What goes on in some heads?

It seems that every person I know has a degree of stupidity associated with them, its part of the baggage we carry with us because of the fact we have a functioning brain that allows us the option of choice, instead of being prisoners of instinct. Its a human trait, while stupidity is easy to recognize in others, it is often difficult to see in ourselves. Maybe we have some kind of a built in filter that diminishes our ability to reason logically when we proceed to do something that advances our self interest or satisfies our wants. Some develop the ability to understand this as we grow older and put decisions to the test, but a surprisingly number never progress past the impulses of an 8 year old to stuff our mouths full of candy at every opportunity.

But there is a solution available and it is centered in looking beyond the immediate desire for instant gratification in our lives and taking just a moment to peer down the road a piece. I have been thinking about this I heard the story of Esau and Jacob extended beyond the trading of a birthright for some stew. If you think about like this, for the instant gratification of a meal Esau gave away his future. The decisions we make that center on self gratification while individually are not as serious as this one single event, collectively are just as damning. Let me present some evidence. Morgan Spurlock dined at McDonald's restaurants three times per day, eating every item on the chain's menu. He also always "super-sized" his meal if given the option—but only if it was offered. Spurlock consumed an average of 5,000 calories per day during the experiment. As a result, the then-32-year-old Spurlock gained 24½ lbs. (11.1 kg), a 13% body mass increase, a cholesterol level of 230, and experienced mood swings and fat accumulation to his liver.

Now is there anyone who doesn't understand that if you treat yourself in a way that leads to high blood pressure, a likely onset of diabetes, clogged arteries and obesity that you are likely condeming yourself to an earlier death, a sedentary lifestyle and debillitating health issues that are going to effect your happiness. If you become addicted to drugs the result will be a lack of success in life, dysfunctional relationships and the scorn of society of a whole.

But the biggest danger comes from simply not acknowledging that success and happiness in life comes from living right and listening to that little voice within us that is constantly trying to steer us towards the decisions that we already know in our heart are right, all we need to do is take the time to listen.

I have collected a few stories, some from my own life as well as a few others that were nothing short of stupidity, some had minor impacts, others severe, but all demonstrating stupidity or folly.

Years ago when I was playing ball around Battleford I needed a new glove. I ran into a guy I slightly knew (his last name was Lundrigan) and he had one I wanted for sale. So we agreed on a price of $10.00. I gave him a check and went on my way, the glove worked great and we were both happy, but apparently he wanted more happiness, so he came up with a sure fire plan to increase his personal net worth.

At months end when I got my bank statement sure enough there was the cancelled check for the $10, but wait whats this, there are two more cheques, one for $15.00 and another for $25.00 that I hadn't written. So I call the Bank, and bring in the two bogus cheques, it wasn't hard to verify it was not my signature seeing as how my name was spelled wrong and wasn't even close to my hand writing. But now, how do we figure out who perpetrated the crime, well he left a clue, the plan involved making the two additional cheques payable to himself. In those days you got imprinted cheques for your account, but you could also go into the bank and get blank counter cheques onto which you could write the account number and thats what he did. I guess that he reasoned that if asked for identification when he tried to cash the cheques he could show that indeed he was the bona fide and authorized recipient of the cash. And just like how a criminal develops a modus operandi this guy had one to, he cashed all three cheques at the same place a few days apart

So armed with this information it wasn't to difficult in a small place to locate the guilty party, especially when the clerk had indeed written down the # of the drivers license of the person cashing the cheque, one ******* Lundrigan.

As I pondered all of this as it unfolded I couldn't help but think, did he actually think he was going to get away with it, probably he did, and the world is full of things gone wrong

Last week there was a news item. Man mauled by tiger may lose arm. Now if this was in India or the jungles of Sumatra or any other place where these man eaters roamed you could understand how this could come about. Guy working in his field, hungry tiger creeping through the tall grass until he gets close enough to pounce on the guy, happens all the time in the jungle. But this chewing of a mans arm takes place in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, a long way from the steamy natural habitat of ferocious orange felines. So here is what happens. Two guys break into the Calgary zoo in the middle of the night and scale a couple of fences around the tiger compound until they can get face to face with the beast. One guy shoves his hand through the wire mesh and tries to scratch the tiger. Surprise, Tony looks at the arm as if it was sugar frosted flakes and turns tiger on the guy. Now this is a foolish act by these guys but what amazes me even more is the official police statement issued later that day.

