I seem to have written a lot about bank robbers lately, but there’s a pretty good reason for that.  Bank robbers are idiots.

These guys in Albania, though, at least got a few things right.  First, they didn’t walk into a bank in broad daylight and stick a gun in a teller’s face.  The only thing that’s going to get you is whatever money is in the drawer, possibly some kind of dye packet to make that money useless anyhow, and a silent alarm to bring the cops down on your ass in short order.  Neither did they do something really dumb, like try to force a teller to open the vault.

Instead, they rented a shop above the bank and tried to drill into the vault from above.  Yeah, their dumb mistake was emulating the plot of a Woody Allen movie.  And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!  I mean… if they hadn’t made so friggin much noise that the cops were alerted to their scheme and busted them.

So, in the end, these guys ended up just like pretty much all bank robbers.  Good job, assholes.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that illegally modifying a baseball bat by hollowing out part of the core and introducing a foreign substance such as cork may not actually help you hit a baseball farther!  As it turns out, corking a bat reduces its “collision efficiency” (whatever that is) and actually tends to make the ball travel less far when struck.

Unless you’re Bucky Dent?  The article is ludicrously unclear on its conclusions, because it includes such horrendous sentence construction as this:  “Who can watch a pitch slightly longer before swinging, make up for the lost time with a faster swing and achieve more solid contact more often.”  I don’t know, Scientific American, who can watch a pitch slightly longer?  The answer appears to “contact hitters”, as that sentence comes right after this one: “But the researchers note that, ironically, a corked bat might result in more homers from non-homer hitters.”  So it looks like some over-zealous editor took out a comma and replaced it with a period.  Never mind that the resulting sentence is nearly impossible to parse correctly.  Anywhooty, the gist of the thing seems to be that corking your bat doesn’t work.  Except when it does.

My favorite part of the article is that it claims that hitters cork their bat in order to make them lighter, to achieve higher bat speed.  Well, sure, that’s what they say NOW.  But that’s only because the old reason they used to cork their bats was proven to be silly long ago.  Back in the day, when Graig Nettles was sticking super balls in his bat, they thought that the foreign substance inside the core of the bat actually added spring to it–in short they thought it did exactly what it doesn’t do, namely increase the “collision efficiency” of the bat.  That little bit of nonsense was disproved years ago, and so everybody switched to the idea that a corked bat is lighter, and thus increases swing speed, which results in more homers.  The truth is, baseball players cork their bats because they’re  illogical, superstitious nimrods who will cling to this bit of garbage forever, no matter how many times it’s shown that they are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage by corking their bats.

Except for Bucky Dent.  He can still cork his bat.  Seriously Sci-Am?  You couldn’t come up with a better, perhaps more recent example of a no-power slap hitter?  You had to go Bucky Fucking Dent on me?  Screw you you goddamn Yankees fans.

So Darth Vader is apparently at it again.  This time around, he’s robbing convenience stores in Ferndale, Michigan.  I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again.  Robbing convenience stores is about as low on the scale of “dumb crimes” as you can go.  You have no chance of getting enough money to make the long prison sentence you’re likely to receive anywhere near worth the risk, and you’re almost certain to get caught.

In this case, poor Vader is surely going to end up in the slammer for this, since he was apparently within sight of the store’s security cameras before he put his mask on.  I know, you feel like a jackass walking down the street in broad daylight wearing a Vader mask, but come on–if it’s between that and going to Rapeville Penitentiary for 20 years, which would you pick?

I know the guy is probably thinking “How was I supposed to know how far the camera could see?”  Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?  This just proves that most criminals are dumb.  Because with a little thought, it’s pretty easy to figure out all the things that could trip you up on a “simple” robbery like this.   How do you get in the store without anybody being able to recognize you later?  How do you get away without being seen, so nobody can tell the cops what car you were driving?  What happens if the clerk has a gun, and all you brought was a butcher knife, like this guy did?  What if there are other patrons in the store–maybe some of them are packing heat.  Hell, maybe they’re off duty cops, you don’t know they aren’t.   It’s pretty easy to think of about a hundred ways this could go wrong and land you in jail.

The force is weak with this one…