The folly of talking to liberals

Ed. here. We are experiencing technical difficulties. We hope to post something more substantial as soon as we can find a 16-year-old Chinese kid to fix our system.

Meme of the month (so far)

Not only do they exist, they're allowed to drive cars [and big rigs! Ed.] and even to vote.

Darwin Award Gold Medal for 2024

May we have the envelope, please?... This year's highest Darwin Award goes, posthumously of course, to Lester C. Harvey, of Phenix, Virginia. Here is one of the last sights Mr Harvey saw before his death on December 9th.

The unfortunate incident unfolded as Mr Harvey and some friends were tracking a bear, which ran up a tree, as bears do. One of his friends then shot the animal, which fell on Mr Harvey, who had managed to live 58 years until that fatal moment.

A member of the hunting party rendered first aid before Mr Harvey was rushed to two different hospitals, neither of which was able to prevent nature from taking its course. 

According to the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, black bears are found throughout most of the state and have been located in at least 92 of Virginia's 98 counties and cities. 

The department says that it is illegal "to cripple, harm or dislodge a bear from a tree for the intent of continuing a hunt, chase, or for the purpose of training dogs." However, a spokesthingy told the local CBS affiliate, "the Department is not currently seeking any charges related to this incident."

Brazilian woman tries "Weekend at Bernie's" trick to get bank loan

Walt loves stories about stupid criminals, and this is the best one I've heard in a looooong time. Erika de Souza Vieira Nunes, a resident of a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, has been arrested after she brought her uncle, Paulo Roberto Braga into a bank to co-sign for a loan. Unfortunately, Mr Braga, who was brought in in a wheelchair, was determined to be dead.

The Rio newspaper O Dia reports that, in a CCTV video, Ms Nunes is heard calling Braga her uncle as she speaks to the body and props up his head. "Uncle, are you listening?" she says. "You need to sign [the contract]. If you don’t sign, there’s no way, because I can’t sign for you."

She then grabs a pen and forces it into the hands of the corpse, saying, "Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches, I can’t take it anymore." According to the video, she replies "He doesn't say anything, that's just how he is," before turning to the dead body and adding: "If you're not okay, I'm going to take you to the hospital." 

Bank staff soon became suspicious as the man's head kept falling back so they called the police who arrested Ms Nunes. The cops allege that Mr Nunes, who was 68, had died just hours before, while ly ing down. "She knew he was dead," said the investigating officer. "He had been dead for at least two hours."

Ms Nunes now faces charges of violating a corpse and attempted theft through fraud. Her lawyer says that Mr Braga was alive when he entered the bank. "The facts did not occur as has been narrated. Paulo was alive when he arrived at the bank. All of this will be cleared up. We believe in Érika’s innocence."

You Can't Fix Stupid Dept.

While we wait for South Carolina to put the last nail in the Birdbrain's coffin (lifetime pct .983), we present an item from Walt's large collection of stories that make one think "Thank goodness I'm not that stupid!" 

Authorities in Colorado have confirmed the death of a 34-year-old local resident four days after he was bitten by one of his two pet Gila monsters. 

Gila monster bites are not normally fatal to humans. But Dr Nick Rivera [Ed. Please check last name -- could be Brandehoff] a medical toxicologist and reptilian expert, told CBS News Colorado that the victim may have suffered an allergic reaction. 

The last human death from such a bite is believed to have been in 1930. That incident "was not even a medical journal case," said the good doctor. "The vast majority of bites cause local swelling and bleeding," he said.Dr Brandehoff added that last week's death "highlights that any venomous animals should be respected". 

The victim reportedly owned two of the carnivorous reptiles. Gila monsters are the largest lizards in the US of A and can grow to about 22 inches in length, according to the Smithsonian Institution. They are named after the Gila River. The creature that bit the unidentificed Jefferson County man last week was a juvenile, only 12 inches long. 

