There’s something oddly comforting about pulling the camera back to look at
DUMB ON A GLOBAL SCALE.
Suddenly, most of the strange and scary world looks remarkably familiar:
Dumb bosses and workers? Check.
Silly governments and grumpy bureaucrats? Check.
Cocktails made with human body parts? Check.
It really is true: we’re a lot more alike than we are different.
That doesn’t mean we’re identical, of course. Some things that look dumb to us look quite smart to the people of other nations. In Japan, for example, one restaurant offers an entire menu of food made with dirt (including dirt soup, dirt salad, dirt risotto with sea bass, and dirt ice cream for dessert). One local review called the results “divine” and “refreshing,” but it’s hard to picture Americans lining up for that sort of treat.
And in South Korea, entrepreneurs recently opened a large museum complex—the “Restroom Cultural Park”—that celebrates indoor plumbing with a building shaped like a—well, just guess. Your average American probably uses the throne as much as your average Korean, but it seems unlikely that a toilet-shaped toilet museum will crop up stateside anytime soon.
So we’re not all the same. Not all of us all name our businesses after genocidal maniacs. Not all of us attack our neighbors with sharpened palm fronds over coconut tree disputes.
But anyone, anywhere can end up looking pretty silly when things don’t go as planned:
Like the Russian airline attendant who took a picture of herself giving the finger to her passengers, and posted it on her country’s equivalent of Facebook. Her bosses at Aeroflot weren’t amused, and she lost her job.
Like the Polish man who wanted to help with the laundry and watch the fights on TV at the same time. He ended up burning half his face when he answered a hot iron instead of the phone. “I was really getting involved in the boxing and was not really thinking about what I was doing,” he said later.
Like the Englishman who couldn’t stop fighting with his brother Terry over who should live in the family house—so he smashed it to rubble with a sledgehammer. “I did what I had to do,” he said. “Terry’s going to be quite bitter.”
Stories like these are a nice reminder of the simple fact of stupid: dumb doesn’t care who you are, where you’re from, what language you speak, or what religion you follow. It doesn’t care if you’re big or small, young or old, rich or poor. Whether you live in penthouse or a mud hut, dumb will happily walk through your door—all you have to do is open it.
So join us on a tour of dumb around the world—and don’t worry about bringing a translator or a dictionary. Stupid, you’ll discover, is a universal language.
Customs officials at Antalya airport found themselves squarely in the crosshairs of the global laugh machine after they stamped the passport of a pink stuffed unicorn.
The supposed unicorn was, in reality, a nine-year-old girl from Wales who mistakenly gave the Turkish officials a “Design-A-Bear” passport. It featured a handsome gold-embossed teddy bear on the cover and a photo of a unicorn in a polka-dot overalls inside.
But officials waved the girl through anyway, and the family only later noticed the mistake. “There was a moment of panic when I thought someone would come chasing after us, but nothing,” the girl’s mother said. “And to make it worse, the unicorn wasn’t even on holiday with us.”
European officials arrested a gang of smugglers who pumped thousands of gallons of cheap vodka out of Russia and into neighboring Estonia through a mile-long underwater pipeline.
The incentive: vodka is heavily taxed in Estonia, but dirt cheap in Russia.
The smugglers managed to pump about 1,600 gallons through the 1.2-mile pipe before getting busted. But their biggest problem was sales—Estonians are discriminating drinkers, and unsurprisingly, pipeline vodka isn’t what you’d call top quality.
—SOURCE: TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
If your dog accidentally leaves his poop on the street in the town of Brunete, never fear! You’ll get it back. Just be ready to sign for a package.
Fed up with sidewalk minefields, local leaders adopted an unusual plan. Volunteer poop-spotters would walk the streets looking for owners who don’t scoop. They would casually strike up a conversation, find out the dog’s name, check it against the national database of registered pets, and ship the poop back to the owner’s address.
Sounds crazy, but in one week alone, the town shipped almost one hundred fifty fragrant care packages, and dog-poop levels have dropped in town by 70 percent. That’s more effective than their last stunt—a remote-controlled plastic pile-of-poop-on-wheels that would chase non-scooping dog owners down the street.
—SOURCE: TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
When you’re literally making money, typos aren’t easily fixed. That’s why the head of Chile’s national mint lost his job.
Nobody saw the mistake at first, but about a year after a new fifty-peso coin was released, someone finally noticed that instead of “Republica de Chile,” it read, “Republica de Chiie.”
In the end, a handful of mint workers got fired, including the boss. But recalling thousands of coins isn’t cheap—so they’re still out there.
—SOURCE: BBC NEWS
Russia’s former minister of finance, Alexei Kudrin, knows a way to generate taxes and goose his country’s sluggish economy: Everyone should drink and smoke more.
“Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state,” he said.
—SOURCE: TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
Authorities recently arrested a forty-year-old man in a remote Russian city for stealing a road.
The road, outside the city of Syktyvkar in the heavily forested Komi Republic, was made of large concrete slabs. The thief used heavy machinery to lift 82 of the slabs, worth a total of about $6,000, onto three trucks. He didn’t get far.
But lucky for him, he only faced a two-year sentence. These days, political protestors in Russia are looking at much steeper penalties—better to steal a road, apparently, than criticize the government.
—SOURCE: EN.RIA.RU
A villager in the Ural Mountains called police at 3 a.m. recently to report a tank invasion.
Police arrived in the village of Beryozovo to find a 14-ton armored all-terrain vehicle that had run off the road, flattened a garage, and come just short of crushing a woman’s house.
Fortunately, despite what some neighbors feared, war had not broken out. But at least one gentleman had gotten very, very drunk. That would be the tank driver, who told police the next morning that he had no idea how he’d gotten to the village.
—SOURCE: BUZZFEED.COM
Fishermen in Øresund Sound (between Sweden and Denmark) recently reported a new fish in their catch—the pacu, a piranha look-alike whose favorite dish happens to be between a gentleman’s legs.
“It normally eats nuts, fruit, and small fish,” one Danish expert said, “but human testicles are just a natural target.”
The fish is native to South America and was probably dumped in the Øresund by accident, but it’s not impossible that more are out there. “Keep your swimsuit on in the sound these days,” the expert said. “It’s not normal to get your testicles bitten off, of course, but it can happen.”
—SOURCE: TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
When workers at a grocery store in Copenhagen took delivery on their latest batch of bananas, they noticed something funny—some boxes were quite a bit heavier than others.
It wasn’t extra fruit: the boxes were packed with 220 pounds of cocaine.
A few days later, workers in at least one store ended up finding bricks of coke in their bananas, which had been shipped from Colombia. Store officials rushed to assure shoppers that the bananas were perfectly safe, but there are probably at least a few customers who wouldn’t mind if their fruit came with a little extra kick.
—SOURCE: DAILYCALLER.COM
A woman in Beijing recently sued a hotel for failing to wake her up. She overslept and missed an exam, so she demanded over $6,000 in damages.
Unfortunately, 27-year-old Zhao Lin never got to make her case in court; she slept through the court date. That left the hotel managers feeling vindicated: “As we can all see today, she seems to have a problem waking up,” said one.
—SOURCE: CROATIANTIMES.COM
Among the popular attractions in the Wuhan city zoo was a talkative mynah bird whose vocabulary included such charming phrases as “hello,” “goodbye,” and “good fortune.”
But mynahs hear everything—and they don’t forget. One day the mynah suddenly began spouting obscenities at everyone in earshot, and it had to be quickly escorted away from the paying guests.
Nobody knew quite what had happened. “Maybe some tourist taught the bird this bad language,” said zookeeper Li Yun. No matter the reason, the zoo couldn’t let its other mynahs get in on the act. The foul mouthed bird was sent to solitary confinement, where it was sentenced to mend its ways by listening to hours and hours of tapes of polite conversation.
—SOURCE: ANIMALNEWYORK.COM
Chinese visitors to an ancient temple in Egypt were shocked to see words in their own language carved in the 3,500-year-old walls: “Ding Jihao was here.”
It turned out to be fresh graffiti left by an enterprising fifteen-year-old from Jiangsu Province. Word spread fast, and profuse apologies quickly followed from the boy, his family, and Chinese authorities. Officials have now launched a campaign to encourage their compatriots to be respectful and considerate travelers.
And with more Chinese seeing new countries than ever before, it’s likely that the world will learn quickly to accommodate them in spite of the occasional dumb teenager. In 2012, 80 million Chinese spent more than $100 billion, making them the highest-spending tourists in the world.
