Lou wanted a free Palm Pre. So, naturally, he got a Palm Pre tattoo. Wait, what?

This isn’t some guy who’s covered in tattoos already, either. This is Lou’s very first and only tattoo, a big ugly Palm Pre right on his shoulder. He will get his precious smartphone courtesy of PreCentral.net, but you’ve gotta wonder how long it’ll be before he starts trying to get a different website to pay for the laser removal. I mean, for chrissakes, the free phone is only worth $US199! Come on, Lou, you could have gotten so much more for an equally embarrassing tattoo if you only knew how to market yourself.

So what do you think: is this more or less sad than Zune tattoo guy? I think Zune guy is still the saddest, as he didn’t get free anything for his permanent branding (that he’s since changed into something perhaps even more regrettable). [Pre Central]

You’ve got to wonder just what was going through prison officer Walter Schmidt’s head when he decided to use a 50,000-volt stun gun on some kids visiting the Talahassee prison he worked at. One of the kids ended up going to the hospital and, not surprisingly, Schmidt got fired.

37-year-old Schmidt told officials who later fired him that he had only been trying to show the children – whose parents all work at the jail near Tallahassee – what a typical day involves while handling unruly inmates.

‘It wasn’t intended to be malicious, but educational,’ he explained to the St Petersburg Times.

‘The big shock came when I got fired.’

The jokes just write themselves, don’t they? [Daily Mail via The Daily What]

[Digg]

Driving through Todmorden, West Yorkshire, Robert Jones followed his GPS navigator, as he normally does. But what he didn’t know was that his navigator had decided Robert needed to die.

He continued following the steep path that the navigator told him was kosher, and totally where he wanted to be going. Suddenly, he hit a guardrail. Jones stopped immediately, so that his car was left hanging off the edge of a cliff. Jones said, “I just trusted the satnav. It kept insisting that the path was a road even as it was getting narrower and steeper. I rely on my satnav, I couldn’t do without it for my job. I guess I’m lucky the car didn’t slip all the way over the edge. But it has been a bit of a nightmare.”

The ironic part? Police arrested Jones. They charged him with “driving without due care and attention,” even though the real crime here, attempted murder, was clearly committed by the GPS. The lesson here is that you should at least occasionally look out the window when you’re driving, if only because your GPS navigator might want you dead. [BBC, The Mirror via Jalopnik Image: Marcin Wichary/Flickr]

Sadly, that’s just what one Acea Schomaker of Omaha, Nebraska did. Cops responding to a domestic disturbance call found the 20-year-old asshole smoking weed out of a duct-taped plastic box with a garden hose running into it and the cat stuffed inside.

The cat was fine, luckily, if dazed. “She was on the front seat of the cop car, wrapped in a blanket, and never moved all the way to the humane society,” said one of the cops. It presumably ate a shitload of cat food when it got there.

Schomaker was fined $US400 and faces drug and misdemeanor animal cruelty charges, and the cat was removed from his custody. [Huffington Post]

From Orlando’s WOFL-TV:

When he refused to stop playing his X-box and come down for dinner, Dena Moir says she went upstairs and unplugged the game, that’s when she says Zachary pushed her and called her a bad name…A few minutes later Dena says she was in the kitchen cleaning and cooking tacos for dinner when Zachary showed up. That’s when she says he slapped her arm and threw a taco in her face.

But that story isn’t the half of it. Following his embarrassing arrest, Zachary Moir then proceeded to take the douchiest mugshot ever. [WOFL-TV via Kotaku]

Representative Massa made the 480km NY to DC trip in a car that has a maximum range of 320km. How? By enlisting the help of two SUVs to tow two fuel cell cars while not in use.

Massa drove one fuel cell car while a hybrid SUV [Chevy Tahoe] towing an additional SUV followed along. Once he got half way, he switched to new fuel cell car [which I assume was towed to the half way point sometime earlier so that it would be waiting for the environmentally-conscious congressman]. The empty fuel cell was then towed back by the first SUV. As he continued on his journey, the second SUV followed. Once Massa arrived in DC, the second SUV then towed the second fuel cell car back to NY.

So basically, one SUV traveled 480km and one SUV traveled 960km for a total of 1600km on a 480km trip. That’s not even counting the mileage on the fuel cell car. Nice work there Captain Planet. [Famous DC via Boing Boing]