Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 (13 page)

Of course, fire is like any tool; it's all in how you use it. Fire can keep you warm, or it can burn down your house. But fire wants to be useful, not destructive. Consider it an unwitting accomplice in what follows.

 

J
erry” had a beef with Burger King;
he wasn't getting enough hours as an employee. He just didn't feel valued. And who hasn't been in those shoes?

Now, when you feel you aren't being valued as an employee, and are not getting enough hours thereby, there are several things you can do to remedy the situation: offer to work late hours, perhaps, or early ones. Let your coworkers know you'd be willing to stand in for them if they need extra time off. Or convince your manager, through the cunning use of pie charts, that you were indeed ready, willing, and able to take up those extra hours.

But Jerry chose a different route; allegedly, he went into his place of work in Dorset, England, chose a nice bin full of hamburger wrappers, and set them ablaze. And then started eight more fires in and around the store. And then he stood back and watched his coworkers run around, futilely trying to extinguish the flames before the building had to be evacuated. In addition to causing more than $1 million in damage and gutting the restaurant, the fire put forty people out of work, including Jerry. And now he's getting no hours! So you see the true flaw in the plan. Well, that and the not-insignificant detail that Jerry was then charged with arson, which really doesn't look good on a resume.

Of course, where Jerry is likely going, he's going to get plenty of hours. The pay's not so good. And it's doubtful after this, they'll let him work in the kitchen.

Source:
The Sun
(UK)

 

W
e understand that people don't like spiders.
Helpful and useful though they are (imagine how many flies there'd be without them hanging around), they are
creeeeeeeeepy,
what with those eight twitchy legs and eight twitchy eyes and that freaky, skittering thing they do across walls. Really,
ick.
Lots of people are none too keen to have eight-legged creepy crawlies around their workspace and will do just about anything to be spider-free.

May we suggest, however, in your rush to exterminate the area's spider population, that you avoid setting them aflame. The reason we suggest this is that we're reading the story of “Pauly,” an assistant manager at the Champs Sports store in the Oakdale Mall of Johnson City, New York. Seems that Pauly, no fan of the arachnids, took extreme umbrage at a representative of that order hanging around in his store. Rather than stomp it with the no-doubt numerous cross-training shoes he had on hand, he decided to torch the creepy-crawly instead. And so Pauly sprayed it with a flammable substance, set it on fire, and then, we're sure, leaned in to hear the little tiny screams.

There was screaming, all right. You see, the fire was not content merely to burn alive a small arthropod; no, it wanted more, like the merchandise in the storage area, and then the store itself. Other people in the mall couldn't help but notice the flames and smoke and heat, so in short order people fled from their shopping as fast as their legs would carry them.
Smoke was visible from more than a mile away. Aside from the Champs, which naturally experienced severe fire damage, followed by significant water damage (when the firefighters arrived), several other shops suffered slight to moderate damage. Pauly was charged with fourth-degree arson, which is a felony.

So in one flaming maneuver, he killed both a spider
and
his retail career. That takes real talent. Somewhere in spider heaven, an eight-legged angel is snacking on a fly and having a good, long laugh.

Source:
Press & Sun-Bulletin
(Binghamton, NY),
Journal
(Ithaca, NY)

 

T
his is one of those “We're gonna get ribbed about this one for years” stories.
In Lancaster, Texas, the firefighters at Station No. 3 got a call to a major accident on Interstate 35. When a call like that comes in, they drop whatever they're doing and get to it, no matter what they are doing at the time.

As people who count on local firefighters to keep our homes from turning into blackened husks, we respect and applaud that sort of thinking; the sooner they get to the scene, the more of our houses will remain after the fire's out. And yet we wonder if there's such a thing as too hasty where firefighting is concerned.

In the case of Station No. 3, they were in such a rush to leave that someone—we're not saying who—left some potatoes cooking on the stove. With no one there to tend the stove, the potatoes started to burn and, before they knew it, there was a fire at the firehouse. Firefighters from other stations responded to the flames (called in by rightfully concerned Lancaster residents), and ended up causing about $125,000 worth of damage.

“I'll bet if you ask, most departments have had this happen,” Lancaster Fire Marshall Ladis Barr said. We're pretty sure most fire departments would beg to differ. But at least now you know why you should always pay attention to what you've got cooking on the stove whether you're a firefighter or not!

Source: Dallas
Morning News

 

W
e're big believers in practical observation of scientific phenomena;
nothing helps you understand things like seeing them happen in the real world. And yet, there are some things we honestly feel we don't need to actually observe to know what the outcome will be. Our predictive abilities, honed by years of training and experience, usually are enough in most cases.

To give an example, let's say you had a container filled with
highly flammable
material. Now, let's suppose you have a pair of pants, and you get some of this
highly flammable
material on those pants—which, we should note, are reasonably
flammable
in and of themselves. Now you've got a
flammable
substance on a
flammable
article of clothing. Okay? Now, what do you think happens to that when you get it near an open flame? If you answered, “Why, I expect it would burn,” congratulate yourself, because your predicative ability is of the highest rank—and you didn't have to catch on fire to get your answer.

Alas, “Ricky,” a college student working in a California furniture factory, did not have such advanced reasoning skills. And so, when his pants were saturated with a highly flammable chemical used in the manufacture of furniture, he decided he needed to find out what would happen to them if they were exposed to an inflamed cigarette lighter. So, out came the lighter—flick, flick, flick—and then Ricky put the flame to his pants
while still wearing them.

