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October 15th, 2001 - Lawsuits Reach New Lows Everyone knows that the best job you can get in America right now, besides unemployment, is being a dumbass. Getting drunk and driving your car into a lake can make you a millionaire. First you sue the bar for getting you drunk, then you sue the car manufacturer for not making cars that turn into boats, and while you're sinking to the bottom, I'm pretty sure Red Lobster is financially responsible if any fish make scary faces at you. Lawsuits are what we invented as a society to make sure our idiots had money. Non-idiots generally don't object, because they know that if they ever can't find work, they can always make a good living getting hit by buses and eating contaminated cheeseburgers. But there's been a lawsuit revolution going on in the past couple months. People have stopped suing for their own failed suicide attempts, and are starting to file lawsuits based on something more lovable: insanity.
Reason for Lawsuit: Attached to delicious leg. Seeking: Compensation for missing, delicious leg. The sport of attacking humans is sweeping the shark nation, and the Bahamas is no exception. Outside a resort there, a vacationing man was swimming in the ocean when a shark decided he would be swimming... in terror. Using jaws refined by history to be the perfect leg removers, it ate most of one of his legs and swam back into mystery. But what was a nightmare for one leg soon became a nightmare for several other people's whole bodies' bank accounts. The half-eaten man started consulting with Johnny Cochran, the same lawyer who kept the blood-soaked OJ Simpson from going to jail for those two people he murdered. With Cochran's help, the vacationer decided that nature's savage fury was just its way of telling him that the nearby resort should give him lots and lots of free money. First he complained that the two lifeguards didn't save his life fast enough, and lingered on the beach during the attack. This is a valid complaint, unless you know what a shark is. You can't fight a shark away from a chunk of human meat with a boogie board and a smile. This was indisputably proven by the two marine biologists, Dr. Shredded Beef and Captain Dumbest Man Alive. I'm somewhat of an expert on lifeguarding. I've seen several commercials for Baywatch, and over a hundred Baywatch-like layouts in pornographic magazines. Not once have I heard of lifeguards being trained to fight sharks. Sending two unarmed lifeguards out against a three ton fish monster would be like your fries launching themselves at your face to save their cheeseburger friend. It would be like a fireman trying to headbutt out a man covered in napalm. Sure it's brave, but a brave napalm-covered shark-bite victim is scraped up with the exact same shovel as a pussy napalm-covered shark-bite victim. Honestly, once a shark decides to bite you and you're armed with a speedo, your only hope is peeing on yourself enough that you're not appetizing anymore.
Shark television shows didn't prepare him. Even though they're full of testimonials from mostly-eaten people and have actual footage of people getting torn apart, every shark show spends 80 percent of the time telling us how uncommon shark attacks are. Then they'll tell us how beautiful and endangered they are right before the show cuts back to a shot of their seventh layer of teeth gnawing through a camera man's arm. So you can see how they're sending a mixed message. The litigant is also planning on suing the resort for not making it clear that sharks existed and contrary to what he'd read in Dumbfuck Monthly, actually live in the ocean. Like maybe there should have been a presentation in the hotel convention hall about what lives in the water and post signs indicating the chance that some of them want to eat you. And they might as well include a puppet show about putting on diapers and describing what types of sand isn't okay to jam in your ass, because they're clearly talking to people so stupid they'll lower the intelligence of any animal that devours them. If resorts were really interested in safety, they would equip swimmers with costumes to disguise them as giant bottles of bleach, hypodermic needles, or anything else a shark might not want to eat. For budget resorts, maybe they could just provide t-shirts that say "I AM NOT A SEAL" in several dialects of shark. The resort in question provided none of these simple devices, and this negligence will probably cost them millions more in court. Maybe billions more if Johnny Cochran raises the issue that the resort did not even employ even one burrito-launching UFO to keep the nearby ocean's carnivores from ever getting hungry. The wife of the man told one reporter, "We haven't decided how much we're suing for yet, because we haven't decided how distraught he'll be. Right now he's just happy to be alive." That's right. They're sitting around and waiting for him to get depressed before they decide how much free money they need to cheer him up. If Cochran was smart, he'd sit by his hospital bed and call him fat all day. You'll see him on the news saying, "I'm... *sniff*... seeking two million dollars for emotional damages. Wait. Johnny Cochran said my shirt looks gay. Six million. He also added that I'm a big dumbass. Twenty million. Further monetary calculations will be impossible since my left leg was where I usually kept my calculator."
Unless he can find the guy who invented sharks, he probably shouldn't get anything for a freak accident. And if somehow the resort is found responsible using the upside down dislogic of the antimatter universe of Kwaad, they shouldn't award him much more than the cost of a new prosthetic leg. That's about fifty to a few thousand dollars plus two or three more dollars for decorative prosthetic leg dinosaur stickers. He could go ahead and get a mutli-million dollar roboleg that shoots lasers and rockets if he can find one, but he better know that we'll expect him to fight crime with it. The only people that really owe him anything are marine biologists. They're constantly spending money and losing parts of their bodies to learn little details about sharks. They'll send a team of highly paid scientists out to follow sharks with clipboards and mark down every time one farts. They'll go through an insanely dangerous procedure to trap a shark, cut it open with a box knife, and stuff it full of tracking devices to see exactly how depth and location affect the great prehistoric predator's farting. "My god. This data shows that farting increases inversely with depth. And preliminary tests show that when you're trying to cut open a shark to jam a tracking device in his bowels, he totally wants to kill you. And now I must depart! What science chooses to do with my discovery is up to them! Whoosh!" This vacationer, using only his tasty flesh and no knowledge of marine biology, scientifically discovered one more thing you don't get back after you put it in a shark's mouth: human leg. Whether the lawsuit goes through or not, the research grants from this will have him laughing all the way to the one-legged bank. In the end, though; the only winner in this case is the shark's tummy. On to Part Two -> |
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