Hutchence just straight up killed himself with a belt and a door knob, I think. Is there a rumor it was autoerotic asphyxiation or something?
Ahhh, the rumor comes from crazy lady Paula Yates, contradicted by the coroner's report and the suicide threats he made on the phone right before suiciding.
In 1999, Yates claimed that Hutchence's death may have resulted from autoerotic asphyxiation, in a paid interview on 60 Minutes, in a documentary film on Channel 4 Television and in opposition to her previous statements given to the police investigators and the coroner.[39] Hand had specifically considered the suggestions of accidental death (coupled with the fact that Hutchence left no suicide note) but had discounted it based on substantial evidence presented to the contrary.[36][37][40] Despite the official coroner's report, fans and relatives considered his death accidental.[41][42] In 2000, Patricia Glassop (Hutchence's mother, who had remarried) and Tina Schorr (his sister), gave an interview on This Morning asserting that Yates had, on more than one occasion, made threats of harming herself or the baby if Hutchence did not marry her; and, that they believed she said this again on the morning of his death, directly precipitating his suicide.[42][43]
I think it's pretty embarrassing getting arrested in almost any situation. Very, very few are the arrests where you can say "well, yes, I got arrested, but I'm still proud of what I did".
Particularly embarrassing arrests that I've heard about personally (either because I was there or I talked to the people):
1. Arrested for having a pot plant in your car, in the front seat, buckled in, as you drove to high school.
2. Citizen's arrested for taking a package out of a fedex box while your co-conspirators evade capture by means of (a) running the wrong way down a one-way street while (b) not being so fat.
3. Arrested, convicted, sentenced to jail time after a furious letter-writing campaign for shooting a fifty-year-old fish (beloved of, and named by, local divers) inside a wildlife refuge), then getting caught when you and your buddies spend ten minutes trying to lever it into your boat and then high-fiving.
4. Bouncing a check trying to buy a shitty fucking tire to keep your shitty fucking car running.
5. Arrested for being passed out in a hotel's phone closet that your friends dragged you into after you had passed out.
6. Arrested and convicted for witness intimidation after 5'5" you and your co-conspirator the blind kid stayed parked on the lawn of your "quarry" until the police arrived, at his suggestion.
I'm sure I know others. Of the above the person in 2 expressed embarrassment and I am pretty sure the person in 4 felt pretty stupid but I would have felt bad asking him about it. The people in 1,3 and 5 were notably sanguine.
Indecent exposure is a bad way to get arrested, especially if you were just peeing on a tree.
There was a . . . CSI? where a guy was drunk and peed on a tree, but it was next to a playground and he ended up arrested and on the sex offender registry. Has that kind of thing ever really happened? Ugh, probably.
1/2: I thought the Michael Hutchence thing was well-established? Like he was sufficiently naked and in the act? I mean, it's a very difficult way to commit suicide otherwise, I'd think.
On the DUI thing I am so pleased to be living someplace that is walkable and compacy and anyhow has decent public transportation so I can just opt out of thinking about that whole clusterfuck. I know I have mentioned here that before moving to LA I thought "everybody there parties a lot, and there's no public transportation and cabs aren't terribly feasible... how do people avoid driving drunk?" only to learn that the answer is "they mostly don't."
,I.Arrested, convicted, sentenced to jail time after a furious letter-writing campaign for shooting a fifty-year-old fish (beloved of, and named by, local divers) inside a wildlife refuge), then getting caught when you and your buddies spend ten minutes trying to lever it into your boat and then high-fiving.
Did the fish get away?
From recent grand jury service, the most embarrassing felony indictment was probably shoplifting 30 boxes of simulac. The most pathetic felony was six counts of burglary for entering every unlocked car on a residential block, where the total take was a lot of loose change, one t shirt, 3 CDs, and one iPhone.
Least likely to succeed was the guy who tore a pay phone off of the wall inside a locked cell in the municipal jail, where he was the only person in the cell.
