5 Famous People Who Were The Worst Neighbors Ever
As everyone who has ever lived within close proximity of another human being knows, neighbors suck. That's why as soon as rich people come into money, they try to move into a place where they won't have to deal with abusive slumlords or cunning laundry room highwaymen.
But here's the truth: When you're rich, you trade crazy neighbors for crazy rich neighbors -- including some you might have seen on TV. Here are the celebrity equivalents of that dick from 5B who gets off on vacuuming his house at 3:34 a.m.
Mark Zuckerberg And Taylor Swift Buy Beachfront Properties, Ruin The Beach For Everyone Else
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may not be rich enough to buy the ocean itself yet, but he can do the best next thing: block other people from so much as looking at it. For probably their whole lives, the residents of Kilauea, Kauai had enjoyed the beautiful view and refreshing breeze of their local public beach, until Zuckerberg showed up and erected a six-foot wall that blocks both those things (unless you're a giant, anyway).
What regular mortals see.
Zuckerberg seemed to show no regard for his neighbors' quality of life, or for the amount of "Facebook wall" puns that would be unleashed by local news stations. To further complicate matters, it turns out that some of those neighbors might be legally entitled to traverse the big chunk of Hawaii that Zuckerberg walled up. See, about eight acres within his 700-acre property are technically "ancestral lands" that have belonged to various families for centuries. This year, Zuck's lawyers attempted to identify the 300 or so people who might have ownership of slices of that scattered acreage ... by suing them. It turns out that this isn't the best way to endear yourself to the local population, so Zuckerberg has dropped the suits as he brainstorms some other Mr. Burns scheme.
Equally obnoxious is the way Taylor Swift is handling the privacy of her Rhode Island beach home:
The beach adjacent to T-Swizzle's house was public, but she found a convenient loophole to make it not so. She built a wall around her property as close to the shoreline as she legally could, rendering the beach totally unusable during high tide and royally pissing off local surfers.
Naturally, this made her neighbors quite upset, too. Luckily for Swift, a local court has ruled that the beach can be completely private, which means that neighbors can't even mope in front of her anymore. We have to wonder how many songs she'll write about hurting their feelings on her next album.
Pablo Escobar's Hippos Are Rapidly Multiplying And Taking Over The Colombian Countryside
After his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar left behind a legacy built almost entirely out of cocaine, which has been fairly well-documented on Netflix by this point. Except for one important aspect, that is. What Narcos has inexplicably brushed right over is the hippopotamus epidemic that Escobar kicked off.
We almost wish we were making this up. A drug lord with a herd of hippos is something that would sound a little bizarre on an episode of Archer, but it's become reality for the Colombian countryside. In 2007, when Escobar's corpse had long crumbled into suspicious white powder, a bunch of rural residents began to call in reports of weird animals popping up out of their rivers. Sure enough, it was a bunch of Peter Potamus lookalikes.
While putting together his private zoo, Escobar had imported a single male hippopotamus and three females, which is more hippos than many actual zoos will carry. After Escobar's death, many of his pets were shipped off to other parts of the world, but the Colombian government sort of forgot about the hippos and let them fuck around in Escobar's former territory. And fuck around they did. It seems the guy hippo managed to impregnate all of his roommates, and then those babies eventually started getting it on with the other resulting hippos. So not only are the hippos breeding -- they're inbreeding.
In case you're not familiar with how the hippopotamus behaves in the wild, they're dangerous as all hell. They're happy to kill people if you get too close to their water. And now, a bunch of rural Colombians are dealing with 4,000-pound toothy inbred maniacs coming up to their villages in increasing numbers, all thanks to a long-dead drug lord. It's basically a South American sequel to The Hills Have Eyes. Seriously Netflix, get on this, or we'll have to.
Vanilla Ice's Exotic Pets Bust Loose And Roamed The Neighborhood For Two Weeks
Pro jet-ski racer and one-time rapper Vanilla Ice has been keeping things pretty low key since getting out of the music industry, living a quiet life down in Florida. Of course, this is Florida, where a "quiet life" sometimes involves keeping a zoo in your backyard.