"The Calgary police are now investigating to determine if any alcohol was involved" duh, even an idiot like me can figure the answer to that one out in about one half a second. But stupidity with tigers is not confined to places like Calgary.

A guy in India was mauled to death by two tigers who also ripped off his left arm as his wife and sons watched.

Digital camera in hand, he sneaked past the first barrier where his wife and their two school-going sons stood with a relative and other visitors crowding Assam State Zoo. He wanted a close shot of a tigress sunning herself.

He reached the tigers’ enclosure a metre away and then made the second, fatal, mistake of stretching his hands holding the camera through the iron railings. A second tiger that he hadn’t seen lurking near the enclosure wall directly below him, grabbed his left arm. In no time, the other tiger joined the attack, sinking its teeth into his arm and clawing his face.Visitors raised an alarm and a zoo-keeper rushed to try and beat back the tigers with a stick. But they let go only when the guys arm was ripped off from the shoulder. “Although one tiger slackened the grip when the zoo keeper intervened, The other did not budge and got away with the hand,” The poor guy was rushed to a Hospital where he was declared dead on arrival. His wife was hysterical. “Oh, God… this is unbelievable,” she screamed, I would have thought she would have cried out "This was predictable, what did she think was going to happen . Back at the zoo, visitors were treated to the sight of a tiger pacing around the enclosure with the severed arm in its mouth, which it later ate. In a wisdom of the ages statement a zoo veterinarian observed tigers can be “very aggressive” . Another visitor to the zoo said that he had learnt a lesson today: “Never try to fool around with a tiger.”

Here is another accident waiting to happen. can anyone believe that a rational thinking human being is going to let a 7 year old boy play with a 20 foot pet python.

Owners of dogs that kill people always say the same thing. " Gee he never killed anyone before" who would have ever thought that an animal like a Pit bull, Rottweiller, Presario or Mastiff, dogs bred for aggression would do a thing like that.

There is an old limerick that goes like this,

There once was a lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
At the end of the ride
With the lady inside
The smiles on the face of the tiger.

May I offer the following:
A young boy once played with a snake.
His mother was known as a flake
The python did squeeze
The boy cried "By jeez"
I think someones made a mistake.

I have done some very stupid things in my life that seemed pretty rational when I did them but now that I have a few years under my belt I have to wonder what I was thinking. Fortunately none of them turned out to be fatal.

When I was 5 and 6 and living on the Suffield Airforce base at Ralston in Southern Alberta one of the great pastimes for me and my friends was hunting for rattlesnakes. We scoured the prairie around the base with sticks as our weapon of choice, we had two prime hunting spots. Walking through the thick grass that grew in the ditches because we knew the snakes liked to crawl out onto the pavement to warm up early in the morning and the best spot of all, the local dump. What could go wrong here! Funny thing no ones mother seemed to be worried as we set off armed with words of warning " be careful, if you see one, don't get to close. Hmmm.

We were never to worried about them until one day when we had a substitute teacher who decided to take our Grade 1 class on a field trip across the prairie. All went well until my group of experienced snake hunters found a rattler moving through the grass, our excited shouts brought the pack of about 25 kids running to get a look. The snake did a very snakelike thing, curling up and shaking its tail at the crew surrounding it, at which time things kind of went berserk. Its amazing the effect that a womans high pitched scream of absolute terror has on a crowd of 6 year olds. Suddenly in 25 minds sights of coiled snakes striking out from every bush and clump of grass became a reality and we became a mass of hysterical humanity each trying to work their way to the center of the mob for protection. What a sight we must have been, moving as one all within a 5 foot circle wailing away and making our way across the prairie back to the safety of the schoolyard. True this was a young substitute teacher but surely she must have known this was rattlesnake country and out on the praitie was their favourits place..