It is illegal to own Gila monsters in Colorado without a licence. Tarantulas are OK though. The animal lover had two of those.  

The Jefferson County coroner's office has performed an autopsy but is conducting additional toxicology testing to determine a precise cause of death. A Colorado Parks and Wildlife criminal investigator told CBS his team had been asked to remove the two Gila monsters from the home.

They will be taken to a "wildlife rehab"* in another state, but the lizard that bit the man will first be transported to a lab at the University of Northern Colorado, where its venom will be extracted and studied to learn more about why its bite led to its owner's death.

* Note from Ed.: I'm not sure what a "wildlife rehab" is. Sounds like somewhere you go to dry out after a wild weekend.

WSJ: "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity"

Dear readers, please don't fail to read "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity", by Lance Morrow, in the Wall Street Journal, 29/8/21... even if you have to subscribe! (The WSJ is one of the few American news outlets that provides reasonably fair and balanced coverage of American politics.) 

This is the subhead: The convergence of many seemingly unrelated elements has produced an explosion of brainlessness. And here's the beginning.

"Stupidity," Jean Cocteau remarked, "is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become." 

We live in a golden age of stupidity. It is everywhere. President Biden’s conduct of the withdrawal from Afghanistan will be remembered as a defining stupidity of our time -- one of many. The refusal of tens of millions of people to be vaccinated against the novel coronavirus will be analyzed as a textbook case of stupidity en masse. Stupid is as stupid does, or, in the case of vaccination, as it doesn’t do. Stupidity and irresponsibility are evil twins.

The slow-motion zombies' assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6 was a fittingly stupid finale to the Trump years, which offered dueling stupidities: Buy one, get one free. The political parties became locked in a four-year drama of hysteria and mutually demeaning abuse. Every buffoonery of the president and his people was answered by an idiocy from the other side, which in its own style was just as sinister and just as clownish.

Cable news provided the Greek chorus. American government and politics became cartoons. The Democrats, all unknowing, played Wile E. Coyote to Mr. Trump’s Road Runner. Twice, the Democrats’ Acme Impeachment Committee rigged up the big bomb (heh heh), lit the fuse and held its ears. 

"Trump is crazy!"

"Trump is Hitler!"

"Trump is a Russian agent!"

"Bob Mueller has the goods!"

Both times, the Road Runner sped away. Beep beep!

Of course there's more. The message I take from it is this.

Yes, President Trump told you so! Walt told you so! 1000s of other people, amazed and distressed by the prevailing stupidity, told you so! It's time to put an end to the stupidity. Mid-terms are coming up in just 15 months. You know what to do... don't you?!

Speaking of special days, months, years, etc

In my earlier post today I admitted to nearly forgetting to mention "Stop Blaming White People" month, which ends tomorrow. I think I should be forgiven for that near-omission. There are so many bogus and useless days, months and years to celebrate, that's it's hard to keep track of them all.

And then there are the festivals. Nearly every weekend sees an ethnic festival of some kind going on in 100s of cities across the land. Then you have the harvest festivals, spring festivals (e.g. Groundhog Day, mentioned here earlier this month), national independence festivals, religious festivals, and on and on and on. One that I hadn't heard of until I saw this report in Metro News (UK), is Mexico's not-very-famous Exploding Hammer Festival.

The event, which takes place every February, involves people attaching a mix of sulpher and chlorate to the ends of sledge hammers. They they smash the hammers against rail beams, making the substance explode and send up massive clouds of smoke. Like this.

This unusual festival, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, is held in the small town of San Juan de la Vega. San Juan, so the story goes, was the victim of bandits who made off with his gold. (Where the gold came from, no-one knows.) St John the Baptist helped recover the gold, thus becoming a Mexican Robin Hood. What this has to do with exploding hammers is unclear, but never mind.