—SOURCE: DAILYMAIL.CO.UK
Every year since 1992, two zookeepers at Islamabad’s Marghazar Zoo have demanded a large annual delivery of alcohol, which they said they used to “calm down” the zoo’s elephants during mating season.
“I serve two bottles of vodka to each of the elephants every night from November to February,” one zookeeper said. “If we delay giving them booze, they get angry.” Every year the zookeepers asked for a bigger ration, telling zoo officials that the elephants would get dangerous without it.
It took only 20 years for someone to ask a veterinarian if elephants drink. The answer: of course not. The alcohol was going exactly where you think it went: down the zookeepers’ gullets. Both lost their jobs, but it was a good run while it lasted.
—SOURCE: ISHTIAQRAO.BLOGSPOT.COM
The woman convicted of assaulting a bus driver with a banana won’t have to pay $1,000 in damages.
That doesn’t mean she’s off the hook completely—the conviction for banana assault still stands. By the driver’s telling, it was a brutal, unprovoked attack that injured his retina: “She hit me right in the face with the half-eaten banana. I had banana all over me—on my tie, my shirt, and my eye.”
The woman, however, argued that the driver almost hit her car, and that when she entered the bus to rationally discuss the matter, the banana slipped.
The court may not have believed that, but it did believe her when she argued that it was “unreasonable that a banana could cause this much damage.” They reduced her penalty to about $100.
—SOURCE: THELOCAL.SE
It’s true what they say about Scandinavia: it’s just plain civilized.
Take the case of the forgetful jailers at Norrtälje prison, near Stockholm. On a recent Friday night, they forgot to lock up six inmates, including three convicted murderers.
So what did the thugs do with their remarkable chance? They baked a sticky Swedish chocolate cake called a kladdkaka and watched TV. “The coziest evening we’ve had in a long time,” said one.
—SOURCE: JULIAMOVED.COM
A traveler in Winnipeg reported this exchange with a fussy server in a sit-down restaurant:
Me: Could my daughter get a baked potato instead of the fries, please?
Waitress: No.
Me: No? Why? Are you out of baked potatoes?
Waitress: No, but we’ve only got a few, and we’re saving them for the adult customers. Kids prefer fries anyway.
Me: She loves baked potatoes! Are you seriously not going to let her have one?
Waitress: Nope!
Key West has the margarita. In Munich, Germany, it’s the frothy stein of beer. And for one town deep in Canada’s Yukon Territory, the signature drink is a cocktail made with a human toe.
They call it the Sourtoe, and since its invention in 1973, more than six hundred thousand visitors to Dawson City’s Sourdough Saloon have knocked one back. If your lips touch the toe—eight of which have been donated over the years by various unfortunates who’ve lost them to frostbite, diabetes, inoperable corns, and a lawn mower accident—you become a member in good standing of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club.
Any drink will do, as long as there’s a toe in it.
And while at least one toe has been swallowed, the safely preserved (but truly ugly) digits haven’t hurt anyone yet. They’ve also done wonders for the remote town’s reputation. “It’s hard to become famous,” said the Sourtoe’s inventor, Dick Stevenson. “It’s much easier to become infamous.”
—SOURCE: SOURTOECOCKTAILCLUB.COM
They take their rules as seriously on the Emerald Isle as anywhere else. A student reported this exchange in her school cafeteria:
Me: Can I also have two slices of white bread please?
Server: Sorry, we need the white bread to make toast.
Me: So, you won’t sell me the white bread as you need to keep it to sell as toast?
Server: YES!
Me: Can I have untoasted toast please?
Server: NO!
An actor in the city of Cardiff reported this exchange between a fellow actor and one of the theater’s technical staff.
Actress: So I heard you’re Canadian!
Tech Guy: Yes, that’s right.
Actress: How’d you get to be that, then?
Tech Guy: Uh, well, I was born there.
Actress: Oh. So where is Canadia [sic], then? Is it near Sweden?
Bosses can be as dumb in the UK as anywhere else. One fast-food worker from Lancashire reported this conversation:
Manager: Can you stay another four hours?
Me: What? Why?
Manager: Your coworker has drunk some wine, and can’t come in.
Me: Isn’t it her wedding day today?
Manager: Yes, that’s why she’s been drinking.
Me: And you scheduled her to work today?
Manager: Yes.
Me: Seriously?
Manager: Yes.
