When you are a serial killer with nothing left to lose and facing a bit of state-funded execution is a serious obstacle between yourself and your next birthday, then why not blame the lawyer whose preposterous job it is to defend you. Danny Robbie Hembree did exactly this after having been convicted of first degree murder in a Gaston County (America) Court.

As superfluous a man like Robbie Hembree is to the every-day beating heart of the human species, he has placed a smug-shaped spanner in the reserved law community of Gaston County. Or at least he did, temporarily: that is until his ludicrous demands were tossed out of court as fast as this man will be catapulted into a concrete prison cell for the rest of his lamentable life. Or he gets the death penalty.

Hollywood serial killer

The defendant, who was convicted of first degree murder of teenager Heather Catterton – as well as previous convictions for a series of armed robberies, physical attacks and the videoed confession to the slaying of another victim, Randi Saldana – asked for the verdict to be dropped and a re-trial to be given. His inept reasoning being his lawyer.

“I don’t have any confidence in counsel, and I don’t have any confidence in the state……Let’s start this thing over and do it right” said the brutally belligerent, calm and calculating Hembree.

The demands were not met, the verdict upheld and sentencing awaits.

The targeted bank was Wells Fargo. They don't make pizza so the robber went next door

Yuma. Tuscon Arizona. A Breeding ground of inept criminals where robbing a bank is followed up with a few beers and a celebratory slice of pizza. But of course. It wouldn’t be so many chromosomes short of a functioning string of DNA if the pizza restaurant chosen wasn’t next door to the bank.

Saturday in Tuscon and the thermometer is pushing 125 degrees and the temperature is playing havoc with Henry Elmers brain. The 56-year old father of ineptitude walked into a branch of Wells Fargo just after midday brandishing a knife. First mistake was in the choice of bank, or more accurately, its location: opposite the Police Department Headquarters.

On entering the bank Elmer threatened the staff and, pretty much nothing like Butch Cassidy and/or the Sundance Kid, left carrying a probably quite small sum of money. Rather than making a speedy getaway, or even a getaway – slow, fast or otherwise – Henry Elmer walked straight into the neighbouring Village Inn Pizza Parlour and ordered a beer and some pizza and waited for the police to arrive to arrest him.

armed and crazy? You are still no match for this 12-year old

Whatever drives a man to enter a jewellery shop brandishing a gun and fully intent on robbing the outfit of the entirety of its precious gems is, you would have thought, not going to be threatened by a 12-year old child. On a normal day it probably wouldn’t, but on a normal day the basement of the worlds criminal classes would not be confronting the 12-year old son of Turkish shop keeper Mehmet Karagoz.

When Mustafa S. entered the jewellery shop of Mehment Karagoz in the Bagcilar district of Istanbul he was probably expecting little in the way of retaliation. He had picked his targets wisely: an old man and a small child. What could possibly fuck up proceedings? What could possibly lodge a spanner in the intricate workings of his ingenious plan?

How about the son of the jeweller who, on seeing the criminal mastermind enter the jewellers, quickly calculated the odds of ineptitude, cowardice and malice running through the veins of the assailant, put one and one together and came up with the assumption that this particular piece of putridity had been lounging with the imbeciles of Istanbul a few moments too long and was, indeed, inept. The 12-year old jumped, attacked and won. Istanbul’s most lacking fled the scene. The CCTV cameras recorded the whole affair and quickly hit the headlines, pushing the small child into the hero-stratosphere reserved for people who normally catch falling babies.

Take The Blame would, obviously, like to bring to the attention the brave feet of daring by the child in question, but also like to draw attention to an armed criminal who was bested by an infant. The Godfather he is not.

How much could possibly go wrong in the search for a cold beer after a long days’ work? You wouldn’t have thought much, but then you wouldn’t really be thinking, because one hell of a lot can go wrong if you are blessed with the ineptitude gene, reside in Covina, Los Angeles and have the mental abilities of a rotting carcass. Unbelievably there were three such blessed on Wednesday.

