Mayor Sallie

This small-town American mayor ordered her police officers to stop chasing suspects on foot, then gave reporters the runaround about it. I like how this guy keeps his cool in the face of this kind of lunacy.

This has actually happened to me. Man, I don’t miss being a reporter.

Today’s Moron: Khamir Grant

This 15-year-old from Brooklyn learned a tough lesson this weekend about handguns. He was out with his friends, wearing his saggy pants, a pistol in his waistband. In other words, he was really, really cool. Until something happened:

He shot his own cock off.

I guess I shouldn’t make light of what happened to him. He’s just a kid. But he’s a kid with a gun. He’s a kid swept up in a stupid world that encourages and endorses criminal behaviour, a world where it’s easier for a kid to buy a cheap handgun than cheap alcohol. A sad world.

Guns are attractive. We all know this. We watch action movies, or crime dramas, and we like the shootouts. Remember that scene in The Matrix? “We need guns. Lots of guns.” Tell me that isn’t cool. I recently saw Shoot ‘em Up and Wanted, two okay movies that dwell on the cult of the handgun in a big way. How about Equilibrium, with Christian Bale’s gunkata martial arts?

By liking these things, are we contributing to the problem? Are we telling young people that they should be carrying firearms? I don’t think so. I’m in my 40s, and I watch action flicks. I like watching people fight … when it’s fiction. And I continue to do so, as I did as a kid. I liked all those things as a teenager, but the closest I got to illegal weaponry was the time we found an old stop sign in the ditch, took it to the school metal shop and made ninja throwing stars out of it.

But I had strong parenting. A lot of people don’t. Whether they live in Brooklyn or small-town Ontario, Canada, England, the U.S. or wherever, there are some kids adrift. And when handguns are that easy to find, shootings happen. In this case, Khamir — who I will conclude is not very bright, given the position he’s put himself in — made a series of stupid decisions that have guaranteed he’ll never be the same again.

My oldest son loves guns. He loves war, soldiers, video games, anything to do with firearms. And that used to worry me a bit. But he’s lucky — and I’m lucky, I suppose — that his stepfather is an avid hunter and shooter, so he’s learning the real rules of firearms, the safe way to shoot, from someone who knows the danger signs and understands how to balance that gun fascination with the real world. I’d like to think that my kid can play Halo without feeling the need to hide a stolen handgun in his waistband.

Anyway, let’s hope Khamir feels better as his case works its way through the courts. And let’s hope his story inspires at least one other teen moron to chuck that illegal pistol in the river.

Today’s Morons: PC World Staffers

I have never shopped at PC World, because the electronics chain is in England and I am not. But I am a gadgety guy, and I shop in a lot of similar stores, and I know what it can be like. Techie nerds who work in techie stores sometimes display a kind of contempt for those of us who do not know as much as they do about things with a lot of initials, like ADSL, DRAM, BIOS and PMU. It’s all GIGO to me.

Here’s a real conversation I had in 1995, when I decided to try out this “Internet” thing and went to the storefront operation run by the only Internet Service Provider in town.

• Me: “I’d like to get the Internet running on my computer at home.”
• Sales Dork: “Great! Blah blah blah $16.99 a month for X amount of minutes, here’s the floppy disk that’ll install it all. Just put it in your PC and away you go!”
• Me: “I’m on Mac.”
• Sales Dork: “Oooh, Mac, yeah, I’m not sure if Macs can go on the Internet …”
• Sales Dork Supervisor: “Sure they can! I’ll take over from here. We can offer you the same Internet package as our PC users, sir.”
• Me: “Great!”
• Sales Dork Supervisor: “But we don’t have the setup software available. No problem, though. All you have to do is go to our FTP site and download it.”
• Me: “Uh, how do I get to the FTP site if I don’t have Internet access?”
• Sales Dork Supervisor: “Just go to the FTP site and download it.”
• Me: “Like I said, how would I do that? How would I go to the FTP site to get the software I need to go online if I can’t get online in the first place?”
• Sales Dork Supervisor, after a long pause: “I guess … uh … go to the FTP?”

Luckily, I had a friend who had a friend who could fix me up, and I was up and running. And going online with a Mac — in the days when you couldn’t cross-platform things like floppies, CD-ROMS, peripherals and even websites, in some cases — was no easy task. I spent years dealing with small-town computer sales dorks … by the time things stabilized, I had somehow ended up as a Windows user anyway. Go figure.

I had a point here. Oh, yeah: PC World morons in England have been caught using a Facebook group to insult their customers. This seems to fit with the way PC World staffers have been described in the past. “Our chain has been repeatedly criticized for poor service, and customers are leaving, and retail in general is suffering, and electronic retailing in particular is hurting, and jobs are being lost … let’s tell the people who keep trying to give us money that they’re annoying losers.”

Until today, the only things I know about PC World came from the occasional remark made by some of my British associates, who will often mention the chain as being particularly poor when it comes to decent service. Also, I used Google to learn more. Now, though, as I read about this Facebookery gone wrong, I have to shake my head. Again and again, people land here at Today’s Moron by forgetting that what they do online can actually be read by other people. For computer-industry “professionals” to make that mistake points to a bigger problem.

Here’s my solution for PC World: Don’t just hire the first dink who shows up. Screen your candidates. Train them. Treat them well. And make sure they know that they’re there to take that money from people who want to spend it. Pissing customers off is no way to save a business. Letting your staff get away with it makes them think they can keep doing it online.

Here’s my solution for PC World workers: Some customers will be assholes. They will be rude. They will not know what they want, or have a limited understanding of what they’re asking for. You will not like this. Too bad. They’re there to give you money, and you should do whatever they want.