My friends and I at about the age of 9 or 10 took up catching and raising pigeons. I had a big box, I put it up on stilts to raise it about 3 feet of the ground as a place for them to nest. Now all I needed was some pigeons so We set off down to Glenmore Dam where pigeons nested in crevices of rocks on the side of a cliff below the dam. Below is a picture, if you went further down the river the cliffs get severe and the rocks extend down to the water. We could see where there was a pigeons nest about 40 feet up the side of the cliff so I decided the only thing to do was to become a rock climber and scale the wall. It was quite a challenge but by taking my time with my face pressed to the wall I found toe and finger holds to inch my way up to the nest. And wow I hit the jackpot so I collected a couple of the baby pigeons and solved the problem of getting thm down by stuffing them inside my shirt which was tucked into my pants. It was about then I realized I had a worse problem, going up wasn't bad because I could look upwards and find cracks to fit my fingers in to keep myself attached to the wall, but descending, no such luck. When you are on a vertical wall you can't get far enough away from the rock to look down, so what to do. Fortunately I had my buddies with me who called up telling me where to move my feet and fingers to reach a hold and slowly I inched my way down. Maybe thats why I am still afraid of heights when I am in a building.

You can't see very well but the railing on the top of the dam is actually a concrete wall about a foot wide. We used to prove our manhood to one another by walking along the rail. I figured that if I fell I would just go into the water and I was a good swimmer. I only came close to drowning a couple of times at the dam and the worst was almost drowning in of all things "shit", pigeon shit that is. If you look at the picture you can see that above the arches there are spaces. Where the arch meets the cement column the center of the column is actually hollow and there is a room with a small doorway leading into each one. We could see there were always pigeons flying in and out of these columns so an idea and a plan hatched. If an group of enterprising boys made a raft so they could float to the base of the arches on the upstream side of the dam and if they cut some long poles that could be used like a ladder it might be possible to get up into those rooms and catch some pigeons. Well it worked and guess who scaled the pole off the raft and was the first to arrive at the mother lode of pigeonville, me, and I couldn't believe what I saw, all kinds of nests. The only problem was they were about 5 feet below the bottom of the entranceway so without thinking the whole thing through I jumped down. The second my feet reached the level of the nests I knew I had a problem because they didn't stop, they kept right on going until I found myself up to my armpits in pigeon shit. Who would have ever thought that could happen. Remember in the old westerns movies when that happened how the hero would push out a stick or a rope and make the rescue. Well I can tell you there was some pretty serious praying going on for Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy to show up, but the best I could hope for were my partners in crime Bryce Saucier and Richard Creelman. It took quite a bit of shouting to explain my predicament and a whole lot more before one of them could bring themselves to leave the safety of the raft and scale the pole to the top of the arch. What a performance, they had to pull the pole up behind them and stick it through the doorway to try and reach me. The pole was so long and the roof of the arch was so short it couldn't be placed straight enough down so Icould reach it, it was way over in a corner But at least now there was hope. I had been struggling in the shit and finally worked myself so I was laying on top of it and with my body weight spread out I didn't sink anymore. But another problem arose. If you lie down try and roll over when you don't have anything solid to press down on with your hands and feet its hard to move. But I found that if I worked my hands and arms into the crap I could get enough resistance to roll over, all I can say is that the experience of being facedown in a room full of shit is exactly what it sounds like. But a happy conclusion was the result as I got to the pole, wrapped myself around it and hanging like some kind of nightmarish looking and evil smelling sloth pulled myself up to the doorway. The worst part in my mind was that I didn't get any pigeons, it was just another day at the office for a 10 year old boy growing up along the edge of Glenmore dam.

