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Dumb Laws
Guyle writes "DumbLaws.com is the most hilarious site I've ever been to. The people who run it went to an amazing amount of trouble to find strange laws from all fifty states in the US, as well as a few other countries. Ever wanted to know where and when you could legally beat your wife, or where you can be fined for not flushing the toilet? Find out for yourself! " This is definitely worth a read. Funny stuff.
I often thought that a lot of the really "off-the wall, is that really a widespread problem?" laws were probably enacted long ago to combat a specific individual.
such as:
Old Joe likes to walk past the front of St. Jude's Methodist Assembly in Peoria at precisely 11:45 each Sunday with an Ice Cream Cone shoved in his pocket for the benefit of the Mayor and his wife as they leave services to go to a late brunch with their friends. No one knows why, and this really irks Mrs. Mayor no end as she thinks that this is some kind of perverted kick for Old Joe who just strolls by there silently grinning with rocky road slowly melting away in his coveralls.
Mayor calls the Sheriff who can't come up with anything to arrest Joe for, he's not a vagrant, he's not loitering, he's not making any obscene gestures or doing anything else illegal, he's just walking along on the public sidewalk with Ice Cream in his drawers.
So the Mayor gets the city council to pass an ordinance that you can't walk on the sidewalk on Sunday with ice cream in your pocket. The Sheriff runs Joe in the next time he does this and the Judge fines him $20 or holds him in the tank overnight to make his point. Joe sees that the joke is over and either backs off or starts chaining wheelbarrows to his front yard tree with a for-sale sign on it.
If you look at the laws in Illinois, you will see one in Park Ridge that you have to park a truck in an enclosed garage. Actually, the oridinance in Mt. Prospect is that a commercial vehicle cannot be parked in a resident's driveway, it has to be in a garage. This ordinance was not the result of hundreds of complaints by enraged citizens that their neighbor who drove a repair truck was parking their truck in the drive next door, this was the result of one village board member's personal fued with his neighbor who happened to work for Sears and drove his service van home every night and parked it in his driveway behind his other two cars blocking the sidewalk.
The oridinance was never enforced. It was put on the books by this wacko trustee who managed to force it trough so he could call the cops on his neighbor when he wanted to.
There is a difference between a dumb law and one hopelessly outdated..
Maybe there is a good reason for keeping a donkey from sleeping in a bathtub and it's just that we don't own donkeys now (the average person) and so don't understand it.
A little history, just a line or two, would put this in context and make it a lot more interesting.
Then there are the good, or just not-bad laws that don't really need to be listed. If there's a practical reason for a law and it doesn't severely infringe on civil rights, it probably isn't interesting enough to bother listing.
The 'dumb laws' are the current ones that are still being enforced but for the wrong reasons. This list contains ones like the six or more women living in one house law.
Having laws sorted in these categories, dumb, outdated, and rational (removed from the site) would IMHO improve it a bit.
You might be able to solicit help from the Alt.folklore.urban people in tracking down some of the more oddball laws (see the AFU article on 'rule of thumb' mentioned earlier.)
Actually, having a section on laws that don't really exist but that most people think exist would be good too... Such as "A common misconception is that you were allowed to beat your wife with a stick not to exceed..." and some citations regarding this.
A site with that is one that I would browse for fun and refer people to, both for humor and to correct their misconceptions.
BTW, Moderators, mark Andy's post up, it's probably the most ontopic one on this thread.
If you like dumblaws.com, you'll love:
www.dumbcriminalacts.com/
Your everyday /usr/games/fortune has a lot of this crap as well. Quite a number of them are untrue and totally made up. IIRC, there was a guy who purposely made up some of these "laws" and circulated them around long enough to get some into the default fortune list. It is on record somewhere on the net. Go find it. The same applies to this website as well. Many of the so-called "laws" are just bad interpretations of legal speak. Come on, when was the last time you saw a law that said in simple words, "Lollipops are banned"? I know it is meant to be funny and all that, but give me a break. It doesn't take wit to interpret laws in a twisted way, take them out of context and translate into something weird. Go ahead and laugh. But don't spread the word and fool a lot of the naive out there as well. Or add a pinch of salt to go.
Sreeram.
Not all the laws mentioned are stupid:
Rememeber that England has suffered from a prolonged civil war (known as "our little problem with Northern Ireland") with frequent bomb attacks on civilians. These bombs were often left in luggage on stations, airports, department stores and other corwded places.
This law therefore makes perfect sense. I rememeber when I first came to England, I was wodering why there were no luggage boxes on the stations. Such youthful innocence...
God (and the IRA et. al.) willing, this particular war should now be over. Now the poor English can concentrate on the ALF, the anti-capitalism terrorists, and whatever today's new violent fringe group is.
I would have liked the web site to have contained references to the law texts. That would have made it much more trustworthy. How many of the laws mentioned, I woder, are nothing more than urban legends?
Hi!
Oral Sex is illegal? This calls for civil disobedance!!!
Do not wright in this space.
It goes WAYYYY back to the first colony days, when church attendance on Sunday was mandatory, but you had to get there and home again alive too.
A township would be granted based on its families' building a "meeting-house" in a central place. The town I grew up in, Bedford, was carved from surrounding towns' territories because those towns were so large that travel from outlying farms to the church in the town center every Sunday was a hardship.
Things may have started out peaceably in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but after a while, the original occupants of the area got sufficiently annoyed at the flood of newcomers, and the treatment they got from them, to start pushing back, hard. Plus, not that far away, the French/Indian Wars got underway, with some tribes allying with the French and making forays into English-speaking settlement territories (and vice versa), so travelers in the colony were vulnerable to bullet or arrow. A muzzle-loaded rifle was a burden to carry in addition to food for the all-day church session and travel from and back to one's own farm, but a necessary one.
This one is confirmed from a former PA Turnpike manager
It is illegal to have sex in a turnpike ticket booth. This is in response to a situation when a female turnpike employee had sex with a truck driver in the booth.
No lie, no legend.