Me: And you didn’t think that would be a problem?
Manager: No.
The worker covered for the colleague. No word on whether or not the boss was boiled in oil.
“British Left Waffles on Falklands”
—THE GUARDIAN
A seasoned European traveler passed on this story from the days when strikes, global competition and Margaret Thatcher were shaking up Britain’s mining industry:
“I was hitchhiking through Yorkshire in 1984 and stopped in a pub for lunch,” he recalled. “I sat at the bar where everyone was complaining about Ian MacGregor shutting down the local mine.
“After listening awhile, I innocently asked if there was any coal left. The response was dead silence. Finally one miner said, “The coal ran out a decade ago, but that’s beside the point!’ ”
—GLEN EMERY
A financial institution in London recently decided it wanted to advertise special services to all of its top clients. So the bank came up with a computer program that would scan its database for wealthy customers and automatically send them letters.
Unfortunately, one programmer decided to indulge in a little snark while drafting the letter—and he forgot to correct the draft before the program went live.
You know where this is going: suddenly, the bank’s customers started getting letters that read, “Dear Rich Bastard …”
—SOURCE: SNOPES.COM
The official English-language radio news bulletin in Prague recently featured two notable items.
One headline read: “Ministry presents annual awards for promoting the good name of the country.”
Just below that: ‘Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek admits being drunk in interviews.”
—SOURCES: RADIO PRAGUE, MARK NESSMITH
Word to the wise: if you want to prune your neighbor’s coconut tree, be sure to wear your iron underwear.
That’s what one fisherman in the district of Half Assini wishes he’d done after he tried to trim some branches that overhung his property. Ezah Kojo had climbed the trunk and was ready to saw away when the tree’s furious owners—a 48-year-old woman and her daughter—attacked him from below with a large sharpened palm branch.
The two women probably didn’t mean to seriously hurt him. But something went badly awry. The stiff frond sunk deep in Kojo’s vulnerable rear, and while we’ll spare you the gory details, the unlucky fisherman had to be rushed to the hospital and can no longer move his bowels “in the traditional fashion.”
The women were found guilty of assault, and while a stern sentence is expected, it seems that the would-be tree trimmer got the worse punishment.
—SOURCE: GHANAWEB.COM
No matter where you go in the world, people talk smack about their neighbors. It’s no different in New Zealand, where the prime minister was once asked asked whether he was concerned by the large number of Kiwis moving to nearby Australia.
The late “Piggy” Muldoon’s famous reply: “New Zealanders who emigrate to Australia raise the IQ of both countries.”
A customer in a restaurant in Melbourne reported this conversation with an unfortunate worker:
Me: Can I have a toasted ham and cheese sandwich?
Cashier: Umm … I ‘m not sure. I’ll have to see. (The cashier disappears into the back room, talks to someone, and returns empty-handed.)
Cashier: Sorry, I’ve got no ham and cheese left. In fact we’ve got hardly any food. That was my boss I was just talking to. He just told me he’s closing the business at the end of today, so I’m officially unemployed in about … um … three hours. Now I know why we’ve had no food delivered all week. Actually, I should probably just close now since we’ve got no food anyway. Sorry to ruin your day!
Me: That’s okay. I think someone else just had a worse one.
Anonymous hackers recently broke into the official accounts of President Bashar al-Assad, retrieving hundreds of e-mails and dumping them online for all the world to see.
Among the embarrassing revelations: while you might expect the ruthless dictator to have ironclad online protection, he didn’t.
In fact, it was just the opposite: Assad’s password was “12345”—what experts call the least-secure password possible.
—SOURCE: TECHDIRT.COM
Competition for shoppers in the city of Ahmedabad is stiff, and shop owner Manish Chandani wanted a name that would honor his family and make his clothing store stand out.
So he put a swastika in the sign and called the shop “Hitler.”
It’s memorable, all right. A small surge of global outrage followed, and Chandani quickly agreed to change the name and logo. “I was not aware of Hitler being responsible for the killing of six million people before the shop’s inauguration,” he said. “This time I will choose a noncontroversial name.”
So how did he hear the name Hitler in the first place? It was his “very strict” grandfather’s nickname, Chandani said.
—SOURCE: BBC.CO.UK
After forty years of marriage, one couple in Prey Veng Province decided that the time had come to split up—so the husband and friends sawed the house in half.