The mugshot says it all. INEPT

Andy Huynh, Nicholas Kalscheuer and Nicholas Fiumetto (check out the mugshots) managed to screw up getting a beer so incredibly well that they now sit in a Los Angeles prison cell, awaiting a court hearing on $50 000 bail. So just how did they manage such a feet? It wasn’t easy. At every step in the evenings proceedings it would have been infinitely times easier to not end up in prison.

Step 1. Don’t buy the beer, steal the beer.

Baja Ranch Market, 3pm. Andy Huynh remains in the car whilst his comrades enter the shop. So far so good. Getaway driver, check.

Step 2. Cock things up royally. Avoid stealth. Avoid cunning.

Fiumetto grabs a 30-pack of beer. Decides not to look cagey and hide said beer up his jumper but just bolts from the shop, Kalscheur at his heels.

Step 3. Get chased by shop workers.

Forgetting 21000 episodes of Cops which end in bullets being sprayed and bloodshed, shop workers run after culprits with complete disregard for well-being. Capture 19-year old Kalscheur and detain until police arrive.

Step 4. Up the stakes.

Realising that things have taken a dramatic turn for the worst Fiumetto jumps in the car and Huynh – the getaway driver! His job was to get away, lets not forget – drives straight at a shop worker who jumps on the bonnet of the car. Genius. The shop workers have now entered the battleground of ineptitude. Without even exiting the car park, the car hits a curb and the two remaining assailants run off. Only they don’t get far.

Step 5. Leave you wallet and identification in the car.

Andy Huynh actually managed to escape the scene of the crime – Quite a feet of ingenuity considering what had come before – only to find the police knocking at his door a few minutes later with his wallet and ID in hand. Nice work sir.

Step 6. Run into a car wash, get wet, get caught.

Whilst Mr. Huynh was busy forgetting his wallet, Fiumetto was busy getting wet. He jumped over the retaining wall into the neighbouring car wash, hotly pursued by two police officers. Perhaps hoping to hide amongst the rollers and soap of the mechanical car wash, he darted straight inside. Yep, pincer manoeuvre by the police saw the suspect quite easily apprehended when he exited the car wash, soaking wet and foam on his head.

Denver Colorado is home to more professional sports teams than any other state in America. Denver Colorado, humble gold-mining town turned winter wonderland, has more parks than any other city in The United States – over 250 of them. Denver Colorado or The Mile High City, as it is known to many, sits 5280 feet above sea level, making its moniker mathematically perfect. Denver Colorado lays claim to 300 days of sunshine every year, boasts one of the most perfect mountain locations in mainland America and is full of the healthiest population in America. To put it bluntly, Denver Colorado is one mighty fine place to live. So why, if the city is so idyllic, so perfect, so steeped in everything that is good in life, does it harbour such callous ineptitude as was unearthed this week when two of its delinquent patrons took it upon themselves to drive one of their ‘friends’ to the pub? Oh yeah, when he was dead.

Denver. Some say that come the Second Coming, Denver will be the place to be. It is really that great.

Whether Robert Jeffrey Young (43) and Mark Rubinson (25) had been watching the 1989 film Weekend at Bernies before they undertook their mission of ineptitude is unclear, what is clear is that their crime bares an uncanny resemblance to the plot line of the cult film. In the film two men discover their boss has been killed by The Mafia and, to enjoy the fruits of his multi-million dollar beach-house, pretend he hasn’t actually died. What follows next, as the two protagonists try to convince an unsuspecting world -via strings and sunglasses – that their host is not dead, is a comedy of errors. In real life however, such Hollywood lunacy is not funny, not clever but dark and quite sick and being replicated in Denver Colorado.

The story unfolded when Rubinson received a call from his friend Young telling him that their friend Jeffrey Jarrett was, how shall we put this, unresponsive, not moving… dead. Rubinsons first response was not what you would think: going to the police or hospital was far from his mind. No, what these two needed was some beer, tequila, a nice little drinking binge, maybe some strippers and a helping of dinner in a fine restaurant. All on their dead friends credit card of course.

