5 People Who Screwed Things Up for Everybody
People complain about a lack of accountability in today's society -- politicians and bankers alike escape from scandals with no consequences beyond a stint in rehab and a nice book deal. Well, we at Cracked are all about finding the people who have made our lives just a little bit worse. Things didn't have to be as messed up as they are now, and it only takes a few assholes to ruin life for the rest of us.
#5. Ronald Clark O'Bryan Ruined Halloween
If you grew up in America, odds are pretty good that you've donned your costume and done your Halloween rounds just like millions of other children. You may cherish the memories of getting home from a long night of trick-or-treating, pulling off your ninja mask and dumping a huge-ass sack of candy onto the carpet. You may also remember, rather less fondly, waiting for what seemed to be a light-year (concepts of time and space weren't your strong suit) for your parents to finish searching said candy for deadly poison.
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"Remember, kids, there are always strangers out to murder you."
If you asked them what they were doing, they'd tell you stories of evil people all across America inserting poison or razor blades or some other horrifying object into the candy they hand out to children. A policeman may even have shown up at your school to lecture you about it, or you may have seen public service announcements on television, warning you to only accept candy from people you knew, and only treats that still had their wrappers intact.
What is it about Halloween candy that turned normal grown-ups into over-protective zealots? It's such a bizarre, improbable thing to worry about, like not letting you jump in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese's for fear there might be snakes in there. How many poison-dealing mass murderers can there be in the Western world, anyway?
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A little poison is good for kids. Keeps 'em from getting soft.
Actually, it all traces back to one person. The man in question is Ronald Clark O'Bryan, an almighty dickhole who poisoned his own 8-year-old son with cyanide in order to collect on a $40,000 life insurance policy, and who we will exclusively refer to with irreverent nicknames from now on because, seriously, screw that guy.
Asshole O'Bryan slipped the poison into a bunch of Pixy Stix, which he then stapled shut. Yes, we said a bunch -- one just wouldn't do, because following some strange logic accessible to only the criminally insane, Shitbricks O'Bryan decided to poison every child his son went trick-or-treating with. Through either a miracle or, more likely, the fact that Pixy Stix suck balls, none of the other kids were harmed. O'Bryan was caught, found guilty and executed, but the case was widely publicized and so the damage had already been done.
State of Texas
We're pretty sure Texas came into existence just to punish Cocksheath O'Bryan.
And that is how even now, close to 40 years later, a trick-or-treater has to write off every piece of candy with a hole in the wrapper. Which is really sort of unfair, as although there have been a couple of other isolated incidents of poisoned candy since Dick O'Bryan set the trend, not a single one of them has been the doing of a random poison-maniac with a grudge against kids in cheesy costumes.
So, we guess the moral of the story is: If someone is going to poison your child's Halloween candy, chances are it's going to be you.
Wikipedia Commons
Also, stay the hell away from Pixy Stix.
#4. Rich Skrenta Released the First Computer Virus
Nowadays, we're so saturated with warnings about viruses and other malware that we never stop to think about how weird it is that such a thing even exists. We almost treat them like actual viruses, like something that naturally occurs in the world that we just have to live with. But behind every computer virus is an actual asshole with programming skills who is intentionally trying to harm strangers' computers. It'd be like living in a world where every sickness was the result of a weaponized microbe some stranger made and blindly inflicted upon you, for absolutely no reason. Who started this shit?
Steve "Antichrist" Ballmer?
Well, we guess it makes sense that the ultimate form of petty, mindless dickery has its origin in a spiteful teenager. Namely, a 15-year-old called Rich Skrenta.
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Spiteful teenagers are also the origin of corpse-camping, 4chan and Goatse.
Skrenta, who was either a dick or just going through a dick phase in his life, had a habit of modifying the games he traded with his friends to display taunting messages on their screens. When this got boring -- or, more likely, when he got tired of getting his ass kicked by the people he'd tricked -- Skrenta set about looking for a way to mess with other peoples' computers without making himself the obvious culprit. He ended up developing something called a boot sector virus, which installed itself on any machine that booted from an infected floppy disk.
(Note: For those of you born past the early '90s, floppy discs are things we used to store data, and we continued to call them floppy discs even though they were square and, later, rigid unfloppy plastic.)
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They made pretty fair throwing stars, too, if there wasn't a teacher in the room.
This virus program, named Elk Cloner, had two distinct key features that you can see in its modern descendants even today. First, it was able to breed. Once a computer was infected, every disc you put in it would get loaded with the malicious code, which basically made it herpes for high school computer class. Elk Cloner's other innovative feature was an annoying little message that would pop up on every 50th boot:
"Elk Cloner: The program with a personality/It will get on all your disks/It will infiltrate your chips/Yes, it's Cloner!/It will stick to you like glue/It will modify RAM too/Send in the Cloner!"
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For an explanation, we turn to marijuana.
While these days Skrenta regrets letting the genie out of the bottle, he does argue that the basic idea of a self-propagating virus would probably have "gotten out anyway." While he may or may not be right in his argument, that won't stop us from resenting the hell out of him and making cheap, outdated insults about his stupid, stupid face.
Burnