6 People Who Mixed Bad Luck with Stupidity

6 The Rasta Banana Man

Name something more fun than carnival games. Did you say sex? A good meal? Friendship? Well-fitting shorts? Pie? Stop, this is getting stupid. Aside from most things, there's nothing more fun than a carnival game. So it's no surprise that a man whose name is Henry Gribbohm (and not the sound he makes when he gets his own fist jammed in his esophagus while trying to eat Goldfish crackers) was so smitten with the games when the carnies rolled their gypsy fun-wagons into his town.

The game was called Tubs of Fun, and the play involved finding fun in some kind of tub. Henry, seeing that one of the prizes was an Xbox Kinect, knew he was about to play the carnies like a cat plays a fiddle, which is to say all fucky and wrong. He spent $2,600 trying to win that Xbox and came away with nothing but a 3-foot-long Rastafarian banana. Dumbasses the world over heaved a sigh of relief and knew if ever a day came when someone placed a call for King of the Idiots, they were not at the top of the list. And then, as one, they put on their helmets and ran headfirst into a bull's hindquarters.

Gribbohm was pretty confident that he had the game down before he started playing. Unfortunately, $300 into the game he hadn't won, and he suspected something must have been up. So he went home and retrieved his life savings, another $2,300, which he probably kept in a cigar box in the cat box. After losing that sum, he called the police to inform them the game was rigged. Police then had to confirm whether or not Gribbohm feels Tetris is rigged when he loses or if the toilet is rigged when he has diarrhea.

5 Carjacking Pants Dropper

I don't know about you, but every time I steal a car, I make sure I'm in jeggings and I've been drinking a lot of Mountain Dew to keep me spry and limber. That's because I have a passion for my craft. Elijah Freeman, however, got caught up in the glitz and glamour of auto theft and forgot the basic lessons of how to pull off a reasonable crime plus police chase.

After stealing a car at gunpoint, Freeman chose to race right onto someone's lawn, where he got out and made off like a bandit in the night, except this bandit was hobbled by stupidity. And pants.

Freeman's pants had started the evening somewhere below his waistline, as is the fashion among people who don't get why we wear pants. Running from the cops caused them to literally fall to his ankles. When he was arrested (within a few seconds, because catching a dude who's running with pants around his ankles is not hard), his pants had literally fallen completely off. It's entirely possible the proper use of a $5 belt could have seen this man riding off into the sunset to start a beautiful criminal legacy. Ahh, what might have been.

4 Nigerian Love

Ever gotten one of those Nigerian scam emails? I remember being so stoked the first time I got one. I had read, only weeks earlier, Dean Cameron's Nigerian Spam Scam Scam and suddenly my inbox was presenting me with my very own opportunity to become a legend of Internet comedy. This was, of course, many years ago, before I became the legend of Internet comedy I am today and the one I briefly was in 2009 when I tried to restart WebVan.com as a home bourbon and Russian bride delivery service. Long story short, my efforts to scam the scammer with a hilariously crafted email response to their grab for money netted me a response that simply said "fuck you."

Unlike me, Marvin Ray Thomas was all over the Nigerian scam when his Nubian princess Jenni came a-calling and asking if he wouldn't mind setting up a simple yet effective money order scheme to defraud strangers and send the proceeds to her so that she could save up enough to come to America and marry him, her being what was likely an overweight African man named Nigel wearing khakis and a 1999 Atlanta Braves World Series Champs T-shirt. Thomas proceeded to mail fake money orders to people around the U.S. asking them to cash them on behalf of his totally legit business, send the bulk of the money back to him, and keep a little for their trouble. It was the kind of offer no one could resist, unless they had a measureable IQ. Sadly, lots of people fell for it to the tune of more than $20,000, which is a pretty impressive tune. It's not like Neil Sedaka, but easily Jon Secada. Google them, this article's not going anywhere.

The thing about asking people to cash fake money orders is that it's illegal. If there's no money behind that money order, then you're stealing. So police caught on to Thomas' scam and went to his house not once but twice to let him know that this manner of behavior was frowned upon and that Jenni probably had a penis that had no interest in putting a ring on. Despite this, Thomas couldn't see how a total stranger from Africa who was having him commit massive mail fraud could be deceiving him, so he kept doing it until police could facepalm no longer and had to indict him.

3 A Man and His Briefcase

Have you ever been arrested? I have never been charged with anything, although once I was detained after a minor incident involving the excessive consumption of some fun time libations and the alleged hurdling of a fence into a neighbor's yard followed by some urination into the azaleas. As if that's an issue the police have time to address. Did you know we have counterfeit pants being sold on street corners? Priorities, people.

It's worth noting that, if you ever are arrested, there are some rules you want to follow to make the process go smoothly. Not the official rules, like your rights or any of that crap. I mean the unwritten rules of a run-in with law enforcement. For instance, a big unwritten rule of being arrested is to never tell the arresting officer how you're innocent and he can call his mom for your alibi since you spent all night poking her in the chops. Another solid rule is that, in the process of being charged with one crime, try not to admit to any crimes the police aren't aware of, and especially don't actually commit another crime while in custody.

Jeffrey John Pollock was not aware of the rules of being arrested when his ex called police to get him out of her house. Pollock tried to defend himself by saying he wasn't committing a crime, he lived in the house. The responding officer, as luck would have it, had responded to a call a few months earlier and had actually helped Pollock move. Oops.

Resigned to his fate, Pollock asked for a favor before he was taken to prison. He had brought a briefcase with him and wanted to make sure he had it when he left, as it was pretty important. It was full of cash, and lord knows you don't want to leave your briefcase of cash laying around. The police asked Pollock if they could look at his briefcase full of cash, and he said no. Then they asked again later, and he said yes. So they did. And it was full of cash. And the cannabis. Which netted him a possession charge, plus a charge of introduction of marijuana to a detention facility, which is actually a thing. Oops.

2 Lion Girl

Ninety percent of all disastrous stories based in a zoo have one common element between them beyond the zoo itself -- a complete idiot. Idiots love zoos; they're like beacons sending out subsonic derp vibrations that only people who taste test chicken that's been on the counter all day can detect. They pack up their meds and some cargo shorts and head to the zoo and maybe eat a hotdog and then think, "I'm really in tune with nature. I'm going to climb this fence and try to ride that wolf." At the same time, that wolf is thinking, "Fuck, again?" Then the story plays out precisely in the way you'd expect.

In this particular case, 18-year-old Lauren Fagen loved lions. Go on, finish the story in your head, because you're almost guaranteed to get the majority of the details right. Raised on lead paint chips and thin oxygen, Lauren was at a wildlife rehab facility in South Africa (not quite a zoo, but the idea is the same) where she had told people she felt an affinity with big cats and really wanted to hug one. This is much like my affinity for fire and my desire to mouth love it that I overcame one Fourth of July in a moment that isn't worth relating to you here but taught me a valuable lesson about life and lip skin.

Fagen was attempting to kiss a male lion through a cage when the lion itself realized it needed to help cleanse the gene pool for the sake of future generations and did its best to maul her, resulting in some deep flesh wounds from fangs and claws across her legs and feet.

1 The Last Horseman

The headline of the news article I'm linking here is "Man Charged Again With Having Sex With Horse." It's a busy headline with a lot of powerful imagery. If headlines were vacuous, self-involved reality stars, this headline would easily be a Kardashian, possibly even a Trump. The source of its power, its radioactive spider bite, if you will, is the word "again." Rarely will an adverb be the most powerful word in a sentence, but here it is king. On the left you have Bill, a man who is charged with having sex with a horse. On your right is Bob, a man who is charged again with having sex with a horse. Bill, you might be interested in this, as Bob is constantly porking horses. He's like some kind of equine Wilt Chamberlain.

Never should the day arrive in your life when a news story about you focuses exclusively on your barnyard sexual proclivities and how you're at it again. It means you've gone astray in a most terrible way in life and now you're a hilarious repetitious punchline, like when Peter Griffin fights that damn chicken. Or, in this case, bends it over and makes sour, repulsive barnyard love to it.

In 2012, Cirilo Castillo was arrested for trying to make a woman out of a neighbor's horse. He was released from jail in April of 2013, and the owners of the horse put up a security camera because they were pretty confident Castillo would be coming back to horse around some more. The sheriff was quoted as saying the neighbors were getting "sick and tired" of Castillo and that he would continue to do it if no one stopped it. Those few tidbits indicate pretty clearly that, despite being arrested only once before, it was pretty obvious that Castillo was always humping this horse. Like a dog that shits on your lawn every day, this guy must have been chasing down Appaloosa poontang all the time to get to the point where neighbors would have to describe it as something they're sick and tired of. It happens once, you're appalled. Twice, you're disgusted. Fifteen times, it's like a guy who revs the engine of his crappy '87 Chevy in the driveway for no reason while blasting Journey songs.

So basically this story is about a man who continually humps one horse and everyone in the neighborhood, including the police, knows about it. And he was arrested again. And hopefully somewhere, right now, Bon Jovi is writing a song about this. A mournful, twangy hit.