As you can see, some of the hammerers are flung backwards by the force of the explosion. One man hurt his leg in the blast and had to be carried off on a stretcher. Others were less seriously injured, bringing the total to 43 hurt. Assuredly, God and Saint John know their devotion.

A very Canadian crime story

Things are tough all across Canada. The country is in winter's icy grip. The natives are restless, demanding that Canadian "colonialists" respect their land rights, and blocking railway tracks to force the cancellation of a natural gas pipeline project in northern BC. The usual gang of antifa and loonie leftists have apprpriated the aboriginal protests for their anti-oil, anti-business, anti-white protests. The lily-livered arch-panderer Just In (for a visit) Trudeau does nothing.

Things are even worse in the western province of Alberta, where a major player in the oil patch, Teck Resources, has abandoned its Frontier tar sands mine plan. Teck's CEO says it's because "global capital markets are changing rapidly and investors and customers are increasingly looking for jurisdictions to have a framework in place that reconciles resource development and climate change, in order to produce the cleanest possible products. This does not yet exist here today."

The cancellation of the project means the loss of 7000 jobs in a province already butt-hurt from the years-long downturn in the oil industry. For many Albertans, unemployment benefits have long since run out, and other jobs just aren't available. In places like Fort MacMurray, if you're not working in the oil patch, you're not working. Period.

Airdrie AB is in the southern part of the province, not totally dependent on the oil economy, but things are still tough there, and people take desperate measures, including stealing from donation boxes at coffee shops. The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen are hoping to identify a man who allegedly used a rubber chicken to help him steal from a box at Tim Hortons earlier this month.

Inspector Knacker told the meeja that the man placed a rubber chicken over a donation box sitting on the front counter and used the prop to conceal the box as he left the business. The incident, which happened at the Tim Hortons in Airdrie on February 11th, was captured on camera. Today, the cops released a picture of the suspect, who they described as wearing a blue sweater or jacket, a balaclava and "holding a rubber chicken." Period.

True laws (à la National Lampoon)

Remember National Lampoon, "The Humor Magazine for Adults"? In its heyday, from the beginning in 1970 through the mid-1980s, it had some excellent writing -- humour in a jugular vein [That was MAD. Ed.] -- by such fine funny fellows as Chris Beard, Doug Kenney, and the inimitable P.J. O'Rourke (my favourite).

Regular features included Letters from the Editor, Funny Pages (excellent comix by the likes of Charles Rodrigues, B.K. Taylor and Shary Flenniken), Photo Phunnies, and another of my favourites, the True Section. The True Section comprised True Facts and True Photos, real-life stuff proving that the truth is stranger than fiction. You couldn't make such stuff up!

Included in the True Facts, from time to time were examples, contributed by readers, of actual laws which were either badly written or just plain stupid in and of themselves. For example: In Massachusetts it is illegal for a goat to wear trousers.

I don't know if that's true now, or ever was true. In fact it doesn't come from the NatLamp True Section, but from a book by Leland Gregory called S Is For Stupid (Andrews McMeel, 2011). Mr Gregory says these are true (and stupid/funny) laws, and I'll take his word for it. They sure made me laugh!

Cats are forbidden to ride on public buses in Seattle if there is a dog already on board. Also, any dog weighing more than 25 pounds must pay the full adult fare.

No person shall knowingly keep or harbor at his house or her house within the city any woman of ill-repute, lewd character, or a common prostitute...other than wife, mother, or sister. (Ashland KY ordinance)

Burglars are prohibited from entering or leaving the scene of a crime by the front door. (Lincoln NE ordinance)

Whoever operates an automobile or motorcycle on any public way -- laid out under authority of law recklessly or while under the influence of liquor shall be punished. (Massachusetts state ordinance. The absence of a second em-dash would seem to impose on the motorist the duty of finding out at his peril whether certain highways had been laid our recklessly or while under the influence of liquor, before driving his car over them.)

No dog shall be in public without its master on a leash. (Belvedere CA ordinance)

In Alaska it is against the laws to disturb a grizzly bear in order to take its picture. (A crime with its own unique punishment?)