8: Nope. He just killed himself: "He was in a kneeling position facing the door. He had used his snake skin belt to tie a knot on the automatic door closure at the top of the door, and had strained his head forward into the loop so hard that the buckle had broken."
He was a distraught guy who wanted to die. Paula Yates spent a bunch time saying it was all Bob Geldof's fault that it was so (this is where I last paid attention to the story), until apparently switching to saying it was autoerotic asphyxiation. So, no, not true, not well established. Now I feel doubly bad for the poor guy!
Did the fish get away?
Sort of? The dead fish was taken away from them by wildlife officials.
12 is not so much embarrassing as revolting beyond words.
But you would probably judge somebody that got arrested for it, right?
Yeah, but "embarrassing" seems far too mild.
The Sunday Times piece on kiddie porn and monetary restitution is worth reading. (Although, be warned, the vague-ish but still specific enough description of what was done to the girls is literally nauseating.)
Leaving an adult porn site open on your work computer, now that's embarrassing, though not actually illegal.
18: to be fair I also think the description, in the OP, of murder as embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as DUI, is a little weird.
20. Probably get you fired though. I only ever knew one guy who was arrested for having kiddie porn. The saddest part was that his wife felt obliged to leave town with the kids because she couldn't face her friends and was worried about the children getting a hard time at school.
19: I find my tolerence for reading descriptions of any kind of sexual violence goes ever lower. Part of me thinks I should know the specifics of stories like the gang rape and murder in New Delhi or mass rape in various wars and part of me thinks that I really don't need the details thankyouverymuch.
Someone I wrote about got arrested for stealing money from his mother's dead body, and then, later in his life, after he was elected coroner of a small town, he was sacked for stealing jewelry from the corpses in his care. But of course he was responsible for massacring lots of people, so perhaps he didn't feel shame. Regardless, I didn't mention either of the above stories because, in light of his other crimes against humanity, it seemed gratuitous and because they both embarrassed me. Also, the sourcing was weak.
Someone I wrote about got arrested for stealing money from his mother's dead body
I admit I wouldn't know off the top of my head what the actual rules on this are.
Kiddie porn was my first thought as well (perhaps because I just read that NYT article this morning). 'Embarrassing' may not capture all of the horror of it, but it's certainly the kind of thing where you can never face people again. Maybe more on the 'shame' end of embarrassment.
I had been going around with the same ideas about Michael Hutchence's death as heebie.
25: I imagine they vary by jurisdiction. In this case, he was being accused of having murdered her -- which he might have -- so the charge of theft could have been a compromise or something. As I said, I couldn't find good sourcing, so I never figured out what was really going on.
In this case, he was being accused of having murdered her
Well that is embarrassing.
25: there were, though, newspaper accounts, which is what made the whole thing seem so embarrassing to me.
This is interesting, though. Setting the "charge of murder" aside, if you come upon your own deceased parent, what's proper? Evidence tampering? Even if there's no other evidence of foul play? Do you have to wait for the coroner before asking if you can check if she had that five hundred bucks on her? What about, like, taking off a beloved watch for safekeeping? Maybe if you're not in the will you're stealing from whatever other heir is named?
Just a lot more complicated than swimming into a wildlife area and shooting a fish in the face, is all I'm saying.
Also embarrassing was the cleaning staff person at my office who lifted a lawyer's checkbook, had it for more than a week, and in that time wrote only one check, for less than $100, for basic cable service to her own apartment. Zero chance to get away with it.
When my maternal grandmother died, the EMTs who came to pick her up and take her to the funeral home removed her jewelry and gave it to my mom and uncle, who were the ones who found her.
32: please tell me the lawyer didn't press charges or anything, because otherwise that story is more embarrassing for the lawyer than for the custodian.
Possibly embarrassing to him, though it merely seemed funy/sad at the time was a former cow orker who collaborated in a scam with the manager of a data entry bureau (this was a little while ago) to skim the payments over several years. Eventually it was discovered and my colleague took his ill gotten gains and fled to somewhere in Latin America.
