A Canadian Driver's Amazing Excuse for Speeding: He was Trying to Dry His Car

     In June of this year, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer  stopped an unnamed 67-year-old motorist who was doing 180 kph (111.85 mph) on Highway 22 just south of Black Diamond, Alberta, Canada.  Just when the Mountie had thought he'd heard all the excuses for speeding, this man offered a new one.

     The motorist had just washed his car and, by speeding, he was hoping to dry it more quickly.  The judge didn't buy his excuse, fined the driver C$800 (US$783), and suspended his licence for 45 days.  With $783, he could have bought a few dozen hair dryers and done the job more quickly.

     Now, could someone explain to us where the Mountie got a horse fast enough to catch a driver who was doing almost 112 miles per hour?

Excuses to Justify Confiscating a Farming Community on Behalf of Rich Investors

     In Taiwan, the “greater good” appears to be good enough an excuse for government to take someone's land.  Strangely enough, the term greater good is defined by a crowd that in most countries is not particularly noted for its goodness: politicians and bureaucrats.

     Just such a case is the seizure of a farming community in Dapu Borough, Miaoli County, Taiwan. 

     For the past two years, the county has battled protesters and local residents who don’t want to see their homes demolished and their land and livelihoods taken away from them.  Even if they're fairly compensated for their homes and land, compensation for the loss of their livelihoods doesn't seem to enter the thinking of government kleptocrats.  To hear Miaoli County politicians tell it, though, all the residents of Dapu are delighted with the prospect of losing their land, homes, and livelihood.  After all, the construction project will be “beneficial to” all those people who are being removed.

     Their excuses are risible enough to quote in full.

     Jhunan Township Council Speaker Lin Shu-wen said, “I was born and raised in Dapu, my family’s house was among those being expropriated and I am fully supportive of the project because [drum roll, please] it’s going to bring prosperity to the community.  As much as 98% of landowners representing more than 900 households in the area have all agreed to the project.  Why would they support it if it’s bad?”  (Answer: Through clever rigging of statistics.  We’ll get to that one in a moment.)

     Dapu Borough Warden Cheng Wen-chen added that all the local residents—bar none—are “celebrating” the project and that only outsiders are opposing it.

     Protestor Yeh Hsiu-tao says that the opposite is true—that every member of his organization is a native of Miaoli County if not Dapu, and the same can be said of the members of the Youth Alliance.

     So how can both sides be factually correct?  Answer: Well planned and executed excuses!  Factual correctness isn't necessarily the same thing as truth.

     According to Yeh, “All of us received official letters from the county government some years ago asking us to provide our agreement [to the project] by a certain date; otherwise we could lose our right to receive compensation.”  In simple language, that’s, “We’ll take your home and land anyway.  If you don’t sign a document agreeing to support the confiscation of your home and land, we’ll take it without paying you a dime for it.” 

     Don Vito Corleone was never that cynical in “making someone an offer he couldn't refuse.”   Additionally, when Don Vito Corleone “made someone an offer he couldn't refuse,” he never tried to pass off his victim’s acquiescence as enthusiastic support.

     In case you’re wondering how a construction project was approved for a community zoned for farming, one of the government ringleaders of the project offered the straw man excuse, “We changed the land classification from ‘for farming’ to ‘for construction’ as early as 1979, so it has nothing to do with the high-speed rail project.” 

     Wait a minute.  The families of politicians with callous-free hands and clean fingernails were awash in cheap farmland, and those same government leaders used the power of their offices to rezone the land to something more profitable?  Was that how Liu Cheng-hung was able to repay a NT$50 million (US$1.6 million) debt within a year of taking office as county commissioner?

     According to the Taipei Times, Liu's sudden financial windfall was not because he “was involved in corruption.”  He had a good excuse for that one: “He said he was able to clear his debts by selling land owned by his family.”  Hmm.  Was he referring to land he’d used the power of his office to rezone, thereby increasing its “prosperity” generating potential?  Just how does he define corruption?

     And what will happen to Dapu farming community residents who, for several generations, had actually been using their farmland to eke out a living as farmers?  Even if they’re compensated for the loss of their homes and land, who is going to compensate them for the loss of their livelihoods? 

Italian Demagogue Offers Poor Excuse for Racist Slur

     Cecile Kyenge is Italy's first national government minister who is black, and it seems that much of Italy is passing through a a phase a bit reminiscent of the United States during the mid-1950's.  Kyenge was born in the Congo and moved to Italy 30 years ago.  A key Italian politician has called her a "dirty black monkey," and another big wig said she looks like an orangutan.  Another said that Kyenge wanted to "force tribal conditions" on Italy and create a "bongo bongo" government, adding that "Africa has not produced great genes."  At a recent rally, someone threw a banana at her.

