C’est Rire category archive

Gina Barreca offers a diagnostic quiz to help you determine “Are You Stupid.” A snippet:

By making extensive use of tests available in magazines, on billboards, via various websites, and on the back of match-covers, I’ve tried to figure out whether I’m creative, introverted, fearful, sexually attractive to members of other species, and/or short for my height.

Want to know what I’ve discovered? That the shape of my face is “round-ish, with some squared oval.” Also, that I am a Capricorn, mean, and probably a canary-person.

I’ve decided that what’s missing is the Test for Sheer Stupidity and I’ve decided to rectify that omission.

Follow the link. Take the quiz.

Don’t underestimate Hollywood.

(Warning: Innuendo at the endo.)

All she wanted wasa a source of stable funding:

A federal judge in Rockford ruled Friday that the U.S. Marshals Service can move forward with selling as many as 400 quarter horses belonging to the former Dixon comptroller accused of stealing tens of millions of dollar from the small town’s coffers.

Marshals have been overseeing the care of the horses since shortly after Rita Crundwell, 59, was arrested in April on charges she pilfered more than $53 million over nearly 22 years as the town official with almost sole control over finances. Prosecutors have said she used the money to fund her championship horse breeding business as well as a lavish lifestyle.

Maybe her daddy should have given her that pony back when she was six . . . .

Peacocks terrorize Crisfield, Maryland.

“People see them every single day,” said attorney John Phoebus, who nearly ran over one a few days ago when it suddenly darted out into the street from between two parked cars. “Everybody knows them.”

But even though the birds are beautiful, they may be … well, bird-brained.

Phoebus said the male gets aggressive when he sees his own reflection.

“I’ve seen him fighting with the side of my car,” he said.

When I was growing up, my Great Uncle Henry Wise, whom everyone called “Brother Henry,” had some peacocks. They are thoroughly unpleasant companions.

The only thing that keeps this bit from being funnier is its eerie similarity to your local news:

I wish I could have had to opportunity to be celebrated for 60 years of being supported by the state.

Didn’t we fight a war over being rid of this?

Mr. Feastingonroadkill has his own take on the situation.

Via Raw Story.

New Jersey inspects boardwalk games (shooting galleries, dart and ball toss and the like) to make sure they are on the up-and-up.

One question: Who ever expected them to be on the up-and-up?

Gorilla my dreams:

I used to keep one of these things on by boat, back when I had a boat. They are aerosol cans of compressed air with a horn attached (when I first saw the headline, I was thinking “air horn,” as in Peterbilt):

Delaware State Police closed off the rear parking lot of a Newark convenience store, after a compressed air horn exploded inside a pickup truck.

Police think the heat in the cab because of the greenhouse effect set it off.

You can’t make this stuff up.

A woman defended herself with a “pooper scooper” for nearly a half-an-hour while a man tried to hit her with another pooper scooper in Plymouth Pilliars Park early Thursday, according to the Seattle Police Department.

Dick Destiny captures a delicious screenshot; he attributes it to the magic of keyword advertising.

Follow the link to enjoy.

Via PoliticalProf.

Via BartCop.

Hitting the bottle again:

Norfolk residents Johnathon and Brandon Wolfe were fishing on the Raquette River when Johnathon spied a soccer ball on the riverbank. He got out to pick it up and then noticed an intact, small Pepsi bottle and a letter inside. Unable to remove the cap, he broke the glass bottle to retrieve Woodward’s note.

It read:

“Hi! My name is Robynn. Please write me.”

After giving her address in nearby Norwood, she declared, “I’m boared!” She also dated the letter (sometime in 1983–ed.) and gave her age and birth date.

“I was shocked, seeing how old it was, by it still being around when we found it,” Johnathon Wolfe said. “It didn’t get smashed or anything. I couldn’t believe it.”

By that night, helped perhaps by the unusual spelling of Woodward’s first name, the brothers had located her via Facebook and sent her a message.

One question:

Are they or are they not going to mail in all the Publisher’s Clearing House entry forms?

Police and postal inspectors are searching for two men who broke into a U.S. Postal Service delivery truck Tuesday afternoon and stole more than 200 pieces of mail.

It’s long been known that beer makes women prettier, but a new study concludes beer also makes men more creative.

The New York Daily News reports the experiment, like most really good ones, was conducted in a bar. The article does not say who paid for the study, but I’m thinking it was a group of men or a beer company.

“We found at 0.07 blood alcohol, people were worse at working memory tasks, but they were better at creative problem-solving tasks,” psychologist Jennifer Wiley, who presumably was not drinking, says in the article, which I have forwarded to my wife.

Which leads one to wonder, would beer-battered fish be a double heaping helping of IQ food?

The birds are losing.

The chickens have got to go:

Attorney Wilson said, “This is very clear-cut. Chickens are poultry, and they are not permitted.” She said according to a long-standing interpretation of city code, chickens and pigs are not considered companion animals.

Suppose for a moment chickens were companion animals, Garriott said. How many could you have?

“If she had 22 golden retrievers, would that be allowed?”

Wilson said the limit on dogs is four.

The board voted 4-1 to uphold Gugal-Okroy’s zoning violation.

And the pigeons are already gone:

Pigeons – even specially bred homing pigeons like Kinser’s – are livestock and not allowed in a residentially zoned community. In December, Zoning Administrator John King and his staff ordered Kinser to get rid of the birds.

King said it doesn’t matter that Kinser bought the 1.1-acre lot in 2000 with the intent of raising pigeons or that he built the coops shortly after his family moved into the house.

In Kinser’s neighborhood, and most other residential areas in Chesapeake, city code allows only domesticated birds that are kept indoors.

A pigeon in a coop isn’t indoors, King said. “Also, they are homing pigeons. You let them out to fly.”

He’s given away most of them, but three of them have have already homed. They are, after all, homing pigeons.

Being a cop does have its hazards:

Suffolk Police have charged a 38-year-old woman with indecent exposure after officers say she exposed her buttocks to them as they responded to a fight Tuesday afternoon.