About a mile down stream from the dam is the Calgary Golf and Country club, one of my favorite haunts, tobogganing in winter and fishing and caddying in the summer. But it was quite a hike for legs that are only a couple of feet long. One bright winters day my buddies and I decided it was time for a tobogganing adventure so we hiked across the dam and along the far side to the huge hill at the golf course. Losing track of time we tobogganed away until someone noticed it was pretty late in the day so we struck off home. Realizing it was quite a hike home we looked around for a shortcut. Well there it was right in front of us, we would simply cross the river so we set out, problem was although the water was only about three feet deep the current was pretty strong especially when you are tied to a toboggan and a couple of us fell over and submerged, me being one of them. Its funny we never thought much past getting to the other side and never pondered the deeper issues like, how you would feel being soaking wet head to toe in the middle of winter. Fortunately we were a resourceful crew and someone had matches. Being a group who all belonged to the boy scouts we soon had a roaring blaze going. It would have been quite a sight to an observer, a bunch of 10 year olds stark naked hundled around a bonfire with their clothes hanging from improvised drying racks consisting of tree branches and dead trees. It probably would have worked better had we not been in such a hurry but the constant checking by fishing a piece of clothing off a rack with a stick to see if it was dry yet led to far to many instances of someones pants or coat ending up in the blaze which caused a panic to get it out before it was completely consumed. Eventually we were able to get dressed and aside from the crematorium like smell coming from us my only casualty was my parka which now only had one arm connected and a distinct burn pattern on the back. can't remember the result when I got home but I think it was something like, "Did you have a nice day tobogganing", my mother knew that she had raised a survivor. If any of my grandchildren ever read this, here is my message, "You're not allowed to try this".

But not thinking straight is not restricted to just tiger lovers and 10 year old boys, occaisionally even adults of the feminine gender have adventures that don't fit into the category known as "good judgement". Sometimes things that seemed like an Ok idea just don't work out.

A lady thought it would be a good idea to fake her death to find out what the reaction would be by her family. As they gathered around her coffin she suddenly sat upright and said "what the hell is going on" her daughter immediately had a heart attack and dropped dead.

A lady called the poison control center and was quite upset, she had caught her daughter eating ants. The person at the center explained she had nothing to worry about, that ants were not harmful and there was no need to be worried or take her daughter to a hospital. She calmed right down and as the conversation continued she mentioned she had given her daughter some ant poison to kill the ants. I think you had better get her into the emergency room immediately she was told.

Funny but it makes you think that these things were done by ordinary people and sometimes people don't think about what they say.

Mariah Carey said: Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.

Brooke Shields observed: Smoking kills - and if you're killed you've lost a very important part of your life.

Sometimes profound and enlightening thought comes from unexpected sources as highlighted when President Bill Clinton said: If we don't succeed we run the risk of failure. And Philadelphia Phillie Manager Danny Ozark pointed out "Half this game is 90% mental". But do either of those match the astuteness of Washington Mayor Marion Barry who observed: Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Kind of makes you want to pick up stakes and move to that paradise Washington DC.
As I was crying and my mother was applying antiseptic ointment to my face I was thinking " I'll bet if I hadn't poked that stick in the hornets nest this wouldn't have happened.

I'm no slouch in the reasoning department. But I have to admit the time I stuck my hand into the fan of a tractor to tighten a bolt I should have known it would have been a good idea to shut the engine off first. And to anyone who doesn't know this, if you stand on a red hot piece of steel with your rubber boots on, it will start on fire and is real hard to put out. Something else, you won't need shoes on that foot for a while because with the size of the blisters that develop, you can't get them on.

I hope someone is paying attention, if you come across a first aid kit with smelling salts in it, don't be tempted to try them out. In case you don't know what smelling salts are they something that is used to bring a person out of an unconscious state. They are made up of a compond called "ammonium carbonate" which kind of short circuits the brain. Another feeling that came close to describing the effect smelling salts have on you was the time I was in the laundry room sitting on a wet floor and I wondered what would happen if I poked a bobby pin into an electrical socket. Anyway I had the unfortunate experience of finding a vial of smelling salts in a First Aid kit my father had brought home when he was in the Air Force. I held it to my nose and took a sniff, nothing. It had been wrapped in a piece of paper, and sure enough there were the instructions. Break the vial in half they said, and place under the nose of the unconscious person. So I thought maybe I'll give this a try, but I was cautious, I broke it and held it quite a ways from my nose and sniffed, nothing, closer, this is nothing I thought so I pushed it under my nostrils and took a deep breath, bad idea, no, worse than bad, in fact probably the worst idea of my life. Bottom line is this don't ever try it the other thing that came close was peeing on an electric fence.

