“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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Another mid-week selection of linguistic catastrophes in the form of newspaper headlines that went sadly wrong.
I bet the authors were congratulating themselves when they wrote them on how clever they had been.
Sorry (at them), but hurrah to us, they had quite the opposite result.
Enjoy.
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“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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Time for another selection of fascinating facts. How you use these is up to you, but some of them may well come in handy sometime.
Enjoy.
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Every year Alaska has about 5,000 earthquakes,
1,000 of which measure above 3.5 on the Richter scale
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There are approximately 7,000 feathers on an eagle
– even a bald one!
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The average person changes their career every 13 years
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The total mileage driven by all U-Haul trucks in a year
is enough to move a person from the Earth to the moon
five times a day for an entire year
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Scientists with high-speed cameras have discovered
that rain drops are not tear shaped
but rather look like hamburger buns.
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570 gallons of paint would be needed to paint the outside of the White House
– make that 570 gallons of white paint
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Tiger Woods is the first athlete to has been named
“Sportsman of the Year”
by magazine Sports Illustrated two times
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In 1996, toy company Mattel released a “Harley Davidson” Barbie.
This dolls distinctive feature is a birth mark on her face
that changes position with every new release of the doll
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In the Sahara Desert there is a town named Tidikelt,
which did not receive a drop of rain for ten years
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The most senior crayon maker Emerson Moser
retired after making 1.4 billion crayons for Crayola.
It was then that he revealed that he was actually colorblind
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There are mirrors on the moon.
Astronauts left them so that laser beams could be bounced off of them from Earth.
These beams help give us the distance to the moon give or take a few meters.
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Tobacco kills more Americans each year
than alcohol, cocaine, crack, heroin, homicide,
suicide, car accidents, fire and AIDS combined
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The oldest bird on record was Cocky, a cockatoo, who lived in London Zoo.
He ceased being Cocky at the age of 82.
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There were 13 couples celebrating their honeymoon on the Titanic
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In July 1874, a swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts flew over Nebraska
covering an area estimated at 198,600 square miles.
It is estimated that the swarm contained about 12.5 trillion insects.
These insects became extinct thirty years later
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Honorificabilitudinitatibus
is the longest English word that consists strictly
of alternating consonants and vowels
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In Haiti, only 1 out of every 200 people own a car which is ironic
considering approximately 33% of the country’s budget on imports
is spent on equipment for fuel and transportation.
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The largest diamond found in the United States was a 40.23 carat white diamond.
It was found in 1924 at Murfreesboro, Arkansas at the Prairie Creek pipe mine,
which later became known as the Crater of Diamonds State Park.
The diamond was named “Uncle Sam” after the nickname of its finder,
Wesley Oley Basham, a worker at the Arkansas Diamond Corporation.
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In 1903 Mary Anderson invented the windshield wipers
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The song with the longest title is
“I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank
on the Streets of Yokohama with my Honolulu Mama
Doin’ Those Beat-o, Beat-o Flat-On-My-Seat-o,
Hirohito Blues”
written by Hoagy Carmichael in 1945.
He later claimed the song title ended with ‘Yank’ and the rest was a joke
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“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
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In 1994, at the annual awards dinner given by the American Association for Forensic Science, their then president, Don Harper Mills, astounded his audience in San Diego with the legal complications of a bizarre death.
Needless to say it featured an idiot, in fact several idiots, which is why it is being recounted on the fasab blog.
This is the unlikely story.
On 23 March 1994, the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head.
The deceased had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide. He had left behind a note indicating his depression.
As he fell past the ninth floor, his attempt to kill himself was interrupted by a shotgun blast through a window, which killed him instantly.
Neither the shooter nor the jumper were aware that a safety net had been erected at the eighth floor level to protect some window washers and that Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide because of this.
Ordinarily, if a person sets out with the intention of killing himself and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he originally intended, the death would be deemed a suicide.
Thus, in normal circumstances, the fact that Opus was shot on the way to certain death nine stories below probably would not have changed his mode of death from suicide to homicide.
However, in this case, the fact that his suicidal intent would not have been successful, because of the safety nets, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.
The room on the ninth floor where the shotgun blast emanated was occupied by and elderly man and his wife. They were arguing and he was threatening her with the shotgun. But he was so upset that when he pulled trigger he completely missed his wife and the shotgun pellets went through window striking Opus as he fell and killing him.
The Coroner held that, “When one intends to kill subject A, but kills subject B in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject B.”
However, when confronted with this charge, the old man and his wife were both adamant that neither knew that the shotgun was loaded.
The old man said it was his long standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her – therefore, the killing of Opus appeared to be an accident in that the gun had been accidentally loaded by someone else.
The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple’s son loading the shotgun approximately six weeks prior to the fatal incident. It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son’s financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.
The case now became one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.
But even that would not be enough to feature in this blog.
Further investigation revealed that the son, was none other than one Ronald Opus, who had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother’s murder.
This had led him to jump off the ten story building on March 23, only to be killed by a blast from the shotgun he had loaded himself some six weeks previously as he fell past the ninth story window of his parents’ apartment.
The medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.
fasab 