Too Stupid for Words category archive

Shooting your mouth off on the internet is still shooting your mouth off.

That is a corollary to “Freedom of speech” does not mean “freedom from consequences.”

Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up.

Via LQ.

Addendum:

Charges dropped.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., is fed up with cable news and, especially with CNN.

One struggles to imagine the aforementioned Cronkite, much less the sainted Edward R. Murrow – peace be upon him – selling their newsmen’s souls so nakedly just so their network might charge a little more for toilet paper commercials.

But then, Ed and Uncle Walter have left the building, haven’t they? And yes, maybe they had the luxury of regarding the news as a public service, a sacred trust, consonant with Thomas Jefferson’s belief that an informed electorate was vital to a self-governing nation. But you have no such luxury. What you have is a 24/7 news cycle and the need to fill it – if not with news, then speculation, if not speculation, then controversy, if not controversy then opinion, if not opinion, then froth.

Fine. But this is not a trend without impact, CNN. We are becoming a stupider people. You see it in test scores, but you see it more viscerally in the way some of us equate higher volume with sounder logic, wear party as identity, refuse new information that challenges old beliefs, act as if everything must entertain us. Even the news.

I think the only time I have watched CNN for more than five minutes was when Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the Potomac over 30 years ago. I was living in Arlington, Virginia, about four miles in a straight line from the crash site; I’d had a grueling drive home in the same snowstorm–about an hour and a half to go 30 miles on I-66 and US 50–from a meeting in Manassas; the boss ended the meeting early because the weather had turned bad. I had to clean ice off my windshield wipers half a dozen times on the way.

The crash was local news and CNN was on top of it.

This might make even Pennsylvania’s screwy alcohol laws seem sane. John Romano reports:

A bill approved by a (Florida–ed.) Senate committee on Tuesday will essentially force small breweries to sell their bottled or canned beer to a distributor before buying it back from the same distributor and finally selling it to you from their own brewery.

Get it?

The distributor won’t make or market the beer. The distributor won’t pick up, deliver or even see the beer. Heck, the beer won’t even leave the refrigerator at the brewery.

And, still, the distributor will make a profit.

Which came first, the salad or the settlement?

After a falling out with his Bigfoot crew, master tracker Rick Dyer, whose new title may be “con artist”, admitted that the 8-foot tall body named “Hank” that wooed crowds last month in San Antonio is a prop made to look like a Bigfoot.

This surprises you just how?

Surprising is that people watch the cavalcade of stupid spewing out of their cable boxes.

On second thought, no. It’s like the tabloids in the supermarket checkout line; they are comic books for persons who don’t read comic books. I can understand why folks read them; fantasy is amusing.

What I cannot understand is why folks believe them.

Nobody could have predicted that opening a trampoline park could lead to injuries. For example:

“I knew immediately something was very wrong,” Keck said. “He’s not a crier, but he was crying really hard. I told the attendant who was standing nearby, ‘I’m pretty sure he broke his leg.’ And the guy said nothing.”

She picked up her son and carried him to the car.

“As I was going out the door, another attendant offered me an ice pack. That was the extent of it.”

A pediatric orthopedist at Portsmouth Naval Medical Center confirmed the break and placed the leg in a cast.

“When I told her where it had happened, she said this was the fourth or fifth injury she had seen from there in the past week,” Keck said.

“I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who have said, ‘Oh, my gosh! I know someone else who was hurt there!'”

Read the rest, in which the proprietors argue that trampolines are safer than bowling alleys.

All seriousness aside, only someone who has never seen an episode of AFV could think that this was a good idea.

Next: Game entrepreneur promotes team tag during rush hour on I-95. Thrills!! Excitement!! Waivers of Liability!!

George Smith explores the recent ricin kerfuffle in Pennsylvania, where a kid sent powdered castor beans to his ex-girlfriend’s new squeeze. You really cannot top his headline, which encapsulates the sacrifice of True Love (or abuse, or manipulation, or something):

You won’t believe what this young man sent in a scratch & sniff card to a rival for his girl! He went to jail for her!

Read the rest.

The razor’s edge cuts deep in Zero Tolerance world.

Last Thursday at Bayside Middle School, sixth grader Adrionna Harris came to the aide of a classmate who was cutting his arm. She faces expulsion for taking a razor from the student, throwing it away and convincing him what he was doing wasn’t right. She thought she was doing the right thing, so on Friday she told the school administration what happened. The way school officials responded led to this question: was the school’s zero tolerance policy taken too far?

Instead of getting praise from the school administration, Adrionna got a 10 day suspension with recommendation for expulsion. The interesting thing — the only reason Adrionna got suspended was because she admitted what happened. The alleged weapon was thrown away, and it was her word alone that led to her suspension.

The razor blade she confiscated and discarded was adjudged to be a weapon, so down came the boom of zero tolerance.

How stupid do you have to be to become a school administrator? Inquiring minds want to know.

Aside:

This was on the evening news on the telly vision at Steve’s Dawg House, where we dining on the most excellent barbecue made by Steve himself.

Words failed me.

You can’t make this stuff up.

There are six billion persons in the world and over 300 million in the US.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that more than one of them have the same first and last names.

Out of the mouths of babes . . . .

Chris Preovolos reports that a Florida restaurant is hitting customers with an “ACA surcharge.” Heaven forbid that all those overpaid waiters and bussers and line cooks should have access to healthcare.

A nugget:

“We wanted to definitely be transparent that affordable health care is part of the cost of doing business,” Clark told Florida’s News965.com.

But why the surcharge now? There are countless local, state and federal programs and taxes are contribute to the cost of doing business, those aren’t broken out on the bill. There’s no surcharge for the paving of public streets in Orlando.

(snip)

“We’re definitely doing it to stay afloat,” Clark told WPEC. “It’s not political in any way.”

Except that it is political, and that’s fine, just call it what it is.

Who needs to suffer through three plus hours of watching Hollywood masturbate to its own empty-as-a-back-lot-storefront reflection when Jackie can sum up the whole shebang in three minutes?

“Right in the heart of Springboro.“

Shoulda used flank steak.

The 44-year-old was arrested for assault after allegedly striking an Ohio supermarket employee with a pair of “special cut filets,” police report.

The internet is a public place.

“Zero tolerance” must be one of the stupidest ideas the educational industrial complex has ever come up with.

On other hand, it does seem to show that school administrators have no judgment, so it may be wise not to allow them to exercise any.

A Florida high school student under suspension for 10 days after breaking up a lunch room assault on a gay teen says he’d do it again.

(snip)

Betterson received a 10 day suspension under the Fort Myers-area school’s zero-tolerance policy around fighting, but he plans to appeal, he told Fox 4 Now. “It’s not fair for somebody to get beat up for something that he is,” Betterson said. “I’m not going to sit there and watch someone get bullied. I’ve been bullied too.”