While slurping my first cup of coffee this morning, I happened across an article about the ice fishing tournament on Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin. Now personally, I think people who wander out on a frozen lake, drill a hole through said frozen lake, and then sit there for hours fishing in such conditions are probably as near insane as one can get and still stay out of the loony bin. I prefer my fishing in warm tropical settings, in shorts and flip-flops.
Anyway, apparently parking was an issue here, so despite the warnings of the event organizers, about 100 people drove out on the ice, and treated it like a parking lot.
You’d think none of these people ever watched Ice Road Truckers. Or had the sense of the fish they were their to catch. Take 100 SUV’s, park them in a few hundred square feet on a sheet of ice, and physics takes over. Some 38 of them sank into the lake, more than a few of them completely submerged and completely totalled. How do you explain that to your insurance company? Do you need flood insurance?
I suppose that if the cars had been spaced well apart, it might have worked, but from the pictures I saw in the video, these guys parked door to door and bumper to bumper. I thought Midwesterner’s were supposed to be full of common sense? Maybe it skipped Wisconsin this year? I mean, c’mon – look who they elected for Governor.
Stupid things that people do don’t always result in just embarrassment or damage to property. It can result in serious death or injury to innocent people. This past Easter Sunday in Pierce County, Georgia, some irresponsible adult let two 7-year old boys take off down a public road on an adult-sized 4-wheeler. Of course, pulling out of a driveway, they got smacked by a car, resulting in the death of one of the boys, and the hospitalization of the other.
Some people have absolutely no sense of consequence. 
Anyone who has spent anytime browsing You Tube and watching videos of airplanes taking off, knows that the airport on Sint Maarten Island in the Caribbean is literally right on the beach. In fact, there is a section of the beach where the tail of an airplane about to takeoff literally hangs over the fence on the beach. Watching this video, you’ll see that instead of doing what any normal, prudent human being with the least knowledge of what a jet engine might do to you would do (i.e. get the heck out-of-the-way), these people run to get behind the jet and cling to the fence like it was some amusement park ride and they couldn’t wait to spend their ticket.
Unfortunately, as you can see, most of the people are unable to cling to the fence and are blown off, one by one. Duh! I wonder how many teeth the girl has left after she was face planted into a concrete barrier? I wonder what thoughts of consequence were going through her head as she ran to cling to the fence? Did she expect a mild breeze? Did she expect to be blown into the water? Did she give any thought at all to the fact that she would lose complete control over her body in the face of tornado like winds?
There is actually a whole website devoted to the stupid acts of people which result in the sudden removal of their genes from the world gene pool. Reading through their site, you’ll see the story of a group of ghost-hunters visiting the site of an 1891 train wreck that killed a few dozen people. Standing on the train tracks, with cameras at hand, a sizeable group of these ghost-hunters were waiting for the ghost-train to appear, when right on schedule, along comes a real train. One man was killed.
My momma taught me as a very young child not to stand around on railroad tracks. Or maybe it was something I just figured out for myself while sitting in a car and watching one of these gazillion ton monsters lumber down the track. Whichever method, it worked, and to this day I don’t think you could get me to stand for long on a train trestle just to see what happens.
Or, this video of an angry man in a motorized wheel chair who just misses his elevator. Using his chair as a battering ram, he takes a quick trip down the empty elevator shaft. I’d be annoyed too if I had to spend much of my life in a wheelchair, but I’m not sure that I would abandon all common sense.
I suppose I should just quietly giggle to myself and let the acts of truly stupid people pass by without remark. Most of the time I’m unaffected and unharmed, but it just galls me that some people can grow to adulthood and still be so darn stupid.