Where he found he hadn't stolen enough to live on and had to come back.
Yeah, I mean, ones that are obviously a product of somebody being poor and desperate and out of ideas... I don't find those so much embarrassing as sucky for them.
I just remembered another one: busted for pulling a toy gun on a girl at the mall. Sorta lame, right? Fast-forward fifteen years, when that arrest comes back to light leading to the perp in question losing his job as youth outreach manager for Mitt Romney's gubernatorial campaign.
The lawyer laughed it off. She lost her job, and was charged with a crime for the several laptops she also took.
Oh well the plot kinda thicks there, don't it.
That Catholic Monsignor who ran a meth ring and operated a sex shop to launder the money seems to me to be straddling the line between embarrassing and amazing.
I have to say I don't really understand what "embarrassing" means here but I like all the anecdotes.
The son of the NRA president who what arrested for shooting a gun at another car on the George Washington Parkway should have been embarrassing for the NRA president, but I don't think NRA presidents feel any kind of embarrassment or shame.
Huh. Well, then that's doubly awful for Hutchence. Poor guy.
I'd always "known" the same thing as Heebie about Hutchence. Good to get facts.
From a story on Google News:
Gregory Matthew Bruni, Naked Intruder, Pooped And Masturbated In Tony Lands' Florida Home: Cops
If they'd just let him stay up on the roof he wouldn't have bothered anybody.
To be honest, I don't see how the wikipedia entry in 12 clarifies what happened one way or the other.
I'm happy to say that the poor guy was depressed and it doesn't matter one way or the other how he died. But it's not obvious to me that the wikipedia entry resolves the matter.
46: I mean, the coroner could be lying to spare someone's feelings, I guess, but the coroner said: "In ruling Hutchence's death a suicide, N.S.W. State Coroner D.W. Hand dispelled speculation that "sexual misadventure" was a factor, and wrote in his report, "It has been suggested that the death resulted from an act of auto eroticism. However, there is no forensic or other evidence to substantiate this suggestion." And I don't know who ought to be believed rather than the coroner.
14: Oh, I misunderstood the original comment--I thought that first he orchestrated a letter-wrtiting campaign to have the fish shot, and then, that having failed, went out and caught it himself, and that the fish might have been alive when he was caught hauling it into the boat. That would have been strange, okay, but not that much stranger than what actually happened, just strange in a different way. That poor fish.
48: haha. No, that would have been more amazing. He claimed the fish attacked him, but it was big and placid and widely beloved, so that didn't go over well.
Oh, I missed that bit. Sure, especially if there's a reason for that other woman to fabricate the lie. It's really widespread, though, so it at least fits the "embarrassing" criteria. Also Richard Gere sticks hamsters up his ass.
Don't forget about poor Mikey's misadventure with pop rocks and soda.
Mickey Kaus and what he does with goats. That's embarrassing.
Wow, I had never heard anybody suggest the Hutchence death was not autoerotic in nature. Keep dispelling myths, Oudemia.
But David Carradine, he still died hilariously, right?
The Chuck Berry coprophilia videos are still real, right?
Wikipedia spreadin' Hutchence innuendo.
The Roy Orbison thing, that's definitely real.
49: A widely-beloved *fish*? Now you're just funnin' us.
I had no idea that In the Realm of the Senses was based on a true story.
I met a fella years back who had been a banker. If memory serves, he was a branch manager at Wells Fargo, and made a nice living but apparently not quite nice enough, because he decided to use his position to embezzle about half a million dollars. I'm sure it would've been more, but the anomaly was spotted almost immediately on account of his having decided to deposit the stolen money in his personal account at Wells Fargo.
I've always thought that must have been a seriously embarrassing story to tell the other guys in white-collar-country-club-jail. "You put it where?!"