When I got a job playing hockey in Watrous I was around the rink a lot and got to be friends with some of the trades people who were working there. One day the electrician came in with a big tall stepladder to replace the light sockets in the 12 foot high ceiling with flourescent lighting. I noticed he never bothered to shut off the power. I asked about this and he went to great lengths to explain to me how electricity worked and it was perfectly safe so long as you didn't touch the hot wires with something that was a conductor. As he was taking down one of the sockets and the wires were hanging down he came down from the ladder to get a new flourescent light, when he climbed back up the ladder he went to high and the two dangling wires made contact with the top of his head. As he lay on the floor with smoke coming from his hair I couldn't help but think "should have turned off the power".

Around the same time a guy was cutting some two by fours when suddenly the power went out. He couldn't figure out what happened because the breaker was still on. One of the other guys on the crew came over and picked up the cord leading to the saw. "You stupid dummy" he said look what you did, you cut right through the power cord. He picked up the cord that was still plugged in the wall and we all had a good laugh at the dummies expense. the guy holding the cord then proceeded to absently mindedly touch the end of his thumb to the two wires at the end of the cord. It was hilarious as the contact was made and blackened the end of his thumb, everyone thought it was funny how the flesh burned, except him that is.

One of my first jobs was working in a plant that manufactured travel trailers and as part of my introduction to the job I had to go through a training session. One of the girls who worked in the plant was assigned to show me the proper use of an air powered nail gun. She was demonstrating how to use it on an angle to toe nail in two pieces of wood together. Problem was, one of the pieces of wood she chose had a knot where she wanted to nail. When the gun went off the nail deflected off the knot and drove a 2 1/2 inch coated nail into her finger entering right at the end and going straight up into her knuckle. It sounds kind of funny after the fact but at the time it was pretty shocking to see her running around in circles and screaming and crying at the top of her lungs. You would have thought after all the years at the plant she would have known better. But sometimes just like the electrician on the ladder you have lapses of judgement.

Later at the same plant after I had been there for about 4 months I was using a big table saw. I had to change the measurement between the blade and the guide so I shut the saw off. It was big blade so it took a few minutes to stop and I was in a hurry, so I got a bright idea, I would push my thumb against the side of the saw blade and the pressure would slow it down. Lo and behold it was working, but not fast enough, so I increased the pressure, bingo one second there I was with my plan working and the next I was holding my hand with the end of my middle finger on my left hand cut off. What was I thinking?

My brother Malcolm was working as a carpenter and standing on a ladder was nailing facia board around the preimeter of a house, a helper was carrying boards up the ladder and handing them to him. Malcolm had the nail gun hanging at his side when the guy got to close and tripped the trigger with his shoulder. the gun went off and drove a 3" spike deep into his shoulder bone. The guy was in terrible pain so Malcolm rushed him to the nearest hospital. The doctors took him into the operating room to try and remove the nail and patch him up. After about 20 minutes or so he was summoned up to a nursing station where one of the operating room doctors was waiting. Tell me, he asked, "would you happen to have a nail puller in your truck we can't get a firm enough grip on the nail to get it out". So Malcolm headed out to the truck and brought back one of those goose neck nail pullers which did the trick just fine.

Some stupid things can be expected from the young, its not really stupidity just inexperience but as we get older you would think that rational, logical thought would take over. You might think that, but life doesn't work that way and I am a prime example of an adult idiot. For some reason I can hardly bring myself to read instructions, instead relying upon an inborn ability to just know how to do things or ask someone.