After discovering their dead friend the three men’s first port of call was Teddys T-bar and grill. Whilst Rubinson and Young chowed down on some lovely rump steak, their friend sat motionless in the back seat of Rubinson’s Lincoln Navigator, the blacked out windows masking the true, oxygen starved, already decomposing corpse. The next stop was a drink at Sam’s No. 3 before heading onto the nights showcase event. After dropping the long dead body of Jarrett at his home, some naked ladies were on the menu for these pair of Denver’s finest gutter juice. But first another meal. This time at Viva Burrito, their dining habits obviously as classy as their moralistic code of honour. After withdrawing 400 dollars from the Jarrett account, the pair headed to Glendale strip club where they remained until closing. They eventually hailed a police man at around 4am and alerted the authorities to their dead friend.

These two wined and dined themselves whilst their dead friend sat in their car

Take the Blame would like to highlight the ineptitude of two morally empty shells of vermin who have cast an unwanted, dirty, evil and dark cloud over one of the worlds most appealing cities. To the people of Denver, we are sorry that such people live in your midst.

This is a clam. It is not for smuggling drugs

This is a clam. If ever something was designed for not smuggling drugs in, then this was probably it. It is small. It is a mollusc. In what world would you fill these with cocaine and attempt to smuggle them into America? Oh yes, this world. This one which is full of ineptitude.

Top 10 global drug smugglers? None of them; not Escobar, not Marks, not Fuentes, not Loera, not even your local dope peddler, would think to smuggle drugs into The United States of America in a bag of clams. Even Birds Eye wouldn’t do it. So why did David Pocasangre Vaquiz from Venuezela do it? The reason is probably his ineptitude and why he is not a global drug lord but a small time crook smuggling a poultry 5 ounces of Cocaine into Dulles airport.

After arriving at the Virginia airport on a flight from Panama Mr Vaquiz passed through airport security and set some noses wagging. Initially it could well have been the smell. Most good cooks and Jamie Oliver advise you to keep clams thoroughly chilled during transportation and to eat as quickly as possible on removal from the sea. They also recommend not eating them if they are warm, dead or refuse to open when boiled. There is nothing about what you should do if they have been glued shut, stuffed in a handbag and carried half away across the United States of America.

Sea food tends to perish when exposed to high aeroplane cargo hold temperatures and with this comes a putrid smell. Perhaps it was this stench which first lead the airport staff to X-ray the hand baggage of the passenger who smelled of rotting fish. The X-ray showed clams full of cocaine.

The end result of such incompetence is obviously going to be a prison sentence where Mr Vaquiz will have plenty of time to concoct some more ingenious smuggling concepts.

This tale of deceit, forgery and fraud could have been hand picked directly from the script writing pages of the Bold and the Beautiful or the Young and the Restless. A modern tale of corruption and welfare fraud is hardly news; it happens every waking minute in every benefit and welfare system in the western world, hell, its happening more than it isn’t – yes Mr Job centre, I have been loooking for a job all week but there just isnt anything in the pub job adverts – but when it is laced with the gloriously day-time television evil twin sister, then people sit up and take notice.

Should Janell Athalone-Afrika need a new job, then day time TV script writing awaits

Janell Athalone-Afrika was a normal woman earning $8.52 working for the Indiana Department of Education. Between 2002 and 2009 she claimed around $15,000 from the Childcare Development Fund – a fund setup to help poverty stricken families living below anything approaching a financially stable environment – to compensate for her unusually low income as a state worker. Only she wasn’t earning $8.52 an hour but double that: $16.43. So how did she convince the Childcare Development Fund that she was only earning $8?

Quite easily is the answer. Enter the ineptitude. What she did, according to court records produced by investigators into her case – 27 times in total – was simply walk into the office of her boss, take his signature stamp and voila. She just changed  it. How to instantly half your pay packet. In 8 years working at the Department of Education not one person noticed the huge difference in declared by Janell Athalone-Afrika. Not one person noticed the missing signature stamp. Not one person at the Childcare Development fund thought it worth checking the data. Her boss never noticed, never investigated, never thought. Not one person cottoned on. For 8 years. That is a lot of ineptitude. We would like to highlight it, and then take the blame for it.

Is this the good or evil twin? Only they really know.

