Assorted Stupidity #123
- A comedian with no political experience who stars in a sitcom in which he plays someone with no political experience who is elected president of Ukraine was elected president of Ukraine on Sunday. He got 73 percent of the vote, in fact, according to exit polls.
- How do leaders who had popular TV shows but no political experience fare against Vladimir Putin? I guess we'll find out!
- Grease thefts are a "gigantic problem" in this country, according to the lawyer for a company that gets paid to dispose of grease. He was responding to a report that on April 4, police in Annandale, Virginia, caught a guy in the process of stealing hundreds of gallons of the stuff, for which he said he got paid 25 cents a gallon by the head of the grease-stealing ring. (It can apparently be recycled into bio-fuel.) The lawyer told ABC7 News he's "seen several hundred grease thefts" in the northern Virginia area alone, although he probably didn't mean that literally.
- Olivia Jade Gianulli, who is a "product influencer" on Instagram and the daughter of Lori Laughlin, who allegedly paid half a million dollars to make sure her product-influencing daughter could get into USC, had a trademark application rejected last month partly because of improper punctuation. The problem involved those pesky commas and semicolons, according to the examiner. To be fair, Olivia Jade almost certainly didn't do her own work on the trademark application, either.
- Speaking of product influencers, people keep saying that Kim Kardashian is planning on becoming a lawyer, as she told Vogue magazine in a recent interview. She's not going to law school, but says she's doing a four-year apprenticeship with a San Francisco firm, after which she would take the bar in 2022. You don't have to have a law degree to take the California bar, or even a college degree, which is good because she doesn't have one of those either. But almost no one who doesn't have those things passes. Will she be one of the extremely tiny percentage who does? "The reading is what really gets me. It's so time-consuming," she told Vogue, so no.
- Brevard County, Florida, was within an hour of being destroyed by an army of turtles recently, according to the man who claimed to be their leader. Local media reported that the man was arrested a couple of weeks ago for disturbing the peace after citizens called to say he was making threats and yelling obscenities. The man, who called himself "the saint," told citizens and then police that his "turtle army" would "destroy them" within the hour for unspecified transgressions. "Leave now," he told police, "or you will all be sorry you f***ed with the saint!" The turtle army has apparently been delayed, but you can probably expect it about the same time Kim Kardashian passes the California bar.
- As Matt Levine pointed out (writing for Bloomberg, citing this Law360 report), you should not destroy evidence, but if you do, you shouldn't do it in a way that others might find amusing. And if you do destroy evidence in a way that others might find amusing, you shouldn't tell anyone about it. Because they might later testify that you, for example, claimed to have thrown a cellphone off the side of a mountain during a ski trip in order to destroy the evidence it contained, and internet jokesters who find that amusing would make sure others knew about it.
- That was just one of several bizarre revelations during the Insys Therapeutics trial, in which several executives are charged with allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe opioids. (A former VP's appearance in a music video that sales reps made about "getting patients on the highest dose possible" was another one, so that's another lesson right there.) After 10 weeks of testimony, jury deliberations are set to begin Monday.
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