When we first moved to PEI something went wrong with our Admiral automatic washing machine, nothing would happen when you tried to turn it on. How complicated can a washing machine be I thought, I can fix this. Now some people with less talent at mechanical things might have started by looking the machine over for obvious and SIMPLE things that could have caused the washer to cease functioning, but not Jim Kinnee. A few hours later as it lay in pieces scattered across the garage floor I noticed a loose wire at the back of the timer which was real easy to fix. But to re assemble the mess on the floor was out of the question as, first, I didn't have a diagram of where the pieces went, second, I had lost some of the pieces, third, I hadn't laid them out in a logical manner that would give me a guide to re assembly and fourth and the clincher, I had applied the Kinnee principle of "don't use force get a bigger hammer" with predictable results.

So what could I do but fall back on what countless millions of my male cronies aroud the world have done for thousands of years. It goes like this and some of you will understand immediately. "Honey" I said "it was broke worse than I thought" no one could have fixed it, I'm afraid we'll have to get another one". Stubbornness is not always a good attribute to have.

Enter the 1978 White Gremlin car with the problem with the clutch. "Take it to the garage" Sharon said " "you don't know anything about cars" and off to the garage it might have gone if it hadn't been the end of the statement " you don't know anything about cars". "Can't be that
difficult I thought, I'll show her". Did you know that its impossible to put a clutch in a Gremlin unless you cut a big hole in the floor of the car. And if you cover the hole with the carpet no one would even know it was there. The job went fairly smoothly and only took about 2 days. But alas, after tightening the last bolt and cleaning up, what would I discover but a couple of substantial looking parts that I had put on my workbench to ensure they weren't lost. Well my objective was met, there they were, but the question remained, "where should they have been after the job was done." and the right answer I'm afraid was , not on the bench. So I pondered the problem and decided that maybe the parts weren't essential after all and started the car up. It moved but there was a problem with the shifter they obviously had something to do with allowing the gears to merge easily, but if you pushed hard it would work. My logic on the Gremiln matter was this, if I put it back together and didn't see where the missing pieces go, who is to to say if I spent another day taking it apart that when I put it back together it would be any different. So here is the solution, "Sharon, it works fine again, but it will be a litle bit stiff to shift for a for a while because of the new pieces" and as with most things in life once you get used to something thats how it should be.

On Jan 1, 1964 at about 12:25 am I made a stupid decision that almost cost me my life. Lets head up to Paynton some one said, they are on slow time so we can make it and bring in New Years again. "Great idea" some of us said, lets go. The problem was that Paynton was 30 miles away and we had to get our coats on and drive across town before we got to the hiway which was only going to leave about 20 minutes to go 30 miles, get out of the car and into the dance hall. What could go wrong, well, a head on collision at 110 mph, a 20 year old boy in a coma from which he woke up from only to finally die from his injuries, a girl whose life was destroyed as her face was ripped off as she went through a window and myself so traumatized that it was 15 years before I could bring myself to get into a vehicle if someone else was driving. Don't you think some one would have said, wait a minute, the roads are icy, its to far, lets forget about gratifying ourselves by trying to do what is foolish and impossible and stay put. The right decision would have been so easy to make.

One of the problems with making poor decisions is that they tend to become habit forming. Some decisions can have instant consequences but for the most part they linger around and it takes years before the true impact of stupidity becomes evident. The most relevant example and the most widespread in early life is not developing good study and work habits in school. Even at an early age most kids have some kind of an understanding that success in life has some connection to how well we do in school. But just like Esau most trade the possibility of a bright and prosperous future away for the immediate gratification of having a good time now.

For older teens and young adults irresponsible behaviour associated with dating and forming the right relationships jeopardize the future of settling down to a stable and fruitful marriage. And for the middle aged the inability to accommodate the needs and desires of their partners leads to the astounding amount of marriage breakdown we see in todays society. And the common thread no matter what the age is that deep inside everyone recognizes the difference between when they are doing right and when they are doing wrong but can't help ourselves. Its the age old struggle between the here and now and the satisfying of the desires of our inner man in the present, or taking the longer road and building towards the future which always seems so far away.

If you want to argue against that, go ahead, but hear what King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived had to say. "Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth"

"Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man . For God shall bring every work into judgement with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil."

Its hard to believe life can be that easy.