Here’s my solution for customers: If you get even the slightest taste of bad service, walk away. I’ve done it. It works. Just this week, I spent 15 minutes in line at the pharmacy while the one cashier on duty dawdled. I was running late, and couldn’t wait any longer, so I turned, left my purchases on a vacant checkout, and walked out. A manager chased me down, opened a till, processed my purchase and treated me like gold. That’s class.

I’ll bet you he didn’t complain about me on Facebook afterwards, either.

Today’s Moron: Gary Moody

I have 10 questions for Gary Moody of Portland, Maine, who has been nabbed (again) hiding in a campground outhouse. You may remember this guy; he was arrested a few years ago for the same offence, and told police he had dropped his wedding ring into the pit. This time, he said he’d dropped his shirt.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have nothing but sympathy for people with psychiatric or psychological conditions that make them want to do these strange things … until those compulsions intrude into other people’s lives. Imagine yourself sitting in that outhouse — already an unpleasant enough experience — only to discover a face looking up at your privates. Imagine it’s your mother, or wife, or child.

If I were still a crime reporter, and I had the chance to meet with Gary and ask him a few questions, this is what they would be:

1. How did you fit through that narrow little poo-hole?
2. Have you ever gotten stuck halfway into an outhouse?
3. Have you ever found anything interesting down there, like an old comic book, or a cellphone, or a bag of smuggled heroin?
4. Assuming you really did drop your wedding ring, how much do you love your wife, and is getting the ring back really worth crawling into human poo-waste?
5. Assuming you really did drop your shirt, how much do you love that stupid shirt? Did your wife give it to you?
6. What does it feel like to sit in poo?
7. Assuming, as you say, that you have “an outhouse problem,” and you’ve done this many times before, how do you clean up afterward?
8. Why the hell would you do this?
9. Why? For the love of God, why?
10. Do people call you Mr. Smells Like Poo?

I used to know a guy who was hired to pump out portapotties at campgrounds. He quit after a few weeks because he could never get rid of the smell on his skin. Imagine what Gary’s wife must have to live with …

Here’s an article about Gary, with a smelly-looking photo.

Today’s Moron: Shenisse Farrell

I actually feel bad about drawing attention to this poor woman’s plight. But she brought it on herself … and she went public, telling her stupid story to the Daily Mail in the U.K. Here it is, briefly: Shenisse Farrell heard about an operation that would turn her brown eyes blue, so she went ahead and had it done, but it turned out to be bullshit, and she had to have emergency surgery to save her vision.

Please review the steps Shenisse took and decide the point at which you would have said “Not gonna do it:”

1. Shenisse decides she has to have blue eyes.
2. She reads about a surgical procedure that will give her permanently blue eyes.
3. This procedure involves slicing open the eye and inserting an artificial iris, colour of your choice, over your existing iris, then stitching it back up.
4. This procedure is not covered by public health in Britain, so she’ll have to pay out of pocket.
5. The cost is five thousand pounds, which is $8,100 in the U.S., $8,900 in Canada, and 257,895 Russian rubles. That’s a lot of rubles.
6. The operation will be performed only after the cash is paid.
7. The operation will be performed in Panama.
8. The operation takes 10 minutes.
9. The operation hurts like a knife in your eye, which it actually is.
10. After the operation, you will be given eye drops and told to “go find your own painkillers.”

Where did you stop? I stopped at the “slicing into your eye” part. Shenisse did not, and she almost went blind. By the time she got back from her operation, which may have also included a complimentary Pina Colada and souvenir beer bottle opener, she could barely see. She had to undergo emergency surgery.

She tells reporters she knew it was reckless, but as she had already had breast implants in Bulgaria, she figured it would be okay. How is that a reason to justify anything? I guess I’m just astonished at people’s interest in surgically changing the way they look, even if it risks their health — or life. Or vision. It’s one thing to have bloated, stupid lips or a weirdly stretched face, like Kenny Rogers, but it’s another to put your future at risk for appearance. Get over yourselves, people, and live with it. We are what we are.

Don’t get me started on the penis-extension morons out there.

Read Shenisse’s story here. And if you kept thinking this was a fine plan anytime after, say, No. 3, I look forward to your appearance here at Today’s Moron.

Today’s Moron: Wikler Moran-Mora

How could I not write about this guy today? Look at his name! Go ahead, say it out loud. Fun, isn’t it? I think this proves my old theory that if you’re cursed with a stupid name, you will do stupid things.

What did Wikler do? He faked his own kidnapping. Badly. He text-messaged his wife this week and told her he had been snatched by thugs. Don’t call the cops, he told her. Also, don’t panic, everything will be okay. His wife didn’t listen. She panicked, and she called the Hillsborough County, Florida, police and the cops tracked Wikler’s cell phone — they can do that now, you know — and “rescued” him.

He wasn’t stashed in the trunk of a Cadillac, nor was he tied up in a closet. He was shacked up with a lady. Wikler admitted to the police officers who found him that he had concocted the kidnapping scheme to free up some time to get down with a woman who wasn’t his wife. He has been charged with filing a false police report.

The capper: He’s a pastor in the Seventh Day Adventist Church of Reform. A man of the cloth. I don’t know much about his church, but I’m guessing they frown on this sort of thing. And I’m guessing they like their preachers to have a little more going on between the ears.

I have some suggestions for Wikler and anyone other wannabe cheaters looking for sure-fire excuses:

• “I won an all-expenses-paid weekend in a sensory deprivation chamber at the university.”
• “My vow of silence kicks in this weekend. I’ll be outside in the forest, in a sweat lodge, and you’ll ruin things if you check on me.”
• “I’ve been drafted, but just for this weekend. I’m going to fight in Iraq. I’ll be back Monday.”

As stupid as he is, though, I suspect Wikler was doomed to this fate from birth, because of his name. Life can’t have been easy. But he isn’t alone; check out these poor people.