     More recently, a deputy mayor named Cristiano (yes, the name means Christian) Za Garibaldi said that he was "unlikely to meet her" because he doesn't "hang out at night on the Retilineo di Ceriale," a road noted for prostitutes, many of whom were black.   Za Garibaldi hasn't explained how he came by this bit of trivia about the street in question.

     Now for the excuse: Za Garibaldi admitted that the remark was "in bad taste and offensive," but then he gave the excuse that he was under stress from having to pay Italy's high taxes.  If stress does that sort of thing to him, we can take some consolation that he's not a New York City cab driver.  (To see the cab driver story and read the cabby's excuse, click here.)

     

New York City Cabby Offers Compelling Excuse for Running over a Bicyclist

     What do you do when a bicyclist pounds on your taxi and yells at you?  If you're Mohammed Faysal Himon, you put the pedal to the metal and run over her, chopping off her leg in the process.  After all, it was New York City, and Himon was a cab driver.  The district attorney is investigating the incident, and city authorities are reportedly "taking steps to suspend Himon's licence."  Note the word suspend rather than revoke.

     Himon offered the excuse that driving a New York City cab is too stressful.  "I need a more suitable job," he said.

     If he's really looking for a job more suitable for his talents, we suggest that he apply for a job as an interviewer on a Fox television talk show.  Bill O'Reilly gets paid $20 million a year for running people down with far less finesse than Mohammed Faysal Himon displayed.

  If Himon has a minimum of English language ability and can affect a suitable air of haughtiness, he can get rich just by screaming accusing questions at people and then scream louder to keep his victim from answering the questions.  To make it more interesting, he could conduct so-called interviews from behind the steering wheel of a cab.

Film Director Comes up with Lousy Script to Excuse Indictment Charges

     You would think that an award-winning professional filmmaker would know how to come up with a credible script.  In Taiwan, film director Chang Tso-Chi (张作骥), who had received the award for best cinematography at the 2010 Golden Horse Film Festival, just couldn't come up with believable lines when he was indicted for allegedly raping a screenwriter.  To make matters worse, the more he spoke in his defense, the deeper he dug a hole with his tongue.

     On the night of May 13, he hosted a dinner at the office of his production company but somehow couldn't remember what he was doing that night.  That was a not-so-clever twist on the overworked excuse that he was too drunk to remember what he was doing.  (The last time we heard the amnesia excuse used that poorly was when George H.W. Bush said he couldn't remember where he was and what he was doing when John F. Kennedy was killed.) 

     Oh, and besides, he’d had a bad back during that particular night and was “almost incapable of having sexual intercourse,” suggesting that he almost couldn't have raped her.  (It’s nice to know that you don’t have to rub alcohol on your back to relieve back pain.  It can also be taken internally.)

     By 2:00 AM, guests were leaving a drunken female scriptwriter with Chang.  When just the two of them remained at the office, the indictment indicates that Chang undertook to use his production company as a reproduction company.  We won’t describe what the indictment said happened over the next few minutes.  Like Alfred Hitchcock, we’ll draw the camera back from the scene of the alleged attack and leave the rest to your imagination.

     Afterwards, the scriptwriter reported the incident to the police, who took her statement and other evidence.  Prosecutors claim that the DNA she provided matched Chang’s.  Since science requires that we keep an open mind, we have to entertain the possibility that two people can have matching DNA. 

     Marcus Tullius Cicero famously wrote, “When you have no defense, abuse your accuser.”  That’s what Chang did, albeit very poorly.   He claimed that the scriptwriter was “out of her mind,” as if a victim’s sanity, or lack of it, had any bearing on his innocence.  Chang didn’t say whether the DNA specialists were also out of their minds.

     Here’s where Chang started digging a deeper hole with his tongue.  To prove that the screenwriter was out of her mind, Chang produced a smart phone containing a video showing that, around 1:00 AM, the woman was crying and pleading with guests not to leave.  In light of what happened after 2:00 AM, it’s hard to see how the video could have helped Chang.

     To make matters worse for Chang’s defense, prosecutors say that the video shows that Chang appeared sober.  Otherwise, prosecutors would have had no evidence as to whether Chang had been as drunk as he had seemed to suggest.  So much for the shopworn defense, “I was drunk and didn't know what I was doing.”

