Stella Awards Rival Darwin Awards For Most Primitive Yet SuccessfulLawsuits

Good you proved you know how to spell, now prove that denial is not your
mental state and get help for your sociopathology.

Algomeysa2 wrote:

it's spelled "anguish."

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message
t.cable.rogers.com...

Get some help for your mental anquish sociopath before you hurt yourself.

Algomeysa2 wrote:


No, you're hearing the wind whistling as it goes in your one ear and out

the

other...

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message
.net.cable.rogers.com...


Lighten up, the post was intended for humour; (Do I hear the sound of
german NAZI whipping you like a dog in the background?)

Algomeysa2 wrote:



The point is, all of the ones in your post are fake. That's why they
"sound stupid". Because they...aren't....real.

You could learn a lot from that snopes.com website.

It's an excellent source for debunking internet passarounds.

Also, once you learn to recognize the pattern of urban folklore, you

might


not be so inclined to believe every damn thing you read on the

internet.

Apollo16 "UFOs" which are actually the EVA camera, etc.

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message

. is.net.cable.rogers.com...


Well even if some of them are fake, still doesn't change how stupid

they

sound and as the link says there are many cases which prove real and
equally 'silly'.

Algomeysa2 wrote:




I provided the link.

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

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message

.is.net.cable.rogers.com...

And how would you know this 'brilliant' assessment? Do tell?

Algomeysa2 wrote:




unfortunately, everything listed there is fake:

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

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message

r.is.net.cable.rogers.com..

.

The Court system proves why the human race is doomed:
--
HUMOR MILL NEWS: THE SAD BUT TRUE SIDE OF THE NEWS

Posted By: Nine_Of_Eleven
Date: Sunday, 15 August 2004, 5:24 p.m.

I received this by way of my correspondent in the Great Sacramento
Valley... thanks once again to Liz...

Stella Awards

Once again, it's time to review the winners of the Annual Stella
Awards. The Stella's are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck

who

spilled coffee on herself &successfully sued McDonalds. That case
inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous successful

lawsuits


inthe United States.

6th place

19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles, California, won $74,000
&medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda
Accord. Mr. Truman apparently did not notice there was someone at

the


wheel of the car when he was trying to steal the hubcaps.

5th place

Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he
had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to

get


the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was
malfunctioning. He could not reenter the house because the door
connecting the house &garage locked when he pulled it shut. The

family


were on vacation &Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage

for

8


days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found &a large bag of dry

dog


food. He sued the house owners insurance claiming the situation

caused


him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.

4th place

Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 &
medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next

door

neighbor's Beagle dog. The Beagle was on a chain in its owner's

fenced


yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog
might have been a little provoked at the time, as Mr. Williams who

had


climbed over the fence into the yard, was shooting it repeatedly

with


a



pellet gun.

3rd place

A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500, after she slipped on a soft

drink

&

broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because

Ms.


Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an
argument.

2nd place

Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, sued the owner of a night club
in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to

the

floor &knocked out two of her front teeth. This occurred whilst

Ms.

Walton was trying to crawl through the window in the ladies room

to

avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 &

dental


expenses.

1st place

This year's runaway winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new Winnebago

Motor

Home. On his trip home from an OU football game, having driven

onto

the



freeway,
he set the cruise control at 70 mph &calmly left the
drivers seat to go into the back &make himself a cup of coffee.

Not

surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed & then overturned.

Mr

Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him, by reading the
owner's manual, that he actually could not do this. The jury

awarded

him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago Motor Home. The company

actually

changed their manuals on the basis of this suit just in case there
were any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.

Resistance is Undone,

Nine of Eleven

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin...cgi?read=54087

"Algomeysa2" wrote in
ink.net:

The point is, all of the ones in your post are fake. That's why they
"sound stupid". Because they...aren't....real.

You could learn a lot from that snopes.com website.

It's an excellent source for debunking internet passarounds.

Also, once you learn to recognize the pattern of urban folklore, you
might not be so inclined to believe every damn thing you read on the
internet. Apollo16 "UFOs" which are actually the EVA camera, etc.

