Really Stupid People ========================= - Police in Wichita, Kansas, arrested a 22-year-old man at an airport hotel after he tried to pass two (counterfeit) $16 bills. - A man in Johannesberg, South Africa, shot his 49-year-old friend in the face, seriously wounding him, while the two practiced shooting beer cans off each other's head. - A company trying to continue its five-year perfect safety record showed its workers a film aimed at encouraging the use of safety goggles on the job. According to Industrial Machinery News, the film's depiction of gory industrial accidents was so graphic that twenty-five workers suffered minor injuries in their rush to leave the screening room. Thirteen others fainted, and one man required seven stitches after he cut his head falling off a chair while watching the film. - The Chico, California, City Council enacted a ban on nuclear weapons, setting a $500 fine for anyone detonating one within city limits. - A bus carrying five passengers was hit by a car in St. Louis, but by the time police arrived on the scene, fourteen pedestrians had boarded the bus and had begun to complain of whiplash injuries and back pain. - Swedish business consultant Ulf af Trolle labored 13 years on a book about Swedish economic solutions. He took the 250-page manuscript to be copied, only to have it reduced to 50,000 strips of paper in seconds when a worker confused the copier with the shredder. - A convict broke out of jail in Washington D.C., then a few days later accompanied his girlfriend to her trial for robbery. At lunch, he went out for a sandwich. She needed to see him, and thus had him paged. Police officers recognized his name and arrested him as he returned to the courthouse in a car he had stolen over the lunch hour. - Police in Radnor, Pennsylvania, interrogated a suspect by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message "He's lying" was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the suspect wasn't telling the truth. Believing the "lie detector" was working, the suspect confessed. - When two service station attendants in Ionia, Michigan, refused to hand over the cash to an intoxicated robber, the man threatened to call the police. They still refused, so the robber called the police and was arrested. - A Los Angeles man who later said he was "tired of walking," stole a steamroller and led police on a 5 mph chase until an officer stepped aboard and brought the vehicle to a stop. -- Police in Key West, Fla., arrested college student Jason Maloney in October as he was reveling with friends at the Mardi-Gras-like Fantasy Festival and decided to enjoy some marijuana in back of a building. They did not realize that the building was police department headquarters and that they were standing very, very close to the building's air-conditioner intake. Officers decided to take a look outside when the room began to smell like marijuana. -- Jose Sanchez, 31, of Camden, N.J., was arrested in November and charged with burglary for allegedly looting the Hill-Rom Corp. in Pennsauken, N.J. The burglar had stuck a piece of paper in the doorway to keep the door from closing and forgot to retrieve it before leaving. The piece of paper was a recent traffic ticket issued to Sanchez, with his name and address on it. -- Leroy Evans, 24, was charged with attempting to rob the Southshore DoNut Shop in New Orleans in October. Evans had apparently not been listening to comedians' jokes lately and so for some reason did not expect there to be a police officer on break inside. Officer Freeman Spears, in uniform, was one of only two customers in the shop when the gun-wielding, stocking-masked Evans burst in at 12:45 a.m. Spears shot Evans twice, sending him to the hospital. -- David Leon Phillips, 24, and three other men were charged in Tullahoma, Tenn., in October with attempting to pass a counterfeit $10 bill at a Krystal restaurant. Several other counterfeit bills were found in their car. Police said the work was of such poor quality that they doubted the U.S. Secret Service, which has jurisdiction over counterfeiting, would even bother to investigate. Not only had the bills been run off on an ordinary copier rather than a laser printer, but all the bills were in black and white. -- Ronnie Wade Cater, 39, was arrested in Hampton, Va., in October and charged with calling in a bomb threat. According to detectives, he was sitting at a bar, drunk, and had the idea to call police about an alleged bomb at another bar, hoping to divert enough officers to that bar so that he might drive home undetected. However, probably because he had been drinking, he lingered on the phone a little too long while talking to the dispatcher about the bomb, and the call was traced.