When I worked for state government, all of the snack bars in the building were run by blind people. They had machines that you'd feed a bill through and the machines would beep once for a five, twice for a ten, thrice for a twenty, and shout "You go big baller" for a fifty. When the new twenty came out, it took some time to reprogram the machines so the cashiers were forced to take the word of the customer when they said it was new twenty. Somebody in the Attorney General's office (but not an attorney) saw this as an opportunity to gain $76 while only losing their job, their ability to be employed in the future, and a brief period of freedom.
(I've mentioned this before, but it is very topical.)
So why'd the fish killer do it? That's the only one on your list that makes me think "Christ, what an asshole".
Yeah, he was an asshole. I think he did it because he saw a big fish and wanted to kill it, fundamentally.
"You go big baller"
Of all of your lies, this is the one I most wish were true.
That Catholic Monsignor who ran a meth ring and operated a sex shop to launder the money seems to me to be straddling the line between embarrassing and amazing.
Yeah. If they wrote this one into the storyline of Breaking Bad, I'd probably think, 'No, c'mon, that's too crazy.' Or that's what I would have thought, until I read about Monsignor Meth Head.
Last Saturday, I came home to my evicted neighbor across the hall pounding on doors and yelling. He and his roommates had been evicted three days previously, and were always loud and obnoxious. He had a wreath and a half-gone jar of tomato sauce and was pacing and yelling to be let in to his old apartment. (He was living there off lease and his girlfriend regularly locked him out, as part of their daily domestic disturbances) After ten minutes, I called the cops. He gave the cops a fake name, insisting, "I ain't got no warrants". His clever ruse failed, and unsurprisingly, he had warrants. As they cuffed him and carried him off, he shouted fair-wells and declarations of everlasting love to his absent girlfriend in their vacant apartment.
I had no idea that In the Realm of the Senses was based on a true story.
Nor I, until a recent metafilter post about the director (recently deceased). I should … watch some of his movies! Maybe not that one first, though.
60, combined with the other facts revealed here, is so so great. He claimed he was attacked by a *sea bass* and speargunned it in self defense?
Since the dawn of time, the sea bass has been an enemy of man.
The street level prostitution busts can get pretty embarrassing, especially if you've done something like get all excited thinking you've just negotiated a five or ten dollar blowjob. And I've also previously mentioned the guys who pull up to each other car to car in the park to watch each other jerk off.
Sometimes it's not the arrest but what's found with them. Often, where there's meth there's sex toys. One girl we went on because she didn't pay her motel bill and then refused to come out of the room. We got in there to find her passed out in the bed with a bag of meth in one hand and a knife in the other. After we relieved her of those items and cuffed her up we found the biggest double ended dildo I've ever seen in her bag next to the bed. But the good part was we got this one dork cop to practically touch it with his face. We called him over to the scene telling him we needed a meth test kit and we place this bag of meth on the counter right next to the giant dildo. And sure enough he's so excited to be testing some meth he doesn't even notice the dildo.
Me: "So, pretty big bag of meth, right?"
Him: "Yeah" (looks right at the baggy, somehow doesn't notice a two foot flesh colored artificial schlong right next to it, and then leans over to look at the meth up close) "WOW, THAT IS A BIG ONE"
I shit you not, those are his exact words, and his forehead is maybe six inches from that dildo. At this point me, the Sgt., and my other cop buddy all break down and laugh hysterically and he still doesn't figure out what we're laughing at until finally the Sgt. clues him in.
Another tweaker girl I arrested for turning a trick in the seat of a dudes car while parked near an apartment complex with a bunch of kids playing outside maybe twenty yards away. I was right around the corner when the call came out and I walk up to the car and the guy is still pounding this chick in the passenger seat. He had a pretty priceless look on his face when I knocked on the window. After they're in cuffs I'm searching the female and there's this little cylindrical object poking up out of her front pants pocket. I'm not sure what it is but I've got a hunch and leave it there. When the guy at jail is inventorying her belongings I tell him she has a flashlight in her front pocket. He pulls it out and then looks at me,
Him: "you fucker, that's not a flashlight."