Ah but you see... your advice is only useful for a "sane" person. Mad
Scientist is (by his own admission), not sane, but mad. Therefore he does
not learn, and refuses to be educated or to even play by the rules of
debate. He is a second class troll who deserves to be ignored. That's why
you have a killfile.

Thanks for posting the URL to verify that the so-called cases were not
true.
To be honest, they were frivolous enough, crazy enough, to actually
sound real...
However, a quick check of the URL you provided verified their falsity,
but the humor remains!
---Mac
**************************************
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 20:24:32 GMT, "Algomeysa2"
wrote:

unfortunately, everything listed there is fake:
http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp
************************************************** *********************
"Mad Scientist" wrote in message
. net.cable.rogers.com...
The Court system proves why the human race is doomed:
SNIP SNIP

But that's the trap, everyone is pre-disposed to believe that there are
these leeches filing crazy lawsuits and getting filthy rich. So one of
these gets passed around on the internet, and everyone believes it at face
value and passes it on to 10 people with no fact checking.

The urban rumor phenomena is always fascinating. Folklore expert Jan
Brunvand wrote a number of books on the subject, and of course now with
email and the internet it becomes possible for these things to spread at
lightspeed.

But there are those telltale signs. Often a morality tale that's too
convenient (i.e., if you go parking on Lover's Lane, The Maniac With The
Hook Will Get You).

Also, as a general rule, if you're pre-disposed to one political view or
another, you're going to pass on the one that confirms what you already
assume is true. For example, if you're a Bush supporter, and you get
some ranting email passaround of some crazy thing that Kerry did, you then
pass it on to 10 friends (Apolitical statement, the same is true for Kerry
supporters passing around Anti-Bush propaganda). But if you go to
snopes.com and do a search on either "Bush" or "Kerry", you'll see that the
majority of stuff passed on is bogus. But people take it at face value:
"Yeah. That's just the kind of thing I'd EXPECT him to do!"

Also, there's something about Internet passarounds that cause people to
leave their common sense behind ("If you pass this on to 10 people,
Microsoft will give you a thousand dollars!" Well. Why WOULD they
possibly do that?!).
..
Periodically you get one of those "lists of 100 interesting factoids" passed
around in email ("The Madagascar Pigeon can fly 6000 miles without stopping
to ask for directions.") (I jest, but that's the general flavor. But when
someone actually goes through point by point, they generally find the things
are baloney almost down to every single point.

Then there's the commencement speeches or words of wisdom that get
attributed to Kurt Vonnegut or George Carlin. Almost every time, turns out
to be written by someone else. But their names get taked on for
versimilitude, because apparently they're seen as the Sages of our Age.

Versimilitude is a key concept, because often even those internet
passarounds that start with a grain of truth get tweaked in route; someone
rewrites sections of them to be more convincing, but with each rewrite, they
go increasingly into the land of fantasy.

It's a sad fact, but if you get any sort of internet passaround that
purports to be true, and you're gearing up to forward it on to friends....
it's probably a gotcha, too good to be true thing.

But www.snopes.com and www.urbanlegends.com and www.urbanfolklore.com are
great debunking sites.

Meanwhile.....this friend of a friend of mine was at Neiman Marcus and got
dessert in their tearoom and asked for the recipe for the cookies, and was
charged $500! She's getting revenge by passing the recipe around on the
internet free! This really happened!

(There, that was a test. Did warning bells go off? Search any of those
sites for the phrase Neiman Marcus Cookie)





"Mac" wrote in message
...

Thanks for posting the URL to verify that the so-called cases were not
true.
To be honest, they were frivolous enough, crazy enough, to actually
sound real...
However, a quick check of the URL you provided verified their falsity,
but the humor remains!
---Mac
**************************************
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 20:24:32 GMT, "Algomeysa2"
wrote:

unfortunately, everything listed there is fake:
http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp
************************************************** *********************
"Mad Scientist" wrote in message
. net.cable.rogers.com...
The Court system proves why the human race is doomed:
SNIP SNIP

Algomeysa2 wrote:

But that's the trap, everyone is pre-disposed to believe that there are
these leeches filing crazy lawsuits and getting filthy rich. So one of
these gets passed around on the internet, and everyone believes it at face
value and passes it on to 10 people with no fact checking.