That's Ice with Bucky Buckaroo, his pet wallaroo (what happens when a wallaby and kangaroo get drunk and try to find out if their parts fit). Unfortunately, it appears that Bucky wasn't entirely content living within the confines of the Ice residence -- in 2004, the wallaroo and a goat named Pancho found a way to open a gate that had accidentally been left unlocked and made a run for it. Reportedly, the pair roamed the local streets for two weeks, no doubt having several buddy cop movies' worth of adventures. The locals were probably just relieved that they weren't alligators.
It was only after Bucky kicked and scratched a woman's car that the community had enough and animal control was called in. Any relief Ice might have felt upon learning that his pals had been located was short-lived, since the authorities also discovered that his permits to keep a kangaroo-wallaby hybrid in his property had expired. Luckily, this was still Florida, where such permits are apparently more common than drivers' licenses, so a friendly animal breeder kept Ice's pets for him while he paid his fines. (No word on what the resulting kangoataroo looked like, or what stupid name Ice give it.)
The Clooneys Turned A Quiet English Village Into A Construction Zone
George Clooney is known to be a bit of a prankster, so his neighbors are probably already on high alert just because. Still, they probably didn't see it coming when internationally acclaimed barrister Amal Clooney and her actor husband decided to begin turning their property in Berkshire, England into a veritable demolition derby:
That doesn't look like a multimillion-dollar estate -- that looks like a junkyard in Van Nuys. You'd think at $15 million, you'd be able to buy something a little more turnkey, but it seems like George and Amal didn't exactly think their dream home was dreamy enough. Among other upgrades, they were looking to add a new swimming pool, tennis courts (plural), and a home cinema, presumably to rewatch Batman & Robin with the splendor it deserves. Apparently, those weren't boxes that the realtor was able to check off in that price range.
With all that construction came a lot of nonsense for the people who paid a lot of money specifically so they didn't have to live in a noisy neighborhood. Traffic was backed up, dirt was being flung everywhere, and it probably looked like something out of a bad indie French film.
Unlike everyone else in this article, however, it seems the Clooneys did feel pretty bad about it. They handed out little "We're Sorry" gift packages to neighbors they knew had been impacted by the mess. And by "little," we mean "Compensation Valued At 45,000 British Pounds," including a 30,000-pound lump sum, a trip to the Greek island of Corfu, and a six-week stay at a luxury hotel. Shit, George Clooney can come break up our home any time he wants. (In any sense.)
Fox News's Roger Ailes Takes Over A Tiny Upstate New York Town
Around ten years ago, recently deceased Fox News founder/man accused of sexual harassing women all the live-long day Roger Ailes casually took a trip north of New York City to a small town called Garrison, only to discover that he'd found his new home. But in order to really make it home, he had to turn the whole town into a paranoid hellscape like the one raging inside his mind at all times.
First, Ailes quickly decided he needed to buy up all the properties surrounding his new house so that he could have a Soviet Union-style property buffer zone.
He didn't mean for the vegetation to die and the animals to ooze black liquid from their eyes, but it was a welcome development.
On top of that, Ailes put together an underground bunker filled with approximately six months' worth of survival rations -- you know, just in case some Kenyan Muslim got elected president or something. Further terrified that "liberal New Yorkers" might get to him or his family somehow, he got the family a German Shepherd that went everywhere with them and was trained to patrol the grounds before Ailes got out of the car upon arriving home. However, what good is a bloodthirsty dog if it can't also bring you a truly fair and balanced newspaper?
And so, in addition to hand-picking his own Republican candidates to run for local office, Ailes went and bought up two of the three newspapers in the county and installed his own editorial staff.
The biggest key piece of that was the hiring of Joe Lindsley, a young and upstart conservative writer, as their editor in chief of The Putnam County News & Recorder. The relationship was going great there (Lindsley was attacking Obama and quoting Ayn Rand in editorials), but circulation was down. Small-town shop owners didn't want to carry Ailes' particular brand of scorched-earth jackassery in their stores.
Ailes, ever the cool-headed thinker, believed that his staff was secretly plotting a betrayal of him, and started using Fox News security to track them and spy on them all throughout town. Lindsley didn't take long to see what was happening and call it quits, because nobody needs that kind of shit when your readership just wants to read about the goddamn apple festival or whatever.
Isaac has a deep-seated suspicion of his neighbors because of the movie Edward Scissorhands. Follow him on Twitter.
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