the stella awards for 2005

[7mmag6]

Only in the US of A!

We got a kick out of these - hope you do, too!


It's time once again to review the winners of the Annual "Stella Awards." The Stella Awards are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck of New Mexico who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald's. That case inspired the Stella awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous, successful lawsuits in the United States.

Here are this year's winners:

7th Place: Kathleen Robertson of Austin, Texas, was awarded $80,000 by a jury of her peers after breaking her ankle tripping over a toddler who was running inside a furniture store. The owners of the store were understandably surprised at the verdict, considering the misbehaving little toddler was Ms. Robertson's son.

6th Place: 19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when his neighbor ran over his hand with a Honda Accord. Mr. Truman apparently didn't notice there was someone at the wheel of the car when he was trying to steal his neighbor's hubcaps.

5th Place: Terrence Dickson of Bristol, Pennsylvania, was leaving a house he had just finished robbing by way of the garage. He was not able to get the garage door to go up since the automatic door opener was malfunctioning. He couldn't re-enter the house because the door connecting the house and garage locked when he pulled it shut. The family was on vacation, and Mr. Dickson found himself locked in the garage for eight days. He subsisted on a case of Pepsi he found, and a large bag of dry dog food. He sued the homeowner's insurance claiming the situation caused him undue mental anguish. The jury agreed to the tune of $500,000.

4th Place: Jerry Williams of Little Rock, Arkansas, was awarded $14,500 and medical expenses after being bitten on the buttocks by his next door neighbor's beagle. The beagle was on a chain in its owner's fenced yard. The award was less than sought because the jury felt the dog might have been just a little provoked at the time by Mr. Williams, who had climbed over the fence into the yard and was shooting it repeatedly with a pellet gun.

3rd Place: A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, $113,500 after she slipped on a soft drink and broke her coccyx (tailbone). The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson had thrown it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

2nd Place: Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware, successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms.Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000 and dental expenses.

1st Place: This year's runaway winner was Mrs. Merv Grazinski of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Mrs. Grazinski purchased a brand new 32-foot Winnebago motor home. On her first trip home, (from an OU football game), having driven onto the freeway, she set the cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the drivers seat to go into the back & make herself a sandwich. Not surprisingly, the RV left the freeway, crashed and overturned. Mrs.Grazinski sued Winnebago for not advising her in the owner's manual that she couldn't actually do this. The jury awarded her $1,750,000 plus a new motor home. The company actually changed their manuals on the basis of this suit, just in case there were any other complete morons around.

[.22guy]

I like that last one and the one with the robber locked in the garage? Where do they find these juries? Mars?

[Father Time]

Sorry, but those are probably urban legends. That's not to say that there aren't a lot of frivolous lawsuits.

http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/tra...s/s1499108.htm

[Dallas]

I'm sorry but those are so outlandish I also don't believe they are true. Or there must be a lot more to the stories. Where did you get them from?

Writer-director Finn Taylor, actor David Arquette and the Discovery Channel’s MythBusters gathered Monday on Reno’s Fourth Street to shoot a movie about some fairly risky behavior.
The film, tentatively titled “The Darwin Awards,” is an independent comedy based on the “honors” given to people who die or injure themselves in outlandish ways. In the movie, Joseph Fiennes plays a forensic detective, and Winona Ryder plays an insurance claims investigator studying a high-risk individual.
On Monday, Taylor was shooting a segment that shows Arquette at Twin City Surplus on Fourth Street. Arquette’s character visits the store and winds up buying a military rocket that he attaches to a car.
“I got a really great role,” said Arquette, star of “Scream” and husband of Courteney Cox Arquette. “‘Dream With the Fishes,’ the first film I did with Finn, is my favorite film I’ve been a part of.”
Arquette said he wasn’t familiar with the Darwin Awards before he signed onto the project, but he looked them up on the Internet. His character could be viewed as a village idiot, but Arquette said his heart is in the right place.
“He just feels like his life is not meaningless, but he hasn’t done anything profound with it,” Arquette said. “It’s always important to me to see the human side (of a character).”
Arquette was in town only a few hours on Monday to shoot the scene with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, hosts of the Discovery Channel show “MythBusters.” On the TV show, Savage and Hyneman test urban legends to see if they’re true. Sometimes that means re-enacting crazy stunts that have led to Darwin Awards.
“(The filmmakers) had seen us do a couple of the Darwin Awards on the show, including the most famous one, the rocket car,” Savage said.
For their television program, the MythBusters actually fitted a car with a rocket and drove it by remote control while riding in a helicopter.
“It’s my personal favorite because it was just so darn much fun to do,” Hyneman said.
In the screenplay, the bit is set in Utah. But Taylor, who grew up in the Bay Area, said he likes to film as close to home as possible to keep money in his local economy. “The Darwin Awards” is set throughout the United States. But Taylor said he should be able to shoot the picture primarily in Northern Nevada and Northern California because of the diversity of the landscape.
“Nevada isn’t really part of the story at all,” said Nevada Film Commission deputy director Robin Holabird. “That’s one of the things this area has always been really good about. … You can pretend we’re so many other areas.”
Twin City Surplus was a gem, Taylor said, as it perfectly fit the scene he was shooting.
“You couldn’t have asked for better production design than this,” Taylor said, standing amid the store’s hodgepodge of goods.
The crew members will also shoot at Lake Tahoe, and they were slated to be in Reno for two weeks, using a desert backdrop for Arquette’s jet-propelled car ride. But the lingering snow may force a change.
“We’re assessing the situation,” Taylor said. “My goal is to try and shoot as close to Northern California as possible.”
Holabird said she knew there could be a problem after the first storm, but the filmmakers decided to shoot Monday because there was no better location. Future shooting is in doubt, however, because Taylor doesn’t want snow on the valley floor for the car launch.
“It’s in flux,” Holabird said. “What we’ll try to do, of course, is try to encourage them to stay in Nevada by doing Red Rock Canyon near Las Vegas.”
Taylor said Icon Entertainment has already bought foreign rights to the film and that a number of companies have expressed interest in the domestic rights. He said he wouldn’t sell those until he finished shooting because that will allow him to retain creative control. Taylor plans to have the film finished in time for submission to the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and he is cautiously optimistic.
“I would never be arrogant enough to propose that I’d be guaranteed to get into any festival,” he said.

[Dennis]

Yeaaaa !!!!

The stories do not suprise me because people are truly that stupid.
Jurys sometimes decide things to stop the arguing in the jury room so they can go home..........
logic doesnt allways enter in to it.

[Rave]

:insane: :jaw: :spaceship