The urban rumor phenomena is always fascinating. Folklore expert Jan
Brunvand wrote a number of books on the subject, and of course now with
email and the internet it becomes possible for these things to spread at
lightspeed.

But there are those telltale signs. Often a morality tale that's too
convenient (i.e., if you go parking on Lover's Lane, The Maniac With The
Hook Will Get You).

Also, as a general rule, if you're pre-disposed to one political view or
another, you're going to pass on the one that confirms what you already
assume is true. For example, if you're a Bush supporter, and you get
some ranting email passaround of some crazy thing that Kerry did, you then
pass it on to 10 friends (Apolitical statement, the same is true for Kerry
supporters passing around Anti-Bush propaganda). But if you go to
snopes.com and do a search on either "Bush" or "Kerry", you'll see that the
majority of stuff passed on is bogus. But people take it at face value:
"Yeah. That's just the kind of thing I'd EXPECT him to do!"

Also, there's something about Internet passarounds that cause people to
leave their common sense behind ("If you pass this on to 10 people,
Microsoft will give you a thousand dollars!" Well. Why WOULD they
possibly do that?!).
.
Periodically you get one of those "lists of 100 interesting factoids" passed
around in email ("The Madagascar Pigeon can fly 6000 miles without stopping
to ask for directions.") (I jest, but that's the general flavor. But when
someone actually goes through point by point, they generally find the things
are baloney almost down to every single point.

Then there's the commencement speeches or words of wisdom that get
attributed to Kurt Vonnegut or George Carlin. Almost every time, turns out
to be written by someone else. But their names get taked on for
versimilitude, because apparently they're seen as the Sages of our Age.

Versimilitude is a key concept, because often even those internet
passarounds that start with a grain of truth get tweaked in route; someone
rewrites sections of them to be more convincing, but with each rewrite, they
go increasingly into the land of fantasy.

It's a sad fact, but if you get any sort of internet passaround that
purports to be true, and you're gearing up to forward it on to friends....
it's probably a gotcha, too good to be true thing.

But www.snopes.com and www.urbanlegends.com and www.urbanfolklore.com are
great debunking sites.

Meanwhile.....this friend of a friend of mine was at Neiman Marcus and got
dessert in their tearoom and asked for the recipe for the cookies, and was
charged $500! She's getting revenge by passing the recipe around on the
internet free! This really happened!

(There, that was a test. Did warning bells go off? Search any of those
sites for the phrase Neiman Marcus Cookie)





"Mac" wrote in message
...

Thanks for posting the URL to verify that the so-called cases were not
true.
To be honest, they were frivolous enough, crazy enough, to actually
sound real...
However, a quick check of the URL you provided verified their falsity,
but the humor remains!
---Mac
**************************************
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 20:24:32 GMT, "Algomeysa2"
wrote:


unfortunately, everything listed there is fake:
http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp

************************************************ ***********************

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message
s.net.cable.rogers.com...

The Court system proves why the human race is doomed:

SNIP SNIP


There are cases which prove the court systems are completely screwed.
Take the sister in law of my friend's wife. She has a very good habit
of exposing privates when bending over as she wears no undergarnments.
She does this everywhere she goes, as she is an exhibitionist. Well the
bar/restaurant where she worked had a manager who one day groped her
when she bent over exposing everything to him. I don't know if it was
because she didn't like him or simply was having a bad day, or because
it was in front of everybody but she proceeded to freak out at him in
front of everyone. Now because she had been an employee of that
restaurant for a very long time, she proceeded to sue for false
dismissal. It took 2 years before her case was heard and she won her
claim with the restaurant forced to pay her in excess of 25,000 dollars.
This is in my opinion a very good candidate for the Stella Awards.

No one ever said the human race was perfect! LOL

But the point again is that, the email passing around is full of a half
dozen incidents that are completely bogus, never happened. If there are so
many crazy lawsuits in real life, why doesn't the passaround use real
incidents? Why did they have to invent them?

Similarly, emails that get passed around that have a bunch of "Darwin
Awards" (people who get killed due to their stupid actions) generally turn
out to be, by and large, fake as well.

