Stupidity (Part II)

We all make stupid mistakes during our lives however mistakes made by some people are so stupid, one is forced to wonder how these people manage to survive as far as they did in life. Here is the second part in this series. Enjoy.

When Mrs. Clarkson was the Governor General of Canada, she and her husband, John visited the Queen and Prince Phillip. John was invited to go on a fox hunt with the prince and after a while, John noticed that the prince’s fly was open. John tried to bring this to the attention of the prince by whispering in his ear the letters, XYZ which means ‘examine your zipper’. He pronounced the Z as ZEE (the Americans do it that way) instead of ZED, the way the British and Canadians do it. The prince then said to John, “I say chap but when you are part of the empire, you say zed.” John was so upset at the rudeness of the prince; he decided to let the prince carry on for the rest of the day ventilating his crown jewels for all to see. The prince is renowned for making rude and stupid statements. That one cost him because John was the only person present who was brave enough to advise the prince that his fly was open.

Sometimes I wonder how computer glitches can go unnoticed by the computer operators. In December 2007, at least 26 motorists felt that they were suddenly broke because of a computer glitch. They used their bank cards to pay for street parking in the city of Trondheim in Norway. Because of the glitch, the machine dispensing windshield permits multiplied the amount of time they purchased for the time they used the parking area by as much as 10,000. The withdrawals from their banks were between $37,000 and $148,000. Where they parking at the Space Station? The banks raced to correct the erroneous transactions and the parking company said it planned to compensate the motorists. How about a little extra compensation, such as free parking for a year?

On December 22, 2007, my oldest daughter, 31, was advised by a vet that if she captured a cat roaming our street, and brought it to the vet, he would charge her less to give one of the cat’s kittens she kept for herself, the necessary shots. My daughter tried to catch the cat and for her troubles, she got severely bitten and scratched by the cat and had to go to the hospital for a series of rabies shots. But what happened to her because of her foolishness; pales as to what happened to a 50-year-old man in New Delhi in India four days earlier.

The 50-year-old man was mauled by two royal Bengal tigers when he went too close to the tigers' enclosure to click pictures in the Assam State Zoo. First a tigress, Divya, seized the victim's hand and soon another tiger, Govardhan, locked his jaws on the hand. The victim, Joyprakash Bezbaruah, desperately tried to free himself but couldn't. The two tigers severed Bezbarua's arms from his shoulder within a few seconds. He succumbed to the injuries at the Guwahati Medical College Hospital later. Earlier a zoo keeper had repeatedly cautioned him to move behind the barrier but he had not heeded the warning.

Both he and my daughter had two things in common. First, he didn’t get the picture and she didn’t get the cat. Both ended up in a hospital. Where the similarities end is; she lived and he didn’t.

Just months after two men were attacked and killed by a tiger at a zoo in San Francisco in April 2008; a new story of a tragedy involving more tigers emerged from China. It happened in late March in the northeast part of the country, when a man police described as mentally ill, entered the animal's cage at a zoo in the Chinese city of Harbin. Zhang Yachun's parents said their son was always fascinated by the big cats and disappeared from their home on March 24th. When the 37-year-old failed to return, his frantic mother and father contacted the police. They came to their door five days after their son went missing to tell them the horrifying truth. Their son had deliberately gone into a tiger's lair in the zoo and had been killed and then eaten by the animal. Only two legs and his skull were left untouched.

Here are three events in a long series of similar events involving circus creatures in the USA. In 2007, a tiger attacked a 6-year-old girl waiting to have her picture taken while she was near the animal. It suddenly turned on her, biting her in the head. The wounds proved fatal. In February, 2008, a lion cost a boy his arm, after it reached out through a cage and literally ripped the boy’s limb off. On January 3, 2008, a South African man was killed and eaten by lions at a game farm in the country's North West province. Samuel Boosen, a 36-year-old caretaker at the Aloe Ridge Lodge at Swartruggens, about 150 km (90 miles) west of Johannesburg, went into the lion enclosure to feed the animals before being attacked by nine lions. They ate him up until the only parts that remained were his skull and spine. It was unclear why Boosen, who had worked at the lodge for four years, had gone into the enclosure as he usually fed the lions by placing meat through the fence.

