“You question my Intelligence?”   “No! I’m certain of your stupidity.”

                                                                                 By Dave Hamby

         I caught a little blurb on the internet that said, “Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.”   True, so true.  

             I have to be real careful talking about other people’s stupidity, every time I do I end up doing something really stupid myself.   I’ve often lamented that I wished I were just a little smarter or just a little stupider.   If I were a little smarter I wouldn’t do the stupid things I do, and if I were a little stupider I wouldn’t know how stupid these things were, and I wouldn’t be bothered about the fact that I did them.

              Everybody does stupid things in their life.   Even the smartest people I know have done some really stupid things.   What’s bothersome though is that some people seem to want to advertise their stupidity.

             The most common form of this advertisement is the bumper sticker.   My wife says that each bumper sticker is an automatic deduction of ten points from the owner’s IQ.   I must confess that I personally feel this may be a little harsh.   I have a “Whitfield for Congress” bumper sticker on the back glass of my convertible and a “Nolan Ryan and Round Rock-A great team,” bumper sticker on the back of my pickup truck.   Do I deduct the 10 points from my IQ for each sticker, or just for the sticker on the car that I happen to be in at the time?   Since the Whitfield sticker is on the back glass of my convertible and I drive around with the top down half the time, and no one can see the sticker when the top is down, do I deduct the full 10 points or do I deduct only 5 points?

              Some bumper stickers are really funny and some are just offensive.   Some are funny in an offensive manner.   Of course the boring bumper stickers like I have, well, they’re just boring.  

             A lot of the bumper stickers are personal statements about the drivers.   Back when I owned a body shop and was teaching a high school auto-body class for RRISD, I had a student who drove an old, dirty Japanese pickup truck with a DARE bumper sticker plastered on the tailgate.   It had the ubiquitous black background with the red script, but instead of saying “DARE to keep kids off drugs,” it said “DARE to keep cops off doughnuts.”   Now this kid often complained to me that the police was always hassling him.   I wonder why.

              I personally enjoy the really dirty pickup truck with the “Bush for President” bumper sticker.   This tells me that the owner never walks around to the back of his truck, or that he still thinks it’s the year 2000.   The dirty van with the fifty or so “Save the Whale” bumper stickers plastered all over it tells me that there’s at least one hippie still alive and the “How’s my driving, dial 1-800- EAT- %^*&,” bumper sticker tells me that the   Texas Department of Public Safety does not discriminate against morons when issuing drivers licenses.

              Now if you deduct 10 points from a person’s IQ for a bumper sticker, how many points should you deduct for these little Calvins you see on the back windows of pickup trucks.   You know the ones I’m talking about.    My wife and I were going down Parmer Lane a while back and we stopped at a red light behind three pickups.   On the far left was a Chevy pickup with Calvin doing his thing on the Ford logo, and on the far right was a Ford pickup with Calvin doing it on the Chevy bowtie.   In the middle was a Dodge pickup with two Calvins on the back window, one going on the Ford logo, the other going on the Chevy bowtie.  

             I personally feel that these little window stickers not only demonstrate the driver’s low level of intellect, they serve as a warning to all of the other motorists, kind of like the warnings found on the sides of cigarette packages.  

             If you’re behind one of these challenged individuals, don’t expect them to behave in a rational manner.   Don’t expect them to signal their intent to change lanes or their intent to turn left or right, for example.   They’ve never figured out what those little sticks on the side of the steering columns are used for.   If you see one going down the road with their blinker on, they bought the truck that way.   They just haven’t figured out how to turn it off.

              If offensive bumper stickers and window Calvins are demonstrations of stupidity, then what are tattoos?  

             My family and I went to an minor league game and there, a couple of rows in front of us sat a couple of really big, skin-headed guys with tattoos on the back of their necks.   The tattoos were in Japanese or Chinese script, so I have no idea what they said.   We’re not big hockey fans and don’t really know the game.   We were just there because we thought a hockey game might take a little bit of the edge off of our missing Express baseball in the middle of winter.   So instead of watching the game, we spent a lot of time wondering what those tattoos were all about.   My wife suggested that when translated those tattoos would say, “I got really drunk one night.”   The best I could come up with was, “This end up.”   My middle teenage daughter won the big prize with her suggestion that they were actually upside down and when read right side up they would say, “If you can read this, please pull my head out of the toilet.”

              While I’m on the subject of hockey games, if there are any dentists reading this column, you should consider advertising at a rink.   I have never seen so many people with missing teeth gathered together in one place, and I don’t mean the hockey players.   I’m talking about the fans.

              Again, tattoos can be really informative.   Some tattoos say, “I’ve spent a lot of time in prison so don’t mess with me.”   Others say, “I was in the Navy and got really bored while I was at sea.”   On young people tattoos sometimes say “This is something I’m really going to regret when I get older.”

             I wonder what all of those tattoo butterflies are going to look like when the young women wearing them get my grandmother’s age.

             Are the tattoos on the muscle bound men that go around their wrists there so they’ll know where their arms end and their hands begin?

             I know I sound like one those old men who went on about Rock and Roll in the late 1950’s.   A lot of what I consider stupid may just be youthful expression.   After all, how are the young people of today going to shock the people of my generation?

             These bumper stickers and tattoos may just be an effort to state a person’s individual attributes.   If that’s the case then I’m going to get me a bumper sticker that reads, “Remember you’re truly unique, just like everyone else.”

(This column appeared in its original form in the Round Rock Leader.   It is available for your publication.)