A good guideline is, if you get an email passaround that makes you just say,
"ooo! That confirms what I've suspected all along! I'm going to pass it on
to other people!", that, by passing it around, makes you feel like you're
striking a blow for the little guy, being an armchair hero, it's probably
bogus.

http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/cookie.asp

A paragraph in the above link from snopes.com from Barbara Mikkelson states
it pretty well:

"As to why this legend has taken on a life of its own despite persistent and
detailed debunkings, it's a classic David and Goliath story. It is, after
all, the little guy smacking the big, heartless corporation a swift one
right across the nose, something both you and I have often longed to do.
This bit of faxlore invites -- nay, demands -- participation. Painless
participation too. One tap of the "Forward" key and someone who always saw
herself as part of The Forces For Good (but who could never find the time to
change the world) gets to enjoy that wonderfully warming self-righteous
feeling that comes from Striking A Blow. All it takes is either a couple of
pins and a bulletin board or e-mail capability and an alias list and your
good deed of the day is done and finished before the morning's first coffee
has cooled.

What's the possible slandering of an innocent company when there's a cheap
'n' easy "warm fuzzy feeling" to be had? Like, would an anonymous,
forwarded-a-million-times e-mail lie to you? "

end quote.

What's interesting about these passarounds is how they're a Meme, a
propigated idea.

In effect, they're like a computer virus for the human brain. You get the
email. It confirms whatever belief you have about society ("Ooo, I could
stamp my little feet, those frivalous lawsuits get me so mad!"), and
then....you post it to a newsgroup, or you Forward it on to all your
friends. In effect, it's behaving much like a computer virus that takes
over your email; it's infected your brain and gotten you to do the dirty
work of propigating it.


"Mad Scientist" wrote in message
et.cable.rogers.com...


Algomeysa2 wrote:

But that's the trap, everyone is pre-disposed to believe that there are
these leeches filing crazy lawsuits and getting filthy rich. So one of
these gets passed around on the internet, and everyone believes it at
face
value and passes it on to 10 people with no fact checking.

The urban rumor phenomena is always fascinating. Folklore expert Jan
Brunvand wrote a number of books on the subject, and of course now with
email and the internet it becomes possible for these things to spread at
lightspeed.

But there are those telltale signs. Often a morality tale that's too
convenient (i.e., if you go parking on Lover's Lane, The Maniac With The
Hook Will Get You).

Also, as a general rule, if you're pre-disposed to one political view or
another, you're going to pass on the one that confirms what you already
assume is true. For example, if you're a Bush supporter, and you get
some ranting email passaround of some crazy thing that Kerry did, you
then
pass it on to 10 friends (Apolitical statement, the same is true for
Kerry
supporters passing around Anti-Bush propaganda). But if you go to
snopes.com and do a search on either "Bush" or "Kerry", you'll see that
the
majority of stuff passed on is bogus. But people take it at face
value:
"Yeah. That's just the kind of thing I'd EXPECT him to do!"

Also, there's something about Internet passarounds that cause people to
leave their common sense behind ("If you pass this on to 10 people,
Microsoft will give you a thousand dollars!" Well. Why WOULD they
possibly do that?!).
.
Periodically you get one of those "lists of 100 interesting factoids"
passed
around in email ("The Madagascar Pigeon can fly 6000 miles without
stopping
to ask for directions.") (I jest, but that's the general flavor. But
when
someone actually goes through point by point, they generally find the
things
are baloney almost down to every single point.

Then there's the commencement speeches or words of wisdom that get
attributed to Kurt Vonnegut or George Carlin. Almost every time, turns
out
to be written by someone else. But their names get taked on for
versimilitude, because apparently they're seen as the Sages of our Age.

Versimilitude is a key concept, because often even those internet
passarounds that start with a grain of truth get tweaked in route;
someone
rewrites sections of them to be more convincing, but with each rewrite,
they
go increasingly into the land of fantasy.

It's a sad fact, but if you get any sort of internet passaround that
purports to be true, and you're gearing up to forward it on to
friends....
it's probably a gotcha, too good to be true thing.

But www.snopes.com and www.urbanlegends.com and www.urbanfolklore.com
are
great debunking sites.

