The World According to "Aaarrgh!"

Here’s a supposedly true e-mail I received that is totally false. 

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  It’s time again for the annual ‘Stella Awards’! For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 79-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald’s in New Mexico where she purchased the coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right?

That’s right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head. So keep your head scratcher handy.

Here are the Stella’s for the past year :

7TH PLACE:

Kathleen Robertson of Austin , Texas was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son.

6TH PLACE :

Carl Truman, 19, of Los Angeles , California won $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbor ran over h is hand with a Honda Accord. Truman apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor’s hubcaps.

Go ahead, grab your head scratcher.

5TH PLACE :

Terrence Dickson, of Bristol , Pennsylvania , was leaving a house he had just burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for Dickson, the automatic garage door opener malfunctioned and he could not get the garage door to open. Worse, he couldn’t re-enter the house because the door connecting the garage to the house locked when Dickson pulled it shut. Forced to sit for eight, count ‘em, EIGHT , days on a case of  Pepsi and a large bag of dry dog food, he sued the homeowner’s insurance company claiming undue mental anguish. Amazingly, the jury said the insurance company must pay Dickson $500,000 for his anguish. We should all have this kind of anguish.

Keep scratching.. There are more…

4th place

Jerry Williams, of Little Rock , Arkansas , garnered 4th Place in the Stella’s when he was awarded $14,500 plus medical expenses after being bitten on the butt by his next door neighbor’s beagle – even though the beagle was on a chain in its owner’s fenced yard. Williams did not get as much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle might have been provoked at the time of the butt bite because Williams had climbed over the fence into the yard and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun.

Grrrrr. Scratch, scratch.

3RD PLACE :

Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania: a jury ordered a Philadelphia restaurant to pay her $113,500 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her tailbone. The reason the soft drink was on the floor – Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument. Whatever happened to people being responsible for their own actions?

Scratch, scratch, scratch. Hang in there; there are only two more Stellas to go…

2ND PLACE :

Kara Walton, of Claymont , Delaware sued the owner of a night club in a nearby city because she fell from the bathroom window to the floor, knocking out her two front teeth. Even though Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the ladies room window to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge, the jury said the night club had to pay her $12,000 – oh, yeah, plus dental expenses. Go figure.

1ST PLACE May I have a fanfare played on 50 kazoos please?)

This year’s runaway First Place Stella Award winner

was Mrs. Merv Grazinski, of Oklahoma City , Oklahoma , who purchased a new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, from an OU football game, having driven on to the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver’s seat to go to the back of the Winnebago to make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the motor home left the freeway, crashed and overturned.. Also not surprisingly, Mrs. Grazinski sued Winnebago for not putting in the owner’s manual that she couldn’t actually leave the driver’s seat while the cruise control was set. The Oklahoma jury awarded her, are you sitting down, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just  who might also buy a motor home.

Are we, as a society, getting more stupid?

Ya think??!?

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Here’s what Snope’s has to say—

http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp

Having been to law school, I agree with Snopes.  I also find it interesting that there is a group here in Oklahoma pushing tort reform, and the #1 on the list happens to be from Oklahoma.  Imagine that!

Geez!  How ridiculously hypersensitive are we?  A bar owner posts a sign saying “No Colors Allowed”, referring to gang colors, and it is taken to be racist.  We need to take a collective chill pill….

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/244/story/898519.html?storylink=omni_popular

I received this in an e-mail over the weekend.  Snopes says that it is true with a minor variation. 

 http://www.snopes.com/crime/cops/judd.asp

I smell a part for Brian Dennehy!

POLK  COUNTY FLORIDA SHERIFF GRADY JUDD

An illegal alien in  Polk  County  Florida who got pulled over in a routine
traffic stop ended up ‘executing’ the deputy who stopped him.
The deputy was shot eight times, including once behind his right ear at
close range. Another deputy was wounded and a police dog killed.
A state wide manhunt ensued.

The murderer
was found hiding in a wooded area with his gun.
After he shot at them, SWAT team officers open fired and hit the guy 68 times.

Now here’s the kicker:

Naturally, the liberal media went nuts and asked why they shot the
poor undocumented immigrant 68 times.

Sheriff Grady Judd told the  Orlando Sentinel:
Talk about an all-time classic answer.
‘Because that’s all the ammunition we had.’

Since it is hurricane season, and I am fascinated by hurricanes, I like to peruse the National Hurricane Center’s website.  Here is an interesting article that I found about the improvement in detecting short-lived tropical storms.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090811_tropical.html

What does it all mean?  What it means is that the argument that an increase in hurricane activity is indicative of global warming is suspect, at best.  Since it has been only recently that the technology has been available to detect short-duration tropical storms, then it is reasonable to conclude that many short-duration storms in years past were never detected and therefore never counted.  Thus, because these storms were not counted, the number of recorded storms in years past is lower.  In other words, since technology has allowed us to detect more storms, then it is logical that the number of storms will increase.  So, the reason why there are more storms now than in years past is that we have better technology to identify storms, not because of global warming.

I did get a chuckle how the whole global warming malarkey is still bought into.  Even though the “More Storms = Global Warming” theory has been debunked, global warming still affects the strength and destructiveness of hurricanes, or so the article says.  Of course, that whole argument is questionable as well.  If they couldn’t detect storms accurately in years past, could they really detect wind speed accurately?  You can’t say that comparing the present to the past is invalid for the number of hurricanes, but not for strength.  Also, did any of the global warming people ever think that the reason why hurricanes have gotten more destructive over the years is because more people live in hurricane prone areas than did in the past?  Look at Florida, for instance.  Florida used to be an unpopulated swamp.  Not any more.  If the demographics of the past existed today, would hurricanes still be so destructive?