So where does the evil twin sister come into all of this? Eventually, in 2010, the deed was unearthed and Janell Athalone-Afrika was fired and court proceedings commenced. In her defence came the evil twin sister who dastardly and cunningly stole her identity. Like a cheesy story from Santa Barbara when the evil twin comes sauntering in, gun in hand, angry at the good twins success and out to destroy their good name, Janell Athalone-Afrika used the best excuse in the book.

However you want to look at it, eventually the ineptitude stopped and the evil twin sister story wasnt believed in court, which judging by the preceeding 8 years, it could well have been.

“It’s pretty clear we didn’t find any truth in the evil twin sister defense,” said Deputy Prosecutor Barb Trathen

Whoever said romance was dead had obviously never met Jordan Cardella from Wisconsin. If they had, they would have discovered that romance is alive and well, living in northern America and shooting itself in the back with a Glock 9 in a vain attempt to win back the affections of the one it once called “girlfriend”. Jordan Cardella wanted his girlfriend back so badly; his heart ached so much; that he forwent flowers, chocolate and all the usual run-of-the-mill romantic gestures and went straight for the horns. Bull horns. In the shape of an automatic weapon. And all because the lady doesnt love Cadburys Milk Tray but because she loves a man with bullet holes in his back. Or at least, one must assume, Monsieur Cardella believed so.

All because the lady loves chocolate, not self-inflicted gun wounds.

After being dumped by his girlfriend, the inept decided that seeing him in hospital, in pain, was the only way to make her realise how much she missed him, how she couldn’t live without him and how much she wanted him back. He concocted a cock and bullshit story with his friend Anthony Woodall whereby he would be shot in what would look like a gang land drive-by. Seeing him in such a state, his girlfriend would instantly fall back in love with him. Easy. Romantic, is it not? Who needs chocolate when you have blood-soaked clothes over multiple gunshot wounds?

Well, job done if by job done you mean 2 years probation, 100 hours community service, complete and utter silence from the magical girl at the heart of this story and a, still, very single Jordan Cardella. Take The Blame™ would like to point the finger at some very obvious ineptitude.

“Thank you homie. Good looking out“

Script from the latest Jason Stratham hostage blockbuster or the grammatically insane ramblings of a mental, rather inept, criminal from Utah, midway through a botched hostage situation as he updates his Facebook profile? Well, of course, Jason Stratham films don’t really have any words, just deep growling, so it must be the latter.

Jason Valdez kept friends and family updated during his 16-hour armed siege.

What you read above are the Facebook status updates of one Jason Valdez of Ogden, Utah. What is unusual is that these were posted during a 16-hour standoff with police whilst Mr. Valdez was holed up in a motel with a woman named Veronica, whom the police a described as a “hostage”. He was armed with a handgun and a smart phone. Whether it was iPhone or Blackberry has not been disclosed.

The story doesn’t have a happy ending. That said, it didn’t really have a happy beginning, but neither did Bambi, and looked what happened to that. Eventually growing tired of the Facebook updates and the constant page refreshing, the police swamped the motel and Jason Valdez shot himself in the chest! Not the head, the chest. The inept icing on the ineptly made hostage taking cake.

Half was through a stand off with SWAT? time for a quick photo with the hostage.

Obviously you don’t just walk into a motel, take a hostage and start posting social network updates about how the operation is going. It takes some time. Carefully botched crimes need to be undertaken before such a standoff. Enter criminal record. Petty crimes and drug misdemeanours led to aggravated assault and domestic violence in front of a child. Sick and bored of this stench on society prosecutors filed felony and misdemeanour drug possession charges against Mr. Facebookhostagestatusupdate. A hearing on June 1st was ignored and a warrant issued for Mr Valdez’s arrest was issued. On serving the notice the culprits only course of action was to hole himself up in a motel. Which is where the Facebook updates begin.

