Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 (4 page)

Look at it this way: everybody does dumb things. We do. You do. Even hugely famous stars do. But most of the time, when regular people do something a little dippy, the paparazzi isn't waiting in the bushes to try to snap pictures of the event and sell them to the highest bidder. (Sometimes obscurity is a good thing.) But just because celebrities are easy targets, they still don't get a pass. Clearly, any sympathy for the rich and famous only goes so far.

 

W
e can believe
that formerly beloved and now mostly inexplicable celebrity Michael Jackson has an aversion to being identified—honestly now, given his personal history over the last several years, if you were him, would
you
want to be identified? Jackson's problem is that his attempts to be “low-profile” end up being pretty obvious. If a skinny man of indeterminate skin tone comes toward you wearing both a surgical mask and a jacket with sequins and epaulets, who else is it going to be? And when he's not being obvious, he's simply scaring the townsfolk.

Case in point: February 2004, Michael Jackson is in Colorado with his children when he decides that what he really needs to do is visit the Wal-Mart located in West Glenwood Springs—apparently Jackson, like many Americans, is all about value. But of course Jackson is concerned about being mobbed by the fans, so he decides to enter the store incognito. “Incognito” in this case meaning “while wearing a ski mask.”

Well, as most people know, wearing a ski mask into a commercial establishment that's
not
directly adjacent to a ski slope is the universal symbol for “Hello! I'll be your robber for today.” So the good news is that the Wal-Mart employees and customers did not realize that Michael Jackson was in their midst. The bad news is that they thought they were being robbed. And the last thing Michael Jackson needs at this point is to be confused with a criminal, smooth or otherwise.

The employees called the police, who arrived after Jackson had left the store, but who then questioned Jackson a short time later in his vehicle, which had been described to the cops by the Wal-Mart employees. Interestingly, this wasn't the first time that week that Jackson had frightened the water out of a retail worker; Jackson pulled the same “ski mask” trick at a camera shop in Aspen, causing an employee to note, “When he first came in, I thought we were being robbed.” The employees at the Aspen Sharper Image store didn't think they were being robbed, but as one noted: “I had no idea it was him, but I did think it was a bit strange for someone to be wearing that outfit.”

Source:
TheDenverChannel.com

 

H
ere's what you do
when you spend a boatload of money to acquire a guitar signed by one of your all-time guitar heroes. When you get it, first you take pictures of yourself with the guitar, in a rock god pose, fake pinwheeling your arms like Pete Townsend or hammering the frets
à la
Eddie Van Halen. And then, once you've had your fun, you mount it on your wall like a prize marlin and you
never touch it again.
To do otherwise is to tempt fate.

This much British guitar fan Tim Walker found out when he paid £1000 (about $1,600) for a guitar signed by Brian May, the guitarist from Queen (whose unique guitar sound comes in part from the use of a six-pence coin as a pick). Walker snapped up the guitar from a charity auction, and when it arrived, he was so thrilled with it that he couldn't resist rocking out with his new toy. When he was done, he discovered to his horror that his enthusiastic rockination had caused his sleeve to wipe off most of Brian May's signature. Now it just read “Bri,” which was just enough of a signature for Tim to say to his friends “Look, that's Brian May's signature!” and for his friends to say “Yeah,
sure
it is, Tim,” and roll their eyes.

There is a silver lining to this tale: Walker put in a call to Brian May's personal assistant, detailing his sad story; she took sympathy on the poor guy and passed along the tale to May, who agreed to resign the guitar. We hope that Tim will be more careful this time. Brian may not be so keen to sign again if another one bites the dust.

Source:
Daily Record
(UK),
The Sun
(UK)

 

D
aryl Hannah apparently has difficulty interacting with the press
—and for good reason, if you've read most of the reviews of her acting (she was excellent in
Roxanne,
though. Check it out). So when the long-legged actress had to chat up the press at the premiere of
Kill Bill Volume 2,
in which she plays a ruthless one-eyed assassin named Elle Driver, she struck upon what she thought was a fine idea. Instead of talking to the press as Daryl, famous movie star, she'd chat them up as Elle, cold-blooded sword wielding killer: “So I went through the press line and I was standing on my car and doing kung fu and giving them the finger or whatever,” she told a reporter for
TeenHollywood.com
.

How convincing was she? Convincing enough that when she later left the theater, there were policemen waiting for her, asking her to take a Breathalyzer test. Because, you see, in the real world, she's
not
Elle Driver, the hard-as-nails extinguisher of life—she's Daryl Hannah, actress. When celebrities seem memorably erratic at movie premieres, police tend to think they've probably got just a little too much of something alcoholic in their system.

Hannah had to talk to them to prove that she was sober (and sane) before they let her go about her life. “They couldn't seem to understand that I was just acting,” she said. Well, Ms. Hannah, maybe they saw you in
Legal Eagles.

Source: Ananova,
TeenHollywood.com

 

I
f you ever want assurance that even the most famous of people
on the globe aren't famous to everyone, everywhere, one need look no further than Eric Clapton, noted rock 'n' roll guitarist. From his early days with John Mayall, through Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, and his own solo work, Clapton has been consistently regarded as one of the most gifted—and famous—rock guitarists ever. But all that fame meant nothing in Surrey, England, when a cop pulled over Clapton's Ferrari for speeding.