     According to background info provided by a Taipei Times news article, Chang had been an assistant director until 1993, when he started his own production company.  In 2010, he received the Golden Horse Award for Cinematography.  The title of the movie, ironically, was When Love Comes (当爱来的时候).
     Social responsibility requires that we make a public service announcement.  First, to men: When a woman says, "Oh, I'm so-oo drunk," it's not a mating call.  Women: If you have been drinking too much, try to avoid showing it; for crying out loud, avoid making sounds that wolves may interpret as mating calls, and try to have a designated driver for a getaway car.

Taiwan's Prince of Poor Excuses Does It Again

     When Wu Den-yih was premier of Taiwan, he was an ever flowing fountain of poor excuses and other stupid remarks.  We suspect that the only reason President Ma Ying-jieo (whom the European journal Economist called "the bumbler") kept him on the job was that Wu may have been the only nationally known politician in Taiwan who, by comparison, could make President Ma look intelligent.

     Let's cut to the excuses.

   Recently, Vice President Wu's grandson had a reserved flight and an effectively invalid passport.  The law says you can't leave the country if your passport is less than six months from expiration.

     We're sure you all know what usually happens in a case like that: The snot-nosed kid has to stay home until his parents can update his passport; then he's allowed to leave.

    That's what happened to Mills's son Enoch a few years ago.  It was an emergency, they quickly reserved tickets, Enoch's passport was set to expire soon, and the airline wouldn't issue a boarding pass—don't forget that part: "wouldn't issue a boarding pass"—for Enoch.  Some airline employees were kind enough to babysit Enoch until his mother could arrive to pick him up.  In the hour or so that he had to wait to get picked up, no one—repeat: No one—said anything about renewing his passport on the spot.  Of course, if he had been the grandson of a vice president, it may have been another matter.

     For the grandson in question, 150 passengers were delayed eleven minutes while paper pushers for the Bureau of Consular Affairs did the necessary paperwork for the hidalgo.  (That's a Spanish word that seems to fit this situation.  It's a shortened form of hijo de algo, meaning "son of something."  A hidalgo is considered special only because of his relationship to someone who is considered special.)

     In making his excuses, Wu Den-yih resorted to the straw man argument—a distraction from the real issue.  That is, he denied something that no one had ever alleged.  He said, "My daughter (the kid's mother) did not call me from the airport, and my grandson's passport did not have his grandfather's name on it.  There was no so-called privileged treatment involved in the incident."  

     Think on that one for a moment.  If Hunter Biden came sashaying into an airport with his daughter Naomi wiping her nose, do you really think that airport officials wouldn't have a clue that the kid was U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's grandbrat?  Consider as well, that there's rarely any sense of modesty among high muckamucks or their close relatives in Taiwan.  Most of them parade about like Oriental potentates.  You can hardly help but know that they're hidalgos.   
     According to a Taipei Times article, the web site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the airport says that (quoting the article), "It does not accept any passport applications, visa applications or examinations of paperwork from Taiwanese at its airport counters." 
     Thus, Wu's excuse was a stupid excuse for two reasons: It was obviously false, and it was easy to disprove.
      A spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs added an eye-rolling excuse to the mix.  He said that a passport application service has "long been available" at the ministry's two emergency contact centers (not in Enoch's case) in restricted areas of the airport, "access to which is limited to passengers holding boarding passes."  As all of you well know, you don't get a boarding pass unless your paperwork is in order.
     For a string of other stupid excuses by Wu Den-yeh, click here and begin reading about halfway down the page.  He makes another stupid excuse three fourths of the way down the page here.  
     A few months ago, Wu commented on a business practice that may be taking hold in Taiwan.  Instead of involuntary "unpaid leave" being used as a last resort, some businesses have been known to use it as a regular part of profit-making strategy.  Of course, it visits untold hardship on the families of employees who are placed involuntarily without means of income.
     Wu Den-yih publicly joked about it.  He laughed, "Whoever invented [involuntary] unpaid leave should get a Nobel Prize for Economics!"  When a groundswell of protest arose as a result of that callous remark, he stupidly tried to excuse the remark by trying to transfer blame to his offended listeners.  He said they should "get a sense of humor."  Understandably, the complaints grew more insistent, and Vice President Wu did the political thing and "apologized."
     Lesson: Don't tell jokes the one above except at a sociopaths convention.  If you somehow tell a joke that decent people find offensive, don't try to make excuses for it and, for crying out loud, don't scold your listeners for having healthy sensibilities.  Quickly apologize with as much of an air of sincerity as you can manage.

     

A Poor Excuse for Skipping Work, Tokyo Style

     In Tokyo, Japan, on August 19, the Monday morning blues got the best of a 20-something Japanese businesswoman.  According to the Sankei Shimbun (a local newspaper), she tied herself to a chair, faking a burglary, and went back to sleep.  