Speed upon country roads will be limited to 10 miles an hour unless the motorist sees a bailiff who does not appear to have had a drink in 30 days, then the driver will be permitted to make what he can. (??? El Dorado County CA law)

Mississippi common law states that every citizen has a right to shoot to kill if necessary when escorting a woman home from a quilting party and another man interferes and threatens to shoot him.

That's enough stupid/funny laws for one day. Ed. Anyone who collects National Lampoon magazines is recommended to search eBay this month. One of our assiduous readers has dozens of them on sale (by auction) at reasonable prices.

VIDEO: Don't FAIL to handle firearms safely!

Regular readers of WWW know that I am a great believer in the Second Amendment, and the right of all citizens (note, CITIZENS!) to bear arms. But if you're going to have a gun to protect yourself, your home and your family from criminals and invaders (note, INVADERS!), please learn how to use and store it properly. Practise firearm safety at all times! If you don't, you could wind up in a video like this!



The question at the end asks which one takes the prize. My vote is for Number 7. Muchas gracias and a tip of the sombrero to Agent 6 for sending this along.

VIDEO: Hockey players' memorable brain farts

Poor Len Canayen here. Ed. has been asking me when I'm going to write something about the woes of the Montréal Canadiens. I am not. At least not until they're officially out of the playoffs, which should be in a week or so. I also want to see what General Manager Marc Bergevin is going to do between now and the February 26th trade deadline... if anything...

Meanwhile, Habs fans need a bit of cheering up, so here's a short(ish) video that proves that everyone makes mistakes... including Marc Bergevin. Enjoy.

For Habs fans, laughter is the best medicine

According to Those Who Should Know, Monday last was "Blue Monday", the saddest day of winter, perhaps of the entire year. Crappy weather, holiday bills coming due, no holiday in store until Easter... and, for fans of the Montréal Canadiens (like the young lady at right), yet another disappointing hockey game.

Now that I have your attention... no, this is not the introduction to another moan by Poor Len Canayen. I asked him if he planned on second-guessing Marc Bergevin this week, but he said no, he'd rather shoot him, if he should catch him strolling down The Main.

He went on to say that when the news is grim, the best thing is share a good laugh, and, good fellow that he is, volunteered this supposedly true bit of testimony from a criminal trial.

Counsel: What happened after you had been listening to the music for awhile?
Witness: We got held up.
Counsel: And what happened? Would you give the judge the details of that?
Witness: Well, they told us to get up against the wall, throw our money on the floor, and drop our pants.
Counsel: And what did you do?
Witness: Got against the wall, threw my pants down, and threw our money down.
Counsel: I mean after you got up against the wall and went through -- or followed his directions, what happened?
Witness: Cracked up laughing, because one of the other guys -- guys in on it -- dropped his pants, too.
Counsel: Excuse me? One of the robbers?
Witness: Right.
Counsel: And what happened as he did that?
Witness: They told him, "Not you, stupid!" And he picked up the money.

Source: Disorderly Conduct: Verbatim Excerpts from Actual Court Cases, selected by Rodney R. Jones, Charles M. Sevilla and Gerald F. Uelmen. Illustrations by Lee Lorenz, one of the great cartoonists of the New Yorker. W.W. Norton & Co., 1987.

Not female, not blonde... just not thinking!

Agent 6 (to whom be thanks) sent us this interesting photo. These contractors are installing bollards (steel pillars) in concrete to stop vehicles from parking on the pavement outside a downtown sports bar downtown. They are pictured cleaning up at the end of the day, anxious to go home.

Agent 6 asks an innocent question: How long do you think it'll be before they realize where they parked their truck?