According to news reports, the conversation between police officer Jim Jackson and one of the most popular and revered recording artists of the last half century went something like this:

Jackson:
And what's your name, then?

Clapton:
Eric Clapton, officer.

Jackson:
So, Mr. Clapton, what do you do for a living to have such a nice car?

Clapton:
I'm in the music business.

Jackson:
Music business, eh? You must be doing okay, then.

And then he wrote Clapton a speeding ticket. It wasn't until later that Jackson's partner, a huge Clapton fan, got his pal up to speed on who it was he'd just pulled over. Or as the
UK paper
The Daily Record
put it, cheekily: “Jackson has since been debriefed about the identity of the little-known Ferrari driver. He can at least breathe a sigh of relief that a cranky Clapton did not shoot the sheriff.”

Well, of
course
he didn't. Clearly Jackson was the deputy.

Source:
Daily Record
(UK)

 

N
BC's
The Apprentice
was a huge hit when it aired.
Viewers tuned in every week to watch teak-haired billionaire Donald Trump humiliate willing, would-be assistants. After the first season had ended, the apprentice candidates became mini-celebrities themselves, appearing on everything from
Oprah
to
Larry King Live.
One particular contestant, a woman by the name of Omarosa had become the one that people loved to hate, mostly because she had developed quite an evil reputation for lying that was clinched by the dramatic season finale where cameras caught Ms. O spewing falsehoods to her teammates. Omarosa defended herself vigorously on the talk show circuit, despite all that the cameras had captured.

In one late-night appearance, when Omarosa was scheduled to appear on an April 2004 episode of the late night
Jimmy Kimmel Live
show, she backed out of the appearance midway through the taping. Just picked up and left, she did. The reason—there was a lie detector on the set, and Omarosa assumed it was for her. Apparently show producers had assured the jittery Omarosa that she wouldn't be strapped to it—indeed, it was for a heavily promoted skit between host Jimmy Kimmel and his Uncle Frank. Here's the thing: if you become known for lying, there's a pretty good chance you assume others aren't telling the truth either.

One assumes she left before her reputation could be trashed by either refusing to submit to a lie detector test
or
by failing a lie detector test. But rest assured Jimmy Kimmel took care of that; after she ditched, Kimmel told the audience, in the studio and over the air: “She left because the lie-detector
is out here. I'm not kidding, she was worried we were going to find out what a horrible, horrible, lying, filthy . . .” and then he trailed off while the studio audience laughed.

The moral? Don't lie, or at the very least, don't tell lies while there are rolling cameras trained on you. Or, at a minimum, don't cross Jimmy Kimmel on his own show.

Source:
New York Post

 

E
veryone agrees
that the first show waifish folk-pop star Jewel played at New Hampshire's Hampton Beach Ballroom Casino in May 2004 was perfectly fabulous. But something happened between the first show and the second, because when the blonde, snaggle-toothed songstress came out for show number two she was apparently a bit unhinged.

Well, you say, she's a rock star. They're supposed to be unhinged. Yeah, but it's supposed to be a
fun
sort of unhinged, and this was, according to concertgoers, merely strange and unpleasant. The singer began her set by mocking the fat and the toothless (never a smart thing in a casino). Later, she asked the crowd to yell requests and then told them to shut up. To top it all off, Jewel eventually told the audience to stop looking at her teeth (snaggly) and instead and look at her breasts (not snaggly).

And then there was that ten-minute meandering discourse on the antidepressants Zoloft and Paxil about halfway through the show. As one concertgoer said to the
Hampton Union
newspaper: “I don't know what that was all about. I don't know if she was on it or what. Maybe she
didn't
take it.”

In all, Jewel played four or five songs in an hour-long concert, which is not very much. And for the encore? About a minute's worth of yodeling.
That's
gonna drive t-shirt sales for sure.

Source: The
Hampton Union

 

D
on't get Richard Simmons angry.
You wouldn't
like
him when he's angry. No, the exercise guru
will
bring the slapdown. Don't think that just because he's, well, you know, Richard Simmons, that he won't mix it up. He is a man without
fear.

Just ask Christopher Farney, who crossed paths with Mr. Simmons at Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport in March 2004. As a bit of background, let us note that Farney stood 6′2″, weighed 250 pounds, and worked as a motorcycle salesman and an ultimate cage fighter (a sport like wrestling but with less brains involved). This chunky hunk of a man saw the diminutive Mr. Simmons (5′7″, 155 pounds, 55 years old), who was waiting for his plane, and according to the police report, said “‘Hey everybody. It's Richard Simmons. Let's drop our bags and rock to the '50s!”

Well, rather than do the usual celebrity thing (which would be to smile mirthlessly at the lame joke, find out the name of the miscreant, and then have your minions ruin his credit record), Simmons walked over to Farney and said, “It's not nice to make fun of people with issues,” and slapped the burly boy right across the kisser. Farney wasn't physically injured, but pressed misdemeanor assault charges against Simmons.

Does this mean Simmons is headed toward the big house? No, because Farney later dropped the charges in May.