Glob-a-log

I’ve talked before about man’s inventiveness - and how our inquisitive brain tends to get us in all sorts of highly entertaining trouble.

When you think about homo sapiens you always come up with the same kinds of buzz words: playful, wilful and, of course those old stand-bys: stupid and perverse.

The old prayer goes, ‘Lead us not into temptation.’

That one really could use the following disclaimer:

‘But when You do, please don’t also lead us into any truly embarrassing situations.’

Keen observators of humanity know neither of these prayers actually ever seem to do us any blind bit of good:

A school custodian’s impromptu after-hours karaoke performance prompted a police response when a teacher thought she was being threatened over the loudspeaker.

State police say the teacher at Booth Free School barricaded herself inside a classroom Wednesday when she mistook someone singing a Guns N’ Roses song over the public address system for a threat.

Six troopers and three police dogs showed up and found three teenagers, one of them a custodian at the school, who had been playing with the public address system. Police say one of them sang “Welcome to the Jungle” into the microphone. The song contains the lyrics “You’re in the jungle baby; you’re gonna die.”

The teenagers were cuffed for about 15 minutes while police investigated. They didn’t realize anyone else was in the school at the time. No charges will be filed, said state police Sgt. Brian Ness.

Of course, the above story is a relatively mild example of the kinds of embarrassments our playful, wilful and inquisitive minds can cause us.

I’ve said it before but nothing - not even wearing a ‘Mohammed is a pig’ T-shirt in your average Muslim holiday resort - gets a person faster into very deep shit than the human brain’s weird love affair with DIY interventions.

Into very serious and deep shit indeed:

Where did you spend Christmas Eve? Wherever it was, it had to be a lot better than the place Robert Schoff found himself in.

The 77-year-old Des Moines, Iowa man began his holiday with a toilet problem. So he went out to his septic tank and tried to remove the clog. Instead, it removed him. The senior lost his balance and fell into the slop, with his head trapped inside and his feet kicking wildly in the air. The 5′5″, 135-lbs. man tried yelling for help at the top of his lungs but no one heard him.

He stayed that way for about an hour unable to escape his smelly predicament until his wife began to wonder where her husband disappeared to. Toni Schoff walked by a window, saw his feet emerging from the opening and quickly rushed outside. But even that didn’t help. “I saw these kicking feet and ran out, but couldn’t get him out,” she recalls.

Eventually 911 and fire officials rushed to the scene and pulled him to safety. A long shower followed. “I thought it was the end of my life,” he reflects. “Thank God my wife saw me. I don’t think I could have stood staying in there much more.”

Still, the good thing about feeling embarrassed, if it’s not a ‘last few dying seconds’ thing is that, indeed, you’ve survived whatever stupid situation your stupid brain got you into.

In evolutionary terms embarrassment might even be a good thing - as it encourages those who land in the shit to avoid doing so again.

Well, that should work in principle, anyway. Some people though don’t seem to be inclined to learn anything at all from whatever harsh and embarrassing lessons life tries to teach them:

Ronald A. Dotson, 39, of Detroit was arrested Oct. 9 after police say he smashed a window at a cleaning-supply company to get at a female mannequin dressed in a black and white French maid’s uniform. He had been out of prison for less than a week.
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Dotson faces up to life in prison if convicted. The potential life sentence is because prosecutors charged him as a habitual offender. Authorities say he has at least six convictions for breaking and entering and a stint in state prison over the last 13 years.

Dotson was arrested in Ferndale in July 2000 and later convicted for breaking and entering at a women’s clothing shop to get at a mannequin in a pink dress with bobbed hair.

Ferndale police also arrested Dotson in 1993 after finding him in an alley behind a woman’s store with three lingerie-clad mannequins. He also has similar convictions in Detroit and suburban Oak Park.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 14:16 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.