This man is more popular than you. Look how many comments he gets

During the 16-hour sit-in, Jason Valdez posted 6 updates. He received over 100 replies and added 12 friends. In the middle of an armed standoff with American SWAT, 12 people thought that befriending the villain was a good idea.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000295855161&sk=wall

Driving under the influence, aggravated assault, refusing an alcohol test, resisting arrest, evading arrest, underage drinking, having no insurance, and violation of the vehicle registration law. Quite a rap sheet and some way to end an evening of quite drinking in a bar. This is exactly how it ended for drunk, 19-year old Zachary Hunter Szela from Cookeville Tennessee.

After a few rounds of liquor, probably a few beers, a few games of pool and maybe some darts, it was time for the fun to start. Little Zach headed outside, pissed as a fart, climbed behind the wheel of Jeep wrangler and went ape shit. Accelerating way past the limit and jumping red lights as he hound down mainstreet, it was only a matter of time before he raised the attention of the local police. Step forward police officer Josh Ward who caught sight of Mr Szela running a red light.

Zach was driving so fast that the latest high-speed pursuit police cars were drafted in

The chase was on. It didn’t last long. Officer Ward soon caught up with the drunk criminal who was in no mood for quick surrender. When confronted with the long arm of the law and the drawn gun, the drunk teenager decided to drive around in circles in someones back yard. Just quite why he thought this was a good idea was not in any police reports.

The man “reversed westbound on Seventh Street and into the back yard of 738 N. Jefferson and traveled in circles in the yard approximately three times”

This was no ordinary criminal. Eventually the pursued ditched his car and tried his escape legs. Obviously being leathered, he wasn’t very good at that either and was soon tackled by officer Ward. This time Americas finest was met with a cruiser-weight headbutt. Undeterred, Mr Ward continued his attempted arrest and eventually got the cuffs on Mr Szela. Drunk, steaming and stinking of booze, the culprit denied all blame and pointed the finger at the bar he had been drinking in.

“that this whole ordeal was not his fault, He reasoned that it was Rodeo Bob’s fault due to the fact that he was drinking alcohol in that establishment while under age.”

“Hacking. It’s like a Berlinda Carlisle song. You know you shouldn’t like it but for some reason you do.”

So we have proved that hacking is cool. Along with driving Ferrari’s and sleeping with super models it is one of the few ambitions of almost all teenagers; the ability to hack into, what would turn out to be, completely pointless government and non-governmental websites. Yes you could hack into NASA. And do what? Ferris Bueller would hack into the school records and change his grades to A*. Surely the teachers would notice? The bank? Yes, you could hack into the bank and award a bank error in your favour. K’ching. $5 million please. You could hack an online poker room and see the cards. K’ching. You could access the criminal records and give people you don’t like imaginary criminal records and have them sent to prison.

World hacking champion hacks 10 at a time.

In reality, all of these things would quickly lead to frozen assets and prison-time. In the films green text scrolls down the screen, loading bars do crazy things, loud maniacal music intensifies the stress and something important is on the line. Usually the end of the world. In reality it is probably nothing like this. In reality, people are after telephone numbers and bank details. yawn.

Which is what happened with Sony recently. The story has received media overkill but essentially what happened is that on the 19th April 2011 unusual and unauthorized activity was noticed on Sony’s mega servers for PlayStation Online – a gargantuan online virtual playground where gamers go to kill and mame each other over vast, online battle fields, tennis courts, football pitches, alien plains, oceans and sky-scapes. Hacking was a-foot. Oh la la. The thing about the PlayStation Online Network is that you can’t just play, you have to register. (Ah ha. Register. One of the most time-consuming, repulsive and annoying words in the English lexicon.) As you can imagine, a lot of people registered. They gave their name, address, daytime telephone number, email address, and… drum roll please…..credit card details. You know what is coming? Yep. The hackers stole it all. All that juicy, precious, expensive information. Gone. Like Kaiser Soze.

100 million online users can't be wrong. But they can be seriously pissed off.

Rumours and blame and accusation abound. Sony is even considering offering Bobba Fett style bounties for information on who is to blame. But who is to blame? Fuck knows. People say the activist hacker group Anonymous. They are annonymous, nobody knows who they are but they deny it. So who could it be? Probably a 7-year old Ukranian computer genius. Or maybe Sony? Probably not this time, but they have done it before. Via ineptitude. Cold, hard, calculating ineptitude.