15 warnings that really shouldn't be needed

It is well known that the Paranoid States of America is the most litigious nation on earth. And it has the highest number of lawyers per 1000 people. Some correlation there, perhaps. But Canada occupies the better half of North America, and seems to have been infected by the same desire to sue anyone -- especially any company with deep pockets -- over anything. To discourage this sort of thing and protect themselves from consumers, lawyers are advising their corporate clients to put warning labels on just about everything. Here are some of the dumb, with Walt's comments in italics.

1. On the bottom of McCain's Tiramisu dessert: 'Do not turn upside down.'
Well,...duh, a bit late, eh?

2. On Planter's peanuts: 'Warning: contains nuts.'
Talk about a news flash!

3. On Shoppers Drug Mart cough medicine for children: 'Do not drive a car or operate machinery after taking this medication.'
We could do a lot to reduce the rate of construction accidents if we could just get those five-year-olds with head colds off those bulldozers.

4. On President`s Choice Bread Pudding: 'Product will be hot after heating.'
And you thought....?

5. On a Sears hairdryer: 'Do not use while sleeping.'
But that's the only time I have to do my hair!

6. On a bag of Fritos: 'You could be a winner! No purchase necessary. Details inside.'
The shoplifter special?

7. On a bar of Dial soap: 'Directions: Use like regular soap.'
And that would be....?

8. On some Swanson frozen dinners: 'Serving suggestion: Defrost.'
It's just a suggestion.

9. On packaging for a Black & Decker iron: 'Do not iron clothes on body.'
But wouldn't this save time?

10. On Nytol Sleep Aid: 'Warning: May cause drowsiness.'
And I'm taking this because....?

11. On most brands of Christmas lights: 'For indoor or outdoor use only.'
As opposed to what?

12. On a Japanese food processor: 'Not to be used for the other use.'
Somebody out there help me on this. I'm curious.

13. On a Westjet packet of nuts: 'Instructions: Open packet, eat nuts.'
Say what?

14. On a child's Superman costume: 'Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.'
I don't blame the company. I blame the parents for this one.

15. On a chainsaw: 'Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals.'
Really??!! Is a lot of this happening somewhere?

Thanks to our newest agent, 29, who writes from the other side of the world. But we know what you are, EH!

VIDEO: Crazy Canuck woman jumps into tiger pen to retrieve her hat

Ed. here. Walt's absence doesn't mean there will be no posts until he return. Nosiree. Not as long as Walt's faithful agents keep forwarding tidbits like this one, sent along by Agent 3. What we have here is proof that the stupidity of the common man -- or woman -- knows no boundaries. The entire world has sunk into a deep and abiding stupidity, from which there appears to be no chance of recovery.

Today's example comes from the Great Not-so-white North where a stupid Canadian woman is captured on video climbing into the tiger cage at the Toronto zoo to get her hat. How her hat got over the fence is unknown.



Also unknown is whether the woman is Canadian-born or one of Toronto's majority of Third World immigrants. Perhaps her hat, which can't be seen clearly in the video, had some religious significance. Who knows.

What we do know is risking your life for a hat is the act of a moron, which is what the woman is called by a bystander. "You're a moron, you're a fucking moron," the man shouts. "You're a bad example to everyone else's kids." Another woman can then be seen intervening to break up the argument. In response, the man says "She jumped into a tiger cage. Are you kidding me?!"

A spokesthingy for the Toronto Zoo told CBC News that she learned of the incident through the YouTube video, and that the zoo is seeking witnesses who can help explain what happened. Perhaps they should start by asking the woman herself. Or perhaps they already did, only to be answered with a loud "Duh"!"

Dumb burglar gets eaten by alligator

Meet Matthew Riggins. Or, I should say, the late Matthew Riggins, deceased at the ripe young age of 22 while fleeing Brevard County (FL) sheriff's deputies.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, Mr. Riggins -- already known to police, as they say -- and another man were in Barefoot Bay to commit house burglaries during the night of November 12th-13th.

