Other People's Mishaps To Make You Feel Better

If things aren't going your way today, just watch the two videos in this post to know that things could be worse.

The first is a giant spool of cable that got loose on a Pennsylvania highway in the past couple of days. Luckily, it didn't hit any cars and nobody got hurt, but whoever owns the truck or the spool certainly had a bad day:



The next is a video out of England, where somebody tried to lift a fat tire bike over a fence but accidentally dropped the bike.

It turned out to be an electric fence, so here's three minutes of comedy gold as the guys try to free the bike from the electrified fence. Note: Definitely some NSFW language in this clip!

People Focused On Pokemon Go Find Novel Ways To Get Hurt

This is a set up photo by a comedian and YouTube
star, but it illustrates what happens when
people get just a little too wrapped up in Pokemon Go.  

As most of us know, the required summer activity this year is playing Pokemon Go.

For the uninitiated, Pokemon Go is a game played on mobile phones in which people must capture digital Pokemon characters, which appear to pop up in the player's real world surroundings.

Pretty cool!

But pretty dangerous if you're focused exclusively on the Pokemon characters and not, you know, the real world.

I have not indulged myself in the game, which I guess makes me something of a loser. 

But an uninjured one! A lot of Pokemon Go people tend to get hurt because they're so focused on the game they don't see the danger around them.

Jimmy Kimmel, in the video at the bottom of this clip, compiled some of the stupid stuff people have gotten into while playing. People walked off cliffs, into traffic or smashed their vehicles into police cars while playing Pokemon Go.

The guy who hit the cop car, all captured on a police officer's body cam, can be heard saying after te crash. "That's what I get for playing this dumb-ass game." (That video is at the bottom of this post, too.)

One clip showed a guy in Bosnia, happily wandering around a minefield all in the pursuit of Pokemon Go.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, pesticide control people can't spray for mosquitoes to prevent West Nile disease because of Pokemon Go. They have to spray late at night, when people aren't outside, but lately hordes of Pokemon Go enthusiasts are out in parks playing as late as 4 a.m.

All these people means no spraying. So does Pokemon Go cause West Nile disease?

Some Pokemon Go crazies seem to want to play in areas that would cause the most offense.

The people who run Auschwitz and tbe Holocaust Memorial Museum have actually had to tell people not to play Pokemon Go there. Yes, a number of people actually thought it was OK to play the game in these places.

The Boston Globe reports that another Pokemon Go stop is the site of a deadly nightclub fire in West Warwick, Rhode Island that killed 100 people and injured 200 more in 2003.

Here in Vermont, where I live, we're not safe from the dangers posed by people who are just a little too into the game.

In July a person playing Pokemon Go, while drunk and while driving, crashed his car near Rutland, Vermont. Luckily,  nobody was hurt.

Pokemon Go is surely a fun game, and most people who are into it are pretty normal and safe. But there's a few in every crowd, as we well know.

And as we can see in Jimmy Kimmel's video:

Joke's On Google As Minion April Fools Prank Backfires

Due to a failed Gmail April Fool's Day mishap,
images of Minions went out with some Gmail
users messages without the sender intending to,
causing lots of problems. 

Never trust a Minion.

As everyone who is a fan of Minions, those pill-shaped yellow characters from "Despicable Me" who also have their own franchise, they usually muck things up pretty spectacularly.

Usually hilariously, too, but you have to be careful.

So Google learned when it used Minions in an April Fools Day feature it introduced in its popular Gmail.

The April Fools Joke that was added to Gmail was a feature in which a GIF of a Minion  goofily dropping a mic.  The thought was you could add it to an email message

Problem was, it was extremely easy to accidentally hit the feature to automatically send the Minion GIF with an email.

Even worse, there was a bug in the system so that the Minion GIF would automatically go out even if the person sending the email never wanted it to.

According to Mashable, one Minion GIF went out with an emailed prayer request to 50 people, mortifying the sender. Another sent it with an important job application, even though the guy never hit the button to send the Minions. So much for that job.

Seeing the chaos unfolding in front of them, Google frantically shut off the dropped mic Minion thing before even more harm could be done.

But as ArsTechnica put it:

"At the very least, here's hoping that the next time Google pulls a prank, it doesn't do it with mission critical software used by millions of people."

And if I inadvertently send weird Minions in an email, I'm really, really, REALLY sorry.