The girl: "It's a vibrator."
Him: "I KNOW WHAT IT IS GODAMNIT."
73 (part 1): was the cop's name Farva?
Man, gswift, how do you keep from getting swallowed up by despair? Serious question. Half of me is laughing and half of me is thinking "Oh god, these people's problems run so far and deep."
Half of me is laughing and half of me is thinking "Oh god, these people's problems run so far and deep."
Just like grading essays from undergrads.
I'm assuming that the "serious question" part is not binding on anybody but gswift.
Often, where there's meth there's sex toys.
See, that's why my business plan was so ingenious.
how do you keep from getting swallowed up by despair?
A lot of "I do the best I can with the hand that's dealt here and the rest is out of my control." But yeah, the suicide rate runs high in this job. My dept. is only about 400 guys or so and we've had three suicides in the last five or six years. And I can think of several other DUI's and another guy who recently passed relatively young from drinking himself to death after he retired.
The moral psychology I've read indicates that there is a big debate over whether embarrassment is a separate emotion from shame. Some researchers wanted to distinguish feeling embarrassment, a mild emotion which comes from violating social norms that have no significant moral content, from shame, which is much harsher and involves real wrongs. They then want to pathologize those who can't distinguish the embarrassing from the genuinely immoral.
The natural criticism here is that they are making moral assumptions that don't work in empirical research when they distinguish the embarrassing form the immoral.
I was thinking of listing 'child molestation' as the most embarrassing thing to get arrested for, but it's not clear that embarrassment is the relevant concept there.
Some character in Birmingham had his place burgled while he was out. The perps left his collection of kiddie pron scattered all over the floors and yard for the cops to find after his neighbors reported seeing strangers going in and out.
Homophobic-preacher-found-with-meth-and-gay-hooker always seemed super embarrassing, but I dunno if it actually is to them.
Meth doesn't get embarrassed. Hookers probably do at least occasionally.
if you come upon your own deceased parent
Yeah, necrophilic incest would be a pretty embarrassing arrest.
I swear, officer, it was an innocent methtake!
Friends of my got busted at a Phish show for allegedly smoking weed, when they were actually smoking beedies. It took a long time to explain to the cops what beedies are. They didn't get arrested, but did get kicked out of the show and had their beedies confiscated.
90: Cloves already used in cooking a ham.
Okay, I take back the "cloves" part. Shitty cigarettes.
Cigarettes don't give you that sweet, sweet eucalyptus-leaf buzz. On the other hand, they don't also constantly become unlit.
I'm still shocked to learn that anybody can tolerate a Phish concert without being stoned.
I did not say that these friends of mine were not also stoned.
The street level prostitution busts can get pretty embarrassing
This seems like the correct overall answer. Many are those who believe our prohibitions of solicitation are puritanical and unnecessary; few are those whose every co-worker and in-law will feel the same.
(two related articles that bring this to mind: Happy hooking in the Bushes' back yard; the war on sex workers.)
Patrolling a Phish concert looking for people smoking weed has got to be like the easiest assignment ever for a cop.
||
Chris Sims went to Waffle House.
|>
Ooh ooh a guy got busted sodomising a goat on New Brighton Common once, that was pretty bad.
And now no one talks about the fences he built, the walls, the bridges...
But you tweet from Waffle House one time ...
30 boxes of simulac
fairly common until they started locking it up.
A news anchor here got arrested offering to give a guy a bj in a park.
Often the solicitation stuff has added embarrassment bc the fake prostitutes are so nasty looking.
Had a client convicted for bank robberies. Got caught bc he called the police to report his car was broken into. When they got there, the bank bags with die were in back seat.
A couple cases in this area:
1. Guy having sex with gf. Stops. Puts peanut butter on himself, gets dog to lick it off. gf calls police.
2. Gf charges bf with object penetration. Criminal complaint reads as follows:
He put a whole strawberry into my vagina. Then he put his penis into my vagina. When I asked him why he did that, he said "To make strawberry jelly." I told him that he did not have permission to do that.
