My Offbeat World

This Years Stella Awards

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For those who aren’t aware of what the Stella Awards are about,  they are named after 79-year-old Stella L.

This is the lady who spilled hot coffee on herself and yet she successfully sued 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. You wouldn’t expect to get burned doing that, right!

You got it:  these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. These are the sort of cases and judgements that make you wonder what the hell were they thinking.

So here are the Stella Awards for the past year: 
 
7 th PLACE :

Was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running around inside a furniture store. The store owners were understandably surprised by the verdict, considering the running toddler was her own son! 
  
6 th PLACE :

CT 19, of Los Angeles , California was awarded $74,000 plus medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. He apparently didn’t notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor’s hubcaps!
 
 
5 th PLACE :
 
TD, of Bristol , Pennsylvania , was leaving a house he had just burglarized by way of the garage. Unfortunately for TD, 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 TD pulled it shut. Forced to sit for  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 TD $500,000 for his anguish.
 
Hang in there, it just keeps getting better.

 4th PLACE :
 
JW of Little Rock , Arkansas , 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.

JW did not get as much as he asked for because the jury believed the beagle may have been provoked at the time Williams had climbed over the fence into the yard and repeatedly shot the dog with a pellet gun.
  
3rd PLACE :
 
AC 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?

2 nd PLACE:
 
KW of Claymont , Delaware
KW 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. At the time of the accident KW 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 – plus dental expenses.

And now for the doozy of them all.

1 st PLACE :

This year’s First Place Stella Award goes to Mrs. MG, 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.

Mrs. MG 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.

What is surprising is that the Oklahoma jury awarded her, $1,750,000 PLUS a new motor home. Winnebago actually changed their manuals as a result of this suit, just in case Mrs. MG has any relatives who might also buy a motor home.

I am amazed that these idiots received compensation for their own stupidity and negligence.



 

More Pests Introduced to Australia

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I recently wrote about how the Cane Toad is an introduced species that has taken over the native frog population.

Well the cane toad isn’t the only disastrous error of judgment that has been introduced into Australia. We actually have quite a track record of bad decisions in this area.

Here are some other species that have been introduced with disastrous effect:

Dingo – introduction date unknown – Australia wide – a predatory pack animal

Black rat – 1788 – Coastal Australia -eats eggs and young of native species

Feral goat -1788 – widespread – browses on native plants

Brown rat – 1800’s – coastal Australia – eats eggs and young of native species

Feral cat – 1800’s – Australia wide – predator

Wild horse – 1800’s Northern & cental Australia & Alps – competes for pasture

Feral pig – 1800’s – Eastern & Northern Australia – opportunistic feeder

Water buffalo – 1825 – top end of Australia – destroys wetlands

One humped camel -1840 – Central Australia – eats native plants

Common starling – 1850 – South-eastern Australia -uses nesting sites

Rabbits – 1858 – Australia wide – competes for pasture

Fox – 1860’s – Australia wide – predator

Common mynah – 1862 – pockets on the east coast – uses nesting sites

Donkey – 1866 – Norther and central Australia – browses on native plants

European carp -1908 – South eastern Australia – muddies natural water systems

Cane toad – 1932 Queensland predator of small animals and more

Where Have all the Frogs Gone?

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Face to Face with Frogs by Mark MoffettSounds like the name of a song but it’s quite a serious business in the Northern parts of Australia.

We all reminisce about the many different species of cute frogs that once were found in abundance in this great land of ours, but now many of them have disappeared because of the introduction of the cane toad.

In 1935, in their infinite wisdom, the government of the day introduced 102 the cane toad to combat the grey backed cane beetle and the Frenchie beetle.

The cane toad proved to be ineffective for this task as the cane toads cannot jump very high so were unable to reach the upper stalks of the sugar cane and couldn’t reach the beetles higher up.

There was an insecticide produced 5 years later and the cane toads were left to do what cane toads do best and that was reproduce, within 6 months there were tens of thousands of these pests. They have spread across Queensland and into the Northern Territory and have now been found in Northern New South Wales.

A female cane toad can lay between 8000 and 30000 eggs at a time (anytime). Most native Australian frogs lay between 1000 and 2000 eggs per year. So our native frogs didn’t stand a chance against these ghastly predators.

The cane toad has no known predators and pets are at risk because of the toxins within the skin of the toads.

This is just another example of Governments not undertaking enough research into the kinds of pests they introduce simply to appease one or other vocal lobby groups, in this case the Sugar Industry.