illustration by Bion Harrigan

True tales: A drunk man shoots himself in the groin, a lazy man calls 911, and a robber man covers his face with toilet paper.

At their best, men are resourceful, creative, and imaginative. Sadly, men are rarely at their best. This is because they are, well, men.

Herein we find three tales of imperfect manhood, a furious redundancy.

It will be our practice, henceforth, to give subjects—in this case, the one in the first story—a pseudonym out of a desire not to further discomfit him. One news story per dumb act per lifetime is more than enough, don’t you think?

DILLON, Colo.—A jury recently convicted a local man of a felony and two misdemeanors for shooting himself in the groin, thereby underscoring the quite sensible notion that knocking back a ton of alcohol and doing such a thing really is not the sort of deed applauded by polite society.

A man we shall call Joseph X. Blitten, 50, was convicted of a felony charge of reckless discharge of a firearm and misdemeanor charges of reckless endangerment and “prohibited use of a weapon—drunk with a gun.” His sentencing is pending.

On May 29, 2009, Mr. Blitten went fishing, which is to say drinking, with a coworker at Lake Dillon, according to a May 8 dispatch in the free daily newspaper the Summit Daily News (“We pride ourselves on providing balanced, insightful community coverage for local residents, second homeowners and visitors”).

Later, at a Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant, the same coworker paid Mr. Blitten $1,000, in cash, for, as the Daily News put it, “some work he had done.”

The newspaper does not elaborate, so we are left to speculate as to what that “work” might have been. After ruminating for a moment, however, one comes up blank. It seems likely that, given Dillon’s size (population 808), the only work to be done is to fish and drink. To receive $1,000 for doing that, and from the person you just did it with, seems an extraordinary windfall, so to shoot oneself in the groin shortly thereafter just seems churlish and ungrateful.

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But people are strange. (Men are, too.) The Daily News reported that Mr. Blitten inexplicably pulled a Makarov 9mm pistol from his truck, which was parked near Dillon’s City Market, and tried, as the newspaper put it, “to cock it.”

This is a telling choice of words, one better left for dissection to linguists more adroit than we. We will only note that, after trying to “cock” the gun, Mr. Blitten inadvertently fired it into his groin. And it is there that we will leave things, semantically speaking.

Mr. Blitten claimed he had been mugged and had produced the gun in self-defense. Surveillance footage from a nearby camera, however, “was insufficient to support that claim,” as the Daily News gingerly put it.

A deputy district attorney told the newspaper that her office is “really looking at probation” rather than jail time for Mr. Blitten. “He’s not a bad guy,” she said. “He just made a series of really bad choices.”

There is a lesson to be learned from this tale, and it is this: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, but give him a fishing rod and he will, sometime later that day, cock his gun and then gun his… well, enough said.

(PS: Heh heh. We said “rod.”)

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LA PLATA, Md.—Demonstrating a laudable ingeniousness in the face of technological calamity, a man here dialed 911 and falsely reported he’d been robbed, and did so in order to cadge a ride home from police, according to a May 9 Associated Press report.

The AP did not name the man, thereby sparing him the merciless ribbing his chums would have rained down upon him for the remainder of his mortal days.

The man told police he’d been walking on Route 225 when, as the AP put it, “a car stopped and someone put a gun to his head and demanded money.”

Right here, the man’s story is already fishy. Details don’t mesh. How, for example, did the car stop and its driver—if indeed that’s the “someone” referred to—put a gun to the man’s head? Did the driver get out of the car? Or did he, feeling altogether too lazy to do that, simply hurl his pistol at the man, conking him on the noggin? Alas, we will never know.

Searching the area after responding to the call, police officers noticed what the AP called “inconsistencies.” Presently, the man admitted he’d made up the story because he’d wanted a ride home. He couldn’t call friends because his cell phone had run out of minutes. His only resource, then, was to dial 911.

Charges are pending against the man, but it is hard to see why. La Plata is not an overlarge place (population roughly 9,000), so the cops there likely have little to do. Citizens’ taxes pay for police vehicles, so it stands to reason that police should be on call to ferry a citizen hither and yon whenever the citizen (I pay your taxes, dammit!) phones.

(A side note: no one “dials” a number with a cell phone. Yet if there is a more picturesque way to describe making a call, we have yet to hear it. “A man here punched in the numbers nine, one, and one” just doesn’t have to it the same ring, or punch.)

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LINCOLN, Neb. – A 29-year-old man was arrested on May 8 for allegedly robbing a convenience store in April, according to a May 10 Associated Press report.

The police had dubbed the man “the toilet paper bandit,” but not for pilfering the prized stuff. Rather, he concealed his face with (presumably unused) streams of it to escape recognition.

This story raises a host of pressing questions, the two most pressing of which are:

1. A toilet paper disguise?

2. Really?

—Dave Ford

Have a news story you’d like Dave Ford to consider for Dudes in the News? Email the story link to him at [email protected].