marta,” from Paarl, South Africa. Seems that she inherited from her parents some very valuable gold sovereign coins, minted in 1890. She stored them rather lackadaisically, and they managed to get mixed in with a bunch of other coins. So one day she scoops up some coins, drives her car downtown, parks. and slips a coin into the parking meter. One of the 1890 coins worth $1,000. That's a
lot
of parking.

Her reaction, as reported in the Cape Argus newspaper: “I can't believe I could have done something like that.” We bet the coin was surprised, too. But perhaps not as much as another one of the coins, which the woman suspected she spent as a 20-pence piece (which it apparently resembled), which would be worth, oh, a few pennies or so here in the States. The woman's excuse for mixing up her money: She was shopping without her glasses. Probably the last time she'll be doing that. The woman has asked town officials to be on the lookout for the coin. We're sure they were right on that.

Source:
Cape Argus
(South Africa), Reuters

 

B
y definition,
people who have vanity plates on their cars and motorcycles want to be noticed (they're not called humility plates, after all). Jim Cara of Delaware was no exception—he wanted to give people a chuckle when they read his motorbike plates, so he selected what he thought was a clever little statement: “NO TAG.” Because, see, he had a tag, and the tag said “no tag!” It was, like,
totally
meta. And thus did Jim Cara of Delaware feel mightily pleased with himself.

Until, that is, he started receiving the traffic violations—more than 200 of them, ranging in offenses from speeding to meter violations, with fines from $55 to $125 (which would mean the total amount would have been at least eleven grand). Either someone had been borrowing Cara's wheels and flaunting the law on a very rapid basis or something had gone horribly wrong somewhere in the ticketing system.

It seems that when you have a license plate with the words “NO TAG,” all the violations for cars that don't actually have plates suddenly get attributed to you, because police officers and meter maids alike write “no tag” on the violations. Because computers aren't smart enough to realize the clever little license plate joke, Cara's vehicle became the most heavily fined in the state. Cara became understandably twitchy about hitting the road on his motorbike. “I messed up the system so bad,” Cara said. “I wonder if they can put me in jail or something?”

Good news for Cara—he got in touch with real live humans, who quickly realized what the problem was and fixed it, so the cops wouldn't throw him in the pokey for hundreds of violations he never incurred. Spokesmen at the Delaware Division of Motor Vehicles suggested that Cara change his plate, but he refused: “I want to keep it,” he said. “I think it's awesome.” At least until the next computer screw-up.

Source: Delaware Online

There's dumb. There's
really
dumb. And then, a cut below that, there's the sort of dumb that even animals roll their eyes at. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here and now, for your delight and edification, a series of incidents involving animals and humans, in which it is clear that the smartest living things in the stories are not the ones with the opposable thumbs.

 

T
hose French.
Oh, stop your giggling. We haven't even told you what stupid thing they've done yet. Really, now. Let us do our work, here.

Where were we? Ah, yes, those French. We understand that France, having been occupied by humans for several thousands of years at least—humans who have a well-justified aversion to having large predators loping around where they live—might not have all that much going on in the way of lions and tiger and bears (oh my) these days. So when it was reported that several residents of Marseille had seen a large black panther roaming around, naturally everyone was a little on edge. Authorities shut down a large recreational area outside of town where the panther had been spotted—wouldn't do to have tourists eaten—and dozens of soldiers and police went through the area to find the large feline predator.

And they found it, sort of. What they found
was
a predator, and it
was
feline, but “large” was strictly a relative term. It was an ordinary if somewhat big-boned black housecat, which experts estimated being two feet long from tip to tail and weighing in at 22 pounds. For comparison, your average panther typically weighs in at 100 to 200 pounds and can be seven feet long, not including the tail. But we guess you
could
confuse a house cat with a panther. If you were a
gnome.

We wonder how the good people of Marseille would describe a real panther. We're not sure, but just in case, we're instructing our clipping service to look out for stories with the words “Marseille” and “Saber-toothed Tiger.”

Source: Reuters,
www.iol.co.za

 

I
n retrospect, it could be said
—not by
polite
people, but even so—that the bird enthusiasts of Wrenthorpe, West Yorkshire, England had perhaps gotten a little smug. And why not? It
was
near their little village that storks only rarely found in Britain had been recently spotted. And so when a new, large, mysterious owl appeared in their midst, the birdwatchers were thrilled. It was just more proof that, if you were a bird or a birdwatcher, Wrenthorpe was a tidy English paradise.

What was nice about the owl was that it seemed to have a predictable routine. Every morning, there it was on a telegraph pole. Really, you could set your watch to it. And after a few days of
that,
well, some people got suspicious. As local bird enthusiast Harold Barrett mentioned to the local press, “Owls can stay in one place for a while, but not that long.”

So eventually someone went to get a closer look at the owl. At which point it was discovered the owl was a decoy nailed to the pole. To scare off other birds or to fake out the now embarrassed and angry birdwatchers? The prankster has not been found to explain his motives, and the owl, of course, is silent.

Representatives of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds offered these consoling words: “It is great that they are looking out for birds. Let's just hope that next time they spot something more than a decoy.”

Source: Reuters

 

I
f you were suddenly missing
a finger, wouldn't you
mention
it to someone? Wouldn't you at least
acknowledge
it?

We ask because in May 2004, there was a spare finger lying outside the jaguar exhibit at the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with no one around to claim it. It turned out to be a more complicated affair then just poking a finger in the cage. To get to the jaguar, the perp had to go past metal barriers and cactus, and avoid detection by the zoo staff to reach his quarry. Make no mistake, it took real initiative to lose this finger. So it was surprising that no one cared to claim it.

Be that as it may, the zoo staff had their suspicions as to who Mr. Nine Fingers was. Particularly, they had their eye on a frequent zoo patron who had been there nearly every day over the past few years and, more importantly, who was seen running from the zoo on the day the finger would have gone missing. Apparently, not only was he running, but he was doing so with his hand in his pocket and with a dark stain spread over his pants. He was a member of the zoo, so they looked up his number in their database and gave him a call. And he said something along the line of, well, I've got ten fingers, so you've got the wrong guy.

Well, he
didn't,
and they didn't. The mystery of the missing finger was solved pretty much like you'd expect. Back at some point when this zoo patron
did
have ten fingers, he'd been fingerprinted by the police. So the zoo handed over the gruesome jaguar treat to the police, who compared its fingerprint and matched it up with that of the zoo patron.
Confronted by the overwhelming evidence of the fingerprinting (and, one imagines, the uncomfortable fact of being able only to count to nine on his hands), the patron reluctantly admitted to the former ownership of said finger.

The zoo didn't press charges against the patron, reasoning that having a finger snapped off by a predator is probably punishment enough. But they
did
ban him from the zoo, we guess just in case he hadn't learned his lesson. Well, look at it this way: if he doesn't learn it after another eight or nine times, we figure the problem will just take care of itself.

This is an object lesson to all you would-be animal lovers out there: just because you think you have a special relationship with an animal at the zoo, it doesn't mean that the animal agrees. This is especially true of, say, animals who are at the top of their food chain in their native habitat and have a mouth full of teeth especially designed for shearing off body parts. But don't take
our
word for it, take the word of zoo director Ray Darnell, who told the press: “They're not your friends, they're not your pets. They're wild animals.” Preach it, Ray.