“It is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” a local reporter said. The husband took his half to his parents’ property, where he rebuilt it. The wife left hers where it stood. And their two children each got a quarter of the family property.
The only ones who got nothing were the lawyers. “This was a not a legal divorce,” one said. “It never went to the court.”
—SOURCE: CNN.COM
A businessman meeting Chinese clients reported this conversation between a friend of his and a lovely young woman at an upscale restaurant in Hong Kong:
Businessman: So, what do you do for a living?
Woman: Me? I’m just a prostitute.
Businessman (mouth dropping open): Uh, wow, that’s, um, really interesting. I bet you make lots of money.
Woman: Not really. But that’s not even the worst part. The hours are very long, so I’m pulling overtime nearly every single day.
Businessman: Is that so? Well, okay then.
Woman: And don’t even get me started on the paperwork.
Businessman: Wait, what? (At this moment, a second woman leans over and starts whispering in Cantonese. The first woman immediately starts blushing.)
Woman: I’m very sorry for the confusion! I’m a PROSECUTOR. Not … what I said earlier.
Businessman: Now that makes sense! Here I am, thinking that you had a really bad pimp or something!
“West Point Cadets Train for Life in Iraq with Weekend in N.J.”
—TIMES HERALD-RECORD
Government officials in Tehran have infuriated the terrorist organization of Al Qaeda by suggesting that the United States government staged the infamous September 11 attacks in New York City.
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suggested in a speech that the official version of events was a “big fabrication,” and that the U.S. blew up its own buildings and murdered its own people.
This left Al Qaeda, which spent many years preparing the attacks, feeling grossly insulted. “Why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief?” one writer said. “[Iran does] not want to give Al Qaeda credit for the greatest and biggest operation ever committed against America.”
No word on Iran’s theories about the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing.
Europeans know that the French are fond of Belgian jokes, portraying their neighbors as dumb, uncultured, and so on. The Belgians, for their part, have long been hesitant to return fire.
That’s why, when the silent French film The Artist earned an unprecedented ten Academy Award nominations, this line started making the rounds in Belgium: “When the French shut up, the whole world appreciates them!”
—SOURCE: BLOGS.TRANSPARENT.COM
How do you give yourself a leg up in Brazilian politics? Change your name to a variation of Barack Obama. Six candidates in Brazil’s local elections recently did just that.
But office seekers didn’t stop there. Two hundred renamed themselves after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which just happened to be the name of Brazil’s immensely popular president. Other people looking for the public’s votes have included a Bill Clinton, a Jorge Bushi, and one Chico Bin Laden.
—TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
Law enforcement officials in the capital of Bangkok want to deliver “guilt and shame” to their own officers, and they think “Hello Kitty” is just the ticket.
Under a new initiative, police caught littering, parking illegally, or otherwise disgracing the uniform will be required to wear bright pink armbands adorned with the ubiquitous cartoon kitten, along with a pair of linked hearts.
Not exactly the image any cop wants to project. “Kitty is a cute icon for young girls,” said one official. “It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.”
The new pink armbands quickly made their mark. “The police are scared,” an anonymous officer said. “It will be very embarrassing to walk around with Hello Kitty on your arm.”
But this extreme policy was only necessary because the plaid armbands they’d been using weren’t working—instead of being ashamed, officers were taking them home as souvenirs.
—SOURCE: NEWYORKTIMES.COM
In a country famous for its love of both beer and rugby, it should probably be no surprise that someone invented a beer vending machine you have to tackle.
It’s called the “Rugbeer machine,” and even after you’ve put inyour money, you have to hit it with a full body blow to get it to release your beer.
No little love taps will do—the machine is happy to make jokes about you if you can’t hit it hard enough. And while the manufacturer reports no fatalities yet, it could be just a matter of time. In the United States, at least 37 people have been killed by tipped-over vending machines since 1978.
—SOURCE: ADWEEK.COM
In the country still known to most as Burma, almost every aspect of daily life has long been controlled by a rigid and ruthless dictatorship. Naturally that has included aggressive censorship, run from an office called the Division of Press Scrutiny.
During a recent political thaw, however, that office was shut down for good. The former director, U Tint Swe, said he was glad to be done with an ugly job. “We didn’t arrest or torture anyone,” he said, “but we had to torture their writing.”
—SOURCE: NEWYORKTIMES.COM
