“Two things are infinite, as far as we know — the universe and human stupidity. And I’m not so sure about first one.” This apocryphal quote from standup physicist Albert Einstein contains a grain of truth bigger than Ayers Rock. Hence the four recent news items below about stupid guy stuff.
1. B.C. conservation officials are investigating a video posted in June to YouTube by the B.C.-based group Wolftracker TV. A unidentified boater’s backside — black swim shorts displaying a pasty-white, come-hither muffin top — is seen as he and his offscreen buddies pursue a moose across shallow water. The man then leaps off the motorboat’s deck onto the creature’s back and rides it for 15 seconds.
“I’ve never seen anything so awesome,” one of his buddies exclaims to laughter. Muffin man pumps his fist in the air before falling off the terrified moose.
Wildlife harassment has a long and distinguished history, from the elephant-straddling Hannibal to the crocodile-wrestling Steve Irwin. In some parts it’s considered as manly as SpikeTV and truck nuts. But unfortunately for the Darwin Award seeker in the YouTube video, it’s an offence in B.C. If he’s identified and charged, I’d like see his community service include a reenacted rodeo act with rutting male moose. On dry land. With ticket sales.
2. The June 17 mass killing of African American churchgoers in Charleston, North Carolina elicited a jaw-dropping tweet the next day from NRA board member Charles L. Cotton. He blamed state senator and pastor Clemental Pinckney for smiting himself and others.
“Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue,” wrote Cotton.
There is nowhere to take this, comically speaking. I am dumbstruck by the absurdity/douchebaggery of the National Rifle Association, and aghast that Mr. Cotton walks freely, never to be wrapped in an ether-soaked Confederate flag coated with bacon grease, and dragged from a trawler off Cape Cod for an episode of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week.
3. More than 500 aircraft in Canada were reportedly struck by laser pointers last year, occasionally blinding pilots. Eighty of the attacks were in B.C.; fifty-two at YVR. Air Canada Pilot Russ Bellman has testified how a laser pointer hit him the left eye on May 12, 2014, and then temporarily blinded his first officer.
Swords, shanks, rifles, bayonets, intercontinental ballistic missiles, laser pointers; what is it with guys and pointy things? (I think we can safely say males of varying age and cranial capacity are responsible for most of these incidents.) I knew a guy who liked to train a laser pointer on apartment walls across from his West End high-rise, just to see the occasional cat leap into view. And as a guy, I thought that was pretty cool.
Sales of these devices should be tightly controlled, even if the NRA insists that “if laser pointers are banned, only cat-fancying PowerPoint users will have laser pointers.”
4. “Being sodomized is acceptable in Islam if the goal is to carry out jihad, according to a cleric on a new video,” reports The Toronto Sun.
Abu al-Dema al-Qasab informs terrorists-to-be how to carry out a successful suicide bombing mission by anally concealing explosives. “However, to undertake this jihadi approach you must agree to be sodomized for a while to widen your anus so it can hold the explosives,” the “cleric” says in the video.
This video was allegedly first aired on a Shia-based satellite television station, but its provenance is shaky. The background of al-Dema al-Qasab is “also unknown,” notes the newspaper report. No word on radicalized young males from Brixton to Brisbane going gaga for Mission Implantable, or if the mystery mullah has anything else to sell us — say, info on illegal centrifuge tubes or Flubber bound for Iran.
But my wandering mind returns to the motorboat muffin man. I envision him as angry and vengeful after Western justice metes out a one-sided romantic encounter with a male moose. Would the sentence expand his horizons enough for radicalized membership in al-Qasab’s butt-blasting battalion? It’s the start of a fractured fairy tale that turns my frown upside-down.
geoffolson.com