In 2001 Sony held a sweepstakes competition. In computer terms 2001 is like Le Mans in 1955 in car racing terms. Slow, dangerous and liable to crash at any moment. Suffice to say, not many people entered the competition. Luckily for them as 2500 people had their data spewed on to the Internet as the information was left on public servers for all and sundry to see.

“In the latest Sony hack, hackers did NOT publish customer confidential information on a website. Instead, Sony did,” as F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen explained at the time.

Fuck Blimey, it’s been a week already! In that time so much blame has fallen onto the Internet highway that it must be time to do a bit of digging and retrieve some of that delicious, mud slinging blame… mmmm

Sony. They used to make Walkmans, remember them? Technological icon. If your heart was beating during the 80′s and 90′s then two things are fundamentally clear; you were probably listening to shit music and you were probably listening to it through a Walkman. But then the Internet and Cd’s came along and raped the Walkman dry; time for a paradigm shift. Enter the PlayStation.

Ipods older, uglier, slower, retarded, inbred cousin

Unfortunately Sony has been so successful with its flagship gaming console that every game player in the universe uploaded all of their personal and financial details onto the online gaming network and then Sony lost it all in one of the biggest online identity theft mega crimes in the world. Unless you are blind and haven’t seen the news, essentially what happened is that someone or something caused all of the online information stored on the Sony gaming servers to be breached and a billion indiviuals’ bank and credit card numbers went public; Sony went offline; shares crumbled; Sony went into meltdown; someone has to be blamed. Well.  Sony has shifted blame back onto the Anonymous hactivist group.

“Sony has discovered a file named “Anonymous” planted on one of the Sony Online Entertainment servers. The file reportedly contains the words “We are Legion,” which is the unofficial slogan of the unofficial group”

Ahhhh. Fat kids. We all laugh at them. They are funny. Fat is funny. But why are kids fat? Too much alpha bettie spaghetti? Not enough smoking? Maybe they should be forced to smoke 37 Marlboro reds a day, soon have the pounds tumbling. The obesity in children epidemic could be washed away with a mandatory daily intake of fat shedding smoke. Or not. According to a new study fat kids are the result of bottle feeding. You heard it here second folks. Milk makes you fat.

“Letting a toddler continue to drink from a baby bottle may be a big fat mistake. Kids who stay glued to the bottle after age two are more likely to become obese, according to a new study. Scientists at Temple University tracked about 7,000 babies born in 2001, and found more than one in five were still sipping a bottle at age two. Of these kids, almost 30% were obese by the time they were 5 1/2.“

This is what could happen if you dont smoke

Piracy. It’s a crime. Apparently. We are not referring to Johnny Depps latest Pirate adventure (which is another crime. A crime against cinema) but to the Internet music and video kind. But who is to blame? The people who download or the people who make it available to download? Fuck knows. We don’t know and our copyright lawyers are about as much use as a 1-legged sheep dog; so we will leave that decision to the law makers Stateside. We might be close to an answer as CBS, which runs CNET and ZDNET, is being sued for copyright infringement. In a particularly unuseful analogy…….

“Alcohol is legal to purchase to a majority of citizens in the United States. The younger minority, however, fall under strict prohibition. If a youngster buys alcohol illegally, and drink-drives and kills someone, who is responsible? The person driving the car, or the person who sold the alcohol?“

Goats don’t make the headlines. Name a famous goat? You can’t, there aren’t any. Elephants have Dumbo, mice have Mickey, rats have Ratatouille, even pigs have Babe. Maybe that is why a West Virginian man went on a goat butchery paranoid trip after snorting too many “bath salts”. Yes, bath salts.

This is a goat. A psycho from Virginia killed it whilst wearing suspenders.

A psychopath from West Virginia put on suspenders, took off his trousers, went next door and killed his neighbours goat!!! crazy bastard. Apparently bath salts are to blame, not the psychos’ mental, paranoid personality.

“found the dead animal lying on the floor, with Thompson, 19, standing half naked and wearing women’s undergarments, according to police.”