So what happened? Well, the pants caught on fire, of course, and Ricky, with his pants on fire, suffered minor
burns. Also, part of the furniture factory caught fire, which required 30 minutes for firefighters to extinguish. The factory itself sustained minimal damage, but there was some heavily toasted furniture for the employees to haul out over the next few days.

“It just baffles me,” said factory business manager Dan Slayton, of Ricky's decision to set his pants and himself on fire. Join the club, Dan. Normally we applaud curiosity, but this time, we figure it was more trouble than it was worth. At least now Ricky knows. And knowing is half the battle, we guess.

Source:
The Union
(Nevada County, CA), United Press International

 

T
here's no possible way we could as succinctly sum up Jim McGill's incident
as well as he did, so let us let him describe it in his own words: “The bottle rocket exploded on the launching pad. And the launching pad was my rear end.”

Here's the set-up. McGill is a member of a radio station morning show in Springfield, Illinois, where he is known as “Jim the Photographer.” Part of McGill's gig as a morning show hanger-on is to do physically humiliating things for the amusement of the radio audience. In May 2004, he decided to climb up on top of a radio station's Hummer (that's the vehicle, folks), pull his pants down, and lodge a small tube between his butt cheeks. Then some radio station lackeys had the dubious honor of stuffing bottle rockets into the tube and lighting them.

McGill later claimed to have done this stunt dozens of times before—a fact that must be contemplated for its own sober horror—without a hitch. But, see, if you spend a lot of your time launching bottle rockets from your rear, eventually you're going to get burned. And indeed McGill did: one of those bottle rockets had a little extra spark to it, and some of that spark went right down that tube, bathing McGill's tender bottom in flaming terror. The whole incident, it probably goes without saying, was broadcast live over the radio. McGill was rushed to the local hospital and was required to undergo surgery for burns on his buttocks and anus, an excruciatingly painful fate just to
ponder.

But wait, here's the
irony:
as McGill has been the (heh) butt of jokes for his radio show before (including a March faked death due to “rectal trauma”), many station listeners apparently refused to believe that McGill was actually injured and that the whole thing was not some elaborate hoax. So kids, don't try this at home. And as for McGill, let's hope he's learned his lesson.

Source:
State Journal-Register
(Springfield, IL)

 

W
hen wasps decide to take up residence in one's house,
a common solution to the problem is to call the friendly neighborhood professional exterminator (not the guy on the street corner who's done time in the big house—we're talking bugs, people), who will often use a sort of smoke to choke the bugs and solve the problem. As with so many things involving fire and dangerous venom-bearing insects, it's probably best to leave these things to the professionals; otherwise it's possible what you'll have on your hands is a pile of smoking rubble that used to be your house.

“Susan,” from Penydarrren area of Wales in the United Kingdom, apparently thought that professional bug-killing help was for quitters; any fool could make smoke, and anyway, exterminators cost money. So when wasps set up shop in her house, Sue attempted her own defense of her property. She grabbed some cardboard and then set it aflame. Then, as smoke was what she was after, she blew out the fire and, according to local fire enforcement, set the smoldering cardboard under a board next to the house to smoke out the wasps in her walls.

The flaw in the plan—and you knew there was one—was that the board acted a bit like a chimney and suddenly the smoking cardboard was on fire again. Whoops. The fire sparked the roof timbers and then spread flames that started burning
inside
the walls of her home. Whoops again. Although that's certainly an
interesting
fire, the flames on the roof were easily in evidence but the fire inside the walls, well, call it a stealth fire—one you can't see but which cheerfully destroys
your home anyway. It's also a difficult fire for firefighting professionals to get at. The ones that arrived at Sue's home ended up tearing through Susan's walls and ceiling to get to the burning parts. In all it took more than two hours to contain the blaze, and Susan's house had that not-so-great wood-smoked flavor to it when everything was said and done.

The wasps? They were fine, of course. They had to call a professional to get rid of them. Funny how
they
always show up, sooner or later.

Source: BBC

 

H
ere's something we've learned from researching this particular story:
just because that cannonball or artillery shell is really old, doesn't mean it isn't still live ammunition. So be careful with that thing.

The cannonball aspect of our tale comes in from Cape Fear, North Carolina, which has a Civil War museum. It appears that a local contractor had a Civil War-era cannon ball in his possession and thought it would be nice to donate it to the museum. It was indeed a thoughtful gift, but the cannonball came with something extra, namely, a round of shot with an intact fuse, which technically kinda made it a
bomb,
which led to the evacuation of several dozen people and the summoning of the local bomb squad. Whoops.

As bad as that was, the next story tops it: a seventh-grader in Frederick County, Virginia, thought that his civics teacher might be interested in a little bit of family history. So one day, he brought it in to share: a foot-long artillery shell that experts later guessed was of World War I vintage. Before the student could share it with his teacher (and, incidentally, this seems
totally
innocent on the kid's part—it's not like he was planning to blow up the teacher), it was noticed by other staff members. Thus resulted another evacuation scene (this time 1,000 people had to vamoose) and another call to experts in exploding things.

Good news: No one injured in either case. Sometimes you get lucky.

Source:
WECT.com
,
The Winchester Star