A sleepless resident called the cops around 2 AM to report that two men, dressed in black, were walking behind houses near Tequesta Drive. The two were spotted minutes later on Royal Palm Boulevard, but fled. With K-9 and helicopter units in hot(ish) pursuit, Mr. Riggins stopped long enough to call his girlfriend to say he was being chased, then dove into a lake just north of Ocean Avenue Way.

Mr. Riggins unwisely disregarded the old diver's maxim "Look before you leap." If he had looked, he might have spotted an 11-foot alligator having a snooze near the shore. Mr. Riggins didn't see the alligator, but the alligator saw him, and did what alligators do.

Mr. Riggins was reported missing by his girlfriend when he failed to come home on November 13th. What was left of him was discovered on the 23rd. He was missing his lower extremities and part of an arm, according to deputies. While recovering the body, the sheriff's dive team were "approached aggressively" by a large gator, which was trapped by the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and euthanized. Deputies told the paper, "A forensic examination of the alligator located remains consistent with the injuries to Riggins inside the alligator's stomach."

The man who was with Mr. Riggins on his little escapade has been identified, but is not cooperating with the investigation. If he doesn't talk, the Sheriff has threatened to throw him in the lake.

Note from Ed.: We haven't checked our e-mail yet today, but am all but certain that Agent 17 will have sent us this item, so thanks in advance!

Book review: More on stupidity from Bill Bryson

More on stupidity... More on... Geddit? Moron!

I am working hard [hardly working? Ed.] on a review of Bill Bryson's latest book The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). My problem is that I keep running into long(ish) passages that I want to quote verbatim. I've already done that twice this week, and feel I'm now in danger of posting the whole book, a page or two at a time. The publishers wouldn't like that. So I content myself with copying one last excerpt.

An underlying theme of Mr. Bryson's latest "travel" book -- really a text in sociology and philosophy -- is the deep and abiding stupidity into which the world is falling. Although the book is ostensibly about Britain and the British, the author takes a few potshots at America and Americans along the way. (Being an American himself, he's entitled to do so.) Here's his account (from pages 284-285) of a visit to Austin TX.

Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective.

Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house [in Britain] doesn't have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: 'City?'

I replied: 'London.'
'Can you spell that please?'
I looked at her and saw that she wasn't joking. 'L-O-N-D-O-N,' I said.
'Country?'
'England.'
'Can you spell that?'
I spelled England.
She typed for a moment and said: 'The computer won't accept England. Is that a real country?'
I assured her it was. 'Try Britain,' I suggested.
I spelled that, too - twice (we got the wrong number of Ts the first time) - and the computer wouldn't take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn't think of anything else to suggest.

'It'll take France,' the girl said after a minute.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You can have "London, France".'
'Seriously?'
She nodded.
'Well, why not?'
So she typed 'London, France', and the system was happy.

I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: 'Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?'
'That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.'
'Shoot,' she said and looked chagrined.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can't identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it's spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

Having now passed on three excerpts from The Road to Little Dribbling, -- this one, "Bill Bryson on declining standards of punctuation and grammar" and "Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity" -- perhaps I can be excused from writing only a few more lines in praise of the book.

I'm not sure if Mr. Bryson set out to be a curmudgeon. Perhaps one doesn't "set out" so to do. With me, it just happened naturally as I watched the world around me sink into the muck of tastelessness, political correctness, and the other stupidities of which Mr. B complains. He pokes fun at our Western society and "culture" with a large pitchfork, in the manner of H.L. Mencken, but with even more humour.

The Road to Little Dribbling purports to be a travel book, the genre which Bill Bryson does best. It does describe his zigzag rambles up "the Bryson Line" from the English Channel to Cape Wrath (and considerably beyond), but, as noted before, the book is not so much about places and things -- although both are described in detail and with great wit -- but about people. Like Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, it is a work of serious philosophical inquiry wrapped in dry humour. Don't fail to read it.

Further reading: Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. The Project Gutenberg e-book, FREE.

Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity

As Ed. told you earlier today -- see previous post -- [not the one with the video of the Swazi reed dance! Ed.] -- I am writing a review of Bill Bryson's latest opus The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). Some people will call it a travel book, but in reality it's a trenchant commentary on the decline of culture and just about everything else, disguised as a travel book. One of the things decried by Mr. Bryson is the descent of modern society into a deep and abiding stupidity. He didn't write that; I did. Here's what he wrote, pages 226-227.

I was seated at a window with a good view of the Jeremy Clarkson poster that I had noted earlier [see previous post] and this got me to thinking about stupidity again, in the universal sense. I had recently read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is named after two academics at Cornell University in New York State, who first described it. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me.

So what I began to wonder was this: what if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don't realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we'd see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it's not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgement or diminished taste? That would explain the success of Mrs Brown's Boys, for one thing.

We all know that regular exposure to lead can seriously impair brain function, yet it took decades for scientists to figure that out. What if something even more insidious is poisoning our brains from some other part of our daily lives? The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than 82,000 at the last count, and most of them - 86 per cent, according to one estimate - have never been tested for their effect on humans.

Every day, to take just one example, we call consume or absorb substantial amounts of bisphenols and phthalates, which are found in food packaging. These may pass harmlessly through us or they may be doing to our brains what a microwave oven does to a tub of baked beans. We have no idea, but if you look at what's on TV on a typical weeknight, you have to wonder. That's all I'm saying.

Drunk driver mistakes police cruiser for taxi, winds up in jail

Every now and then we get a good dumber-than-dumb story. This one comes to us from Abbotsford BC, where an unnamed gentleman, obviously tired and emotional, failed to recognize this car for what it is.

Well, yeah... It's a police cruiser! Duhhhhh! But I guess it's possible it could be mistaken for a taxi... at night... in the dark... with drink taken.

The gentleman was the worse for wear, but not so much so that he failed to realize he was in no condition to drive. That's why he jumped into the back seat of the cruiser. "Get me out of here buddy," he told the astonished constable, "there’s cops everywhere!"

The cop took him, all right... straight to the local hoosegow.

Abbotsford police are showing their sense of humour [Cops with a sense of humour? Ed.] by posting memes of bizarre happenings on social media for "Driving Excuses Week". "This kind of thing happens more often than you'd think," they tweeted after posting this one.

Walt reminds all WWW readers: Don't drink and drive! (You might spill some.)

10 worst 9-1-1 calls of 2014

The year-end wouldn't complete without a list of some kind: best this, worst that, top ten the other. Walt has been making a list [and checking it twice? Ed.] but hesitates to publish it for fear of offending someone and being hailed in front of a human rights tribunal or the Legion of Decency.

As a substitute, and in keeping with the tradition, we present the 10 worst 9-1-1 calls of 2014, as compiled by E-Comm, the largest 9-1-1 call centre in British Columbia, and published by CBC News. In Letterman order, here they are:

10. "What's the date today?"

9. Home internet isn't working.

8. Wants help finding lost glasses.

7. Food they ordered is cold.

6. "Is today a stat holiday?"

5. "Can you call a taxi for me?"

4. "What's the number for my travel agency?"

3. Pizza not fresh; wants a replacement slice.

2. "What's the fine for jaywalking?"

1. Wi-fi at a local coffee shop isn't working!

These aren't as far-fetched as you might think. Long ago, before there was 9-1-1, I used to get calls like these from my sister-in-law! And what ever happened to 4-1-1? "Information" operators used to keep lists of stupid questions they got asked every day!

Walt's Agents 1 and 78, both of whom have manned ["personned", surely. Ed.] information desks, have similar lists. One day I'm going to put them all in a book. People will have to call 9-1-1 to find out where to get it.

Footnote: Readers in the UK are advised to dial 9-9-9 for answers to their stupid questions. People wishing to call the Springfield Police Department should call 9-1-2.