Meanwhile.....this friend of a friend of mine was at Neiman Marcus and
got
dessert in their tearoom and asked for the recipe for the cookies, and
was
charged $500! She's getting revenge by passing the recipe around on
the
internet free! This really happened!

(There, that was a test. Did warning bells go off? Search any of
those
sites for the phrase Neiman Marcus Cookie)





"Mac" wrote in message
...

Thanks for posting the URL to verify that the so-called cases were not
true.
To be honest, they were frivolous enough, crazy enough, to actually
sound real...
However, a quick check of the URL you provided verified their falsity,
but the humor remains!
---Mac
**************************************
On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 20:24:32 GMT, "Algomeysa2"
wrote:


unfortunately, everything listed there is fake:
http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp

************************************************ ***********************

"Mad Scientist" wrote in message

s.net.cable.rogers.com...

The Court system proves why the human race is doomed:

SNIP SNIP


There are cases which prove the court systems are completely screwed.
Take the sister in law of my friend's wife. She has a very good habit
of exposing privates when bending over as she wears no undergarnments.
She does this everywhere she goes, as she is an exhibitionist. Well the
bar/restaurant where she worked had a manager who one day groped her
when she bent over exposing everything to him. I don't know if it was
because she didn't like him or simply was having a bad day, or because
it was in front of everybody but she proceeded to freak out at him in
front of everyone. Now because she had been an employee of that
restaurant for a very long time, she proceeded to sue for false
dismissal. It took 2 years before her case was heard and she won her
claim with the restaurant forced to pay her in excess of 25,000 dollars.
This is in my opinion a very good candidate for the Stella Awards.

No one ever said the human race was perfect! LOL

Mad Scientist:

Mad Scientist wrote:

The Court system proves why the human race is doomed:


[clip]

"1st place

This year's runaway winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new Winnebago Motor
Home. On his trip home from an OU football game, having driven onto the
freeway,
he set the cruise control at 70 mph &calmly left the
drivers seat to go into the back &make himself a cup of coffee. Not
surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed & then overturned. Mr
Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising him, by reading the
owner's manual, that he actually could not do this. The jury awarded
him $1,750,000 plus a new Winnebago Motor Home. The company actually
changed their manuals on the basis of this suit just in case there
were any other complete morons buying their recreation vehicles.

Resistance is Undone,

Nine of Eleven "




Who was the prosecuting attorney in that case? Is that not an instance
of the evil of unmitigated Pragmatism? That attorney is a person to be
avoided.

The principle that the court failed to recognize is that the operation
of a motor vehicle means just that: that the principle doesn't cease to
exist on a whim. The operation is continued. The driver failed to
continue the operation of the entire motor vehicle when he set one
control for the throttle that implicitly is to be used while the
steering and all the other controls for the operation of the motor
vehicle are in continued use. The cruise control setting is contextual
in its proper use, and the context is the continued active human control
of the vehicle at all times.

The attorney should be require to return his fees and the owner the
award to Winnebago on appeal. Idiocy of that type should not despoil the
justice system.

BTW:

What is the name of the movie starring Dan Ackroid in which a Winnebago
RV was adapted with military weapons and used as a spy vehicle in
Eastern Europe? That movie was hilarious.

Ralph Hertle

"Ralph Hertle" wrote in message
...

"1st place

This year's runaway winner was Mr. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma. Mr. Grazinski purchased a brand new Winnebago Motor
Home. On his trip home from an OU football game, having driven onto the
freeway, he set the cruise control at 70 mph &calmly left the

Who was the prosecuting attorney in that case? Is that not an instance
of the evil of unmitigated Pragmatism? That attorney is a person to be
avoided.

Unfortunately, like most Internet pass-arounds concerning supposed real
lawsuits or so-called Darwin awards, this is all urban rumor, complete
invention.

http://www.snopes.com/autos/techno/cruise.asp

Train yourself to be suspicious when you see these kind of things. Turn a
jaundiced eye. Search snopes.com and see if it is an urban rumor. Usually
it'll turn out to be just that... a tall tale, complete invention, and
you're allowing yourself to be sold a bill of goods.