Bob Fenster - The Big Book of Duh: A Bathroom Book

Copyright 2007 by Bob Fenster. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information, write Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street , Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

E-ISBN: 978-0-7407-8890-1

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2006937916

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Bob Fenster is the author of a dozen books, including Twisted: Talesfrom the Wacky Side of Life and Duh!:The Stupid History of the HumanRace. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall StreetJournal, Readers Digest, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Playbill.He lives with his wife and three sons in Santa Cruz, California.

Youre about to enjoy one of the great private pleasures of life: the pause to reflect that no matter what stupid things youve done in your life (or are at this moment doing), youre not as stupid as these fools.

The reason this is best a private pleasure is that if you tell your friends about it, youre likely to get an argument.

A n inmate serving a ten-year sentence in a Massachusetts prison filed a lawsuit to have his sentence reduced by two days.

Why? Because there would be two leap years during the term of his incarceration, and the extra days would unfairly increase his sentence beyond the term of a normal year.

Petition denied, A-plus for creativity.

A Texas woman dropped her six-year-old daughter off at school and drove away. The police found the girl several hours later wandering alone around the schoolyard.

The cops arrested the mother, even though she claimed she didnt notice there was no one else at the school when she dropped off the girl. Also, she had forgotten it was Saturday.

I ts hard to break into show biz, harder still if you try it without the benefit of a brain.

In 1929 an aspiring actor named Charles Loeb sealed himself inside a large box and mailed himself from Chicago to a Hollywood film studio.

That gambit got him past the studio gates, but he was unpacked more dead than alive. Loeb recovered from his injuries but didnt land a part in a movie, because no one wanted to hire anyone that whacko.

I n 2006 police found a man keeping a thousand pet rats in his small house in the Northern California town of Petaluma.

One pet rat is colorful. A thousand pet rats is someone you dont turn your back on. What makes the story stranger is that five years earlier, the Petaluma cops found a woman keeping two hundred cats in her house.

That was slightly less eccentric because people who hoard animals typically choose cats or dogs, and most are women.

Still, the town might have solved one of its problems by getting the cat-woman together with the rat-man. Or they could just change the town slogan to: Petaluma, Home of Animal Hoarders.

T wo Canadian friends died in a head-on snowmobile collision. But it wasnt an accident. These geniuses were playing a game of snow chicken and they tied.

W orld-class idiots will try to solve problems that dont exist, like the South Korean woman who hung herself in 1987 because she forgot to set her clock ahead when the country switched to daylight savings time.

Due to her mistake, her husband had to leave for the company picnic without his lunch. How could she be expected to live with that shame? She couldnt.

Why didnt her husband set his own alarm clock or make his own lunch? Ask any woman whos got one.

S ometimes you have a small problem, or maybe you only think you do. But you figure out how to take care of the problem, and it kills you.

Thats what happened to a teenage boy in England who was concerned that he might have B.O. He went to the store and bought some deodorant. Problem solved? Not quite.

The teen wasnt sure hed gotten rid of all the smell, so he bought another can of deodorant spray, then another.

Eventually, the coroner ruled, the boy deodorized himself to death. Obsessed with not smelling, the boy brought on a heart attack by accumulating ten times the lethal dose of propane and butane in his blood from months of spraying his body with extreme amounts of deodorant.

A three-way tie for political candidates so nutty theyd get my vote:

Samuel Ferdinand-Lop ran for president of France in 1940 on the Lopeotherapy platform, which called for the elimination of poverty after ten at night. Lop also had an original plan to improve air quality in Paris: If elected, he would move the city to the country.

When Carl La Fong ran for the San Francisco City Council on the Pastrami ticket, his campaign slogan was: I like pastrami.

Works for me.

In 1999 a politician ran for Englands House of Lords on the platform of muzzling cats to prevent cruelty to mice and small birds.

O ofty Goofty conceived one of the strangest acts in the history of show business. He tolerated pain for a living.

A nineteenth-century street performer in San Francisco, Oofty Goofty charged people to punch, kick, and beat him with a bat.

Boxing champ John L. Sullivan took Goofty up on the challenge to hit him with a pool cue for 50 cents. Sullivan broke Gooftys back, and that was the end of his career in show biz.

I t may take extra effort to do something memorably dumbthat is, something other people will remember you for.

An Australian man was shooting pool in his garage when he thought up a cute trick shot. He hoisted himself onto a ceiling crossbeam and hung by his knees, so he could cue a shot upside down.

The man missed the shot, fell from the beam, hit his head on the concrete, and died of brain damage, although he may have suffered the brain damage prior to the fall.