     The owner of the apartment happened along, found her "unconscious," and called the police.  When the local Columbos arrived, they found it curious that there were no signs of forced entry into the apartment.  Confronted with the evidence of her poor skills at making excuses, the woman fessed up: "I did not want to go to work, so I did it as an excuse for absence without due notice."

     The gumshoes responded to this new wrinkle in their trench coats by issuing her a reprimand, without pressing charges.  We're sure that her employers will charge her with plenty.

     There's little doubt in our minds that this woman is in little danger of suffering from the malady that the Japanese famously call karoshi—death from overwork.  While we admire her desire to avoid work, a basic principle of excuse making is, "An excuse should not require more trouble than the amount of trouble you're trying to avoid by making the excuse."  This woman desperately needs to become a regular reader of World of Excuses.  

     By the way, what did that woman expect to do all day, tied to a chair—watch Doraemon cartoons?

Chinese Zookeeper offers Feeble Excuse for Populating Exotic Wild Animal Enclosures with Household Pets

     African lions aren't supposed to bark, are they?  No, we didn't think so.  Leopards are supposed to look feline, aren't they?  Yes, that's what we thought.  Apparently, a zookeeper in Louhe, in Henan Province, China, had hoped that visitors in this backwater province wouldn't know the difference between a lion and a dog, or between a white fox and a leopard.

     The ruse was discovered when a woman took her young son to the local zoo, and they heard the "lion" barking at them.  Hmm.  That was no lion; it was a Tibetan mastiff.  In another cage, a white fox was labeled as a leopard.  In yet another cage, a dog was said to be a wolf.  (At least that one may have been close, unless the dog was a chihuahua.)  Astonishingly, white rats populated the snake enclosure.  (What was their excuse for that one?  Some attempts at deceptions are so transparent that not even World of Excuses can salvage their credibility.)

     The zookeeper's excuse for the substitutes was as bizarre as the substitutes themselves.  The lion and the leopard had been removed for breeding, he said, and the Tibetan mastiff was placed in the lion's enclosure out of unspecified "safety concerns."  We're still waiting to hear his excuse for having Old Yeller in the wolf enclosure or having Cinderella's coachmen in the snake enclosure.

     One Chinese blogger suggested that the zookeeper should stand in a cage marked, "Gorilla."

     Just for fun, let's test your animal IQ.  Take a look at the following photos to see the supposed African lion, leopard, wolf, and some snakes.  Would you be deceived?  Except for laughs, would you pay the equivalent of US$2.40 to see exhibits as inauthentic as these?

African Lion

Leopard

Wolf

Snakes

     For the CNN report and video on the ill-conceived attempt at deception, click here.

     Passing off household pets as wild exotic animals is minor compared to China's history of passing one thing off as another.

     From 2007 through 2010 (and probably earlier) Chinese toy makers passed off toxic (and illegal) lead paint as non-toxic, lead-free paint.  (link)

     From 2008 through 2010 (and probably earlier) China routinely passed off pubescent (read: underage) gymnasts as being 14 or older, which is the minimum age for Olympic gymnasts.  Even when official Chinese records showed their true ages, Chinese athletic officials used the excuse, "Chinese bodies are not the same as Western bodies."  (link)

     Also from 2008 through 2010 in China, melamine was passed off in milk and other food products as protein that naturally occurred in the products.  At least 100,000 babies were hospitalized and at least 6 died.  (link)

     In 2010, a Chinese official passed himself off as an impartial judge at an international taekwondo event in Korea.  The charlatan was videotaped picking up a sock sensor from the floor, crossing the competition floor and pretending to remove it from the sock of Taiwanese silver medalist Yang Shu-chun.  By disqualifying the Chinese competitor's biggest competitor, he all but guaranteed that the Chinese competitor would win.  The Korean judge—who, apparently like many Korean officials today, was fearful of offending China—went along with the deceit and barred Yang from competing for three months.   (link) and (link)

     Probably their most notorious misrepresentation is the claim that Taiwan is a Chinese province.  Their excuse for that one is, "Taiwan has been an inseparable part of China since ancient times."  "Ancient times" refers to the period from 1886 to 1895, and even during those nine years, the Manchu Dynasty (which was Mongolian rather than Chinese) controlled only the western half of Taiwan.  (Important lesson in making excuses: Don't try to use an excuse that anyone can disprove in just five minutes.  It makes you look like a jerk on top of being a liar.)

     If anybody needs an intensive course on how to make credible excuses, it's Chinese businessmen  and officials—from the head honcho on down to the lowliest zookeeper.  Even if you're not a Chinese businessman or official, and your excuses are already fairly credible, we expect that you'll find World of Excuses enormously helpful in creating world-class excuses.