Suddenly the Antioch College code makes more sense.
There's embarrassment and shame, I guess. If I were Paul Reubens, I'd be embarrassed to have everyone hear about joyless puritans publicly exposing the fact that I went to a porn theater to do what people go to porn theaters to do, but I couldn't feel shame about things that aren't bad, like pornography and masturbation. Now I will read the rest of the comments and it will turn out that this turned into a bike thread or a baby thread around comment 37. And I'll be like "um."
109: actually quite topical as you will learn.
There's embarrassing arrests because what you were doing is so embarrassing, and then there's the ones where it's embarrassing because you were so inept at it. In the second category, I may have mentioned the tactic that the London police use in Operation TRIDENT (anti-gun-crime in the black community): look on Facebook for idiots whose profile photo is of them posing with illegal handgun; use photo to get warrant; search home; find gun; arrest idiot. It's intelligence led policing, but there isn't much intelligence involved.
The moral psychology I've read indicates that there is a big debate over whether embarrassment is a separate emotion from shame.
I may have mentioned before that a (Spanish) friend believes that embarrassment is an emotion unique to the Anglosphere. As he put it, "An Englishmen has a fight with his girlfriend with all the neighbours watching, he gets embarrassed. An Italian has a fight with his girlfriend with all the neighbours watching, he goes and buys a red Ferrari."
I have a much lower threshhold for embarrassment than for shame.
Embarrassment is, I have always thought, the sensation of knowing that other people know how stupid you have been. Shame is more like knowing that they know about the immoral things you have done.
But open to correction here.
I mean, it wouldn't be embarrassing to have been arrested for beating your wife. It would be shameful. It would be embarrassing to be arrested for public indecency after she had thrown you out of the house without any trousers on.
This is pretty embarrassing and also shameful: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/28/florida_incident/
I love that they mention he's a carnival worker in the very first sentence.
Is it embarrassing or shameful that 116 is pwned by 44?
(okay, added value).
I sat on a jury once where the defendant was on trial for soliciting prostitution. It was a sting, and he'd approached the hot as hell (should have been the first clue that something was up) female undercover officer and offered her twenty bucks for a blowjob. His defence was that he was intimidated by her and didn't know what else to do and that he had no intention of following through when she told him to meet her around the corner for some privacy. I have no idea how he thought he would get away with it, but he certainly showed no embarrassment during the trial or after we convicted him (in about half an hour flat, most of which was spent picking a foreperson and deciding on voting procedures).
44, 116: This is the detail that stands out for me in that case: drink the contents of a wet-dry vacuum cleaner .
I'm pretty sure I don't know a single embarrassing arrest story -- lots of sad or pathetic ones, and some infuriating ones, but I can't think of any that cross that embarrassing/funny threshold. Regarding 67, it does seem like apartment dwelling in Portland is a fraught enterprise. That's where that anecdote I've relayed before about the guy who violated a restraining order by stalking his ex, and then when the cops showed up to arrest him, he answered the door with a gun in his hand, so they shot him, happened.
This is pretty fucked up: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/education/georgia-backed-scholarships-benefit-schools-barring-gays.html?_r=0
How about littering ... and creating a public nuisance?
The second makes up for the first. In the eyes of father rapers, anyway.
I sat on a jury once where the defendant was on trial for soliciting prostitution. It was a sting, and he'd approached the hot as hell (should have been the first clue that something was up)
A friend of mine and her academy classmates are both quite good looking girls in their 20's who worked on the vice squad for a couple years. She says sometimes they'd do stings on the male prostitutes with online ads by contacting them with something along the lines of "my girlfriend and I want to try something new but don't want to do it with a guy who knows us". She said those guys always looked so, so happy when they showed up. Like, more eager than the junkies who think they're about to get their fix. Idiots.