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Dumb crooks |
CHICAGO (AP) -- The convict couldn't stand another day in his Rhode Island prison.
Faced with a 90-day sentence for disorderly conduct, he spent 88 days concocting a scheme to break out. On the 89th day he successfully made his escape -- only to be caught a few months later and sent back to prison for 1 1/2 years.
``The crimes are real, but the names have been changed to protect the ignorant,'' quipped author Leland Gregory, who collaborated with two others on the new book, ``America's Dumbest Criminals.''
Gregory, Daniel Butler and Alan Ray toured the country for four months beginning last November talking to police officers in big cities and small towns. Among some of the most stupid criminals
were:
- A Nevada robber who let a convenience store clerk make one
phone call during a hold-up, then seemed surprised when police
showed up.
- A Rhode Island man charged with breaking open vending machines who paid his $400 bail entirely in quarters.
Those criminals might seem too stupid to be real, but that's all the better, the authors said.
``We wanted to let kids know that criminals are not really glamorous characters,'' said Gregory, an actor, writer and TV producer who lives in Chicago.
``Films like `Seven,' `Copycat,' `The Silence of the Lambs,' with intellectual, conniving criminals -- that's all fiction,'' he said. ``The truth is a guy gets drunk, tries to steal a TV and gets his foot caught in an air vent.''
The authors say they also have enough material to make 26 half-hour TV shows, which are currently being produced for syndication. They have sold the rights for a ``World's Dumbest Criminals'' show to producers in Spain, France, Italy and Sweden.
``All of these people in the book are victims of their own crimes,'' said Butler, an actor and writer based in Nashville, Tenn.
One such ill-conceived exploit was a man's plan to blow up Percy Priest Dam near Nashville and flood the city. He figured that with the country music capital submerged, he could strap on scuba gear, dive through the city and plunder its riches.
Never mind that he had never been scuba diving before. And the dynamite explosion he rigged managed only to knock down the door of an old wooden shed near the top of the dam.
Then there was the thief who liked to smash windows of jewelry stores and grab whatever he could. One store he robbed replaced its windows with unbreakable plexiglass. When the thief returned and threw a cinder block at the window, the block bounced back, hit him in the head and knocked him out.
``They sent us a video,'' said Jerry Atnip, national secretary for the Fraternal Order of Police, based in Nashville. ``It was a humorous side to the sometimes ugly business that we're in.''
The book, published by Rutledge Hill Press, was released earlier this fall.
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These all are jokes that we've had the good fortune of having other people email to us or we've retrieved off the Internet. Over time, we've sent them on to the subscribers of our various jokes lists. Since we're talking some ten years of managing these emails lists, we've built up a pretty sizeable (and FUNNY) collection of jokes. They cover pretty much any category and topic that you can imagine; from clean jokes to dirty jokes and most everything in between, including the much loved lawyer jokes and the blonde jokes and the yo mama jokes as well as those redneck jokes. Remember, we did NOT author them, but we did take the time to convert the text files to html.
If you are certain of the authorship of any of these, email us the author's name along with relevant information on how we can verify that they truly are the author so we can give them the credit that they deserve.
The difference between web surfing with IE and Firefox is the difference between body armor and a trendy cotton vest
We've all heard the stories. Stories about innocently searching the internet with Internet Explorer when, all of a sudden, all the alarms are going off with your virus scanner. Programs are installing themselves. Warnings about Smitfraud-C, SpyAxe, and Vcodec are popping up on your screen.
And some of us have had firsthand experience. Firsthand experience that has led us away from IE and to other browsers like Firefox.
And why is that? Well, virus writers are generally going to be trying to get the most bang for their buck, ,just like everyone else. That's why. And IE currently provides them with that. It still has the largest market share, likely due in large part that it comes preinstalled on most computers.
But just because it's preinstalled doesn't mean you have to use it and expose yourself to all the spyware and virii targetted to it. You can do what an ever growing portion of users out there are doing. You can switch to
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