The lessons to be learned from this; tigers and lions are great to look at, and even feed them providing you are out of reach of them. Remember that old limerick; “There was a lady from Niger, who sat on the back of a tiger….”

On January 10, 2008 a 23-year-old Burnaby, B.C., man is in hospital after having mock-hanged himself from a tree while a friend filmed it. RCMP say two men had gone to a North Burnaby park Wednesday afternoon with plans to record a fake hanging so that they could post it on the Internet video site YouTube. The scene went wrong, however, and the man pretending to be hanged began choking. His friend, who was filming, at first thought he was acting. He was taken to Royal Columbian Hospital, just outside of Vancouver, where he was listed in critical condition.

That mishap should serve as a warning to amateurs who want to shoot shock footage or attempt stunts they've seen on TV or in the movies; even if they believe they have taken all the proper safety precautions. Many years ago, I lost a good friend who did a similar stunt and didn’t survive.

In 2004, a 15-year-old Mission, B.C., boy suffered burns to 85 per cent of his body after dousing his pant legs with gasoline and lighting himself on fire as a stunt in the school playground.

Two years earlier, in 2002, Josh Chapman died after driving a snowmobile through a wall of fire at a birthday party in Squamish, B.C. An accelerant, believed to be gasoline, was poured on burning hay moments before Chapman drove through. His fatal drive was filmed on video. He died three weeks later from his burns.

What the public, and anyone else ever considering doing such dangerous stunts, need to remember is that when you see these types of things happen in a movie or on television, it is done with the utmost of training by the stunt people and that numerous safety precautions have been put in place.

On January 14, 2008, a German man threw himself out of a third storey window along with a Christmas tree during a late-night attempt to dispose of his festive decorations. The man fell 7 metres (22 feet) from his flat after he lost his balance throwing the tree onto the street in the western city of Moenchengladbach. The tree did not break the victim's fall. He was mimicking a TV advertisement showing people having fun throwing their old Christmas trees out their windows. However, you're not supposed to jump with them. The man was taken to hospital in critical condition with severe head injuries. Actually, it is rather stupid throwing anything out of a window. You could get sued big time if someone is injured.

On January 5, 2008, a Houston, Texas-area man was killed in a hunting accident after his dog stepped on a loaded shotgun in the back of his pick-up truck, triggering a blast that pierced the vehicle and the hunter's leg. The shotgun blast severed his femoral artery. Perry Price, a 46-year-old math teacher, shot a goose then put his gun in the back of the truck where the dog was waiting to retrieve the bird. Investigators found paw prints and mud from the dog, a Labrador retriever named Arthur, on the shotgun. Price was taken to a local hospital, but died from a loss of blood after doctors were unable to revive him.

In October of the previous year a similar accident was reported during an Iowa pheasant hunt. James Harris, 37, told authorities that he shot a pheasant that sailed down across a fence. Harris said he then laid his loaded shotgun down on the ground and was climbing the fence when his hunting dog stepped on the gun and it went off. Harris was struck in the calf but fortunately, he made a full recovery.

If you've been around many hunting dogs and handled many shotguns, you understand how these things happen. In neither of these stories was the shotgun identified, however, I'm betting they were either auto-loaders or pump-action guns. Nearly every magazine-style shotgun has a cross-bolt safety located either just ahead of or just behind the trigger. On guns designed to be fired by a right-handed shooter, you push the safety with your trigger finger from right to left to make the gun fire. Anytime a hunter lays a gun down, he should lay it down on its right side. The action is on the right side. So is the safe position for the cross-bolt safety. Even if a dog does a nervous tap dance on the gun's left side, the gun is unlikely to discharge

Excited dogs represent a wild card to hunting safety. Dogs don't understand the danger represented by a gun. Hunting dogs are so single-minded that they'll run over you as they course the field, looking for birds. The unpredictable nature of dogs is an important reason to constantly check your gun's safety, just to make certain it's in the safe position.

I hope you have enjoyed this article on stupidity. Part III will come later.