One of my favourite comedians is Lewis Black. In one of his shows he mentions that the dumbest thing he’s every heard was some strange girl at the International House of Pancakes telling her friend “If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.”
Yeah, that’s what I said. I have a story like that as well.
One evening I was at a casual dinner party at a friend’s house. One of the other guests was a young fellow who took endless pleasure in bragging about how hard he could “party”. You know the sort.
During the course of the evening he let rip with this little nugget:
“I won’t give money to the Salvation Army. I saw this documentary about how they are sending troops to Ivory Coast to support the rebels in the civil war.”
I’ll give you a moment to roll that around in your head for a bit.
Ready? Okay.
In the interests of promoting reader interaction, I invite you all to tell us the story of the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard.
And… go!
Is there a hierarchy of dumb? I can’t tell anymore because dumb seems to be oozing out of everything and all dumb is equal to me these days so I can’t give you an actual DUMBEST EVER. But here’s two dumbs anyhow:
ReplyDelete1. In a comment thread over at RealClimate, relating to something Stephen Hawking said about positive warming feedbacks, M.M commented: “Relying on Hawking for your climate information is like getting your dentist to do brain surgery.”
I collapsed into a garbling heap under the dumb weight and nonchalant hubris of that statement and might never have recovered but for Gavin’s (a climate scientist and much, much tougher and cleverer than me) response: “Actually it's more like getting a brain surgeon to floss your teeth.”
2. “Australia grows Canola, Soya, Wheat and Sugar Cane & Beet; ‘We’ can grow MORE of these if needed, but there should be more to agronomical effort NOW than ‘food’, NOW the future for agronomy is FUEL.”[sic]
- I call this person the Lone Deranger, because if you call him by name he will track you down and his MO is: Pounce, and pelt with infinite reams of gobbledygook until death do us part.
I suspect that he is an alien invader who mainlines diesel for dessert, which is why he doesn’t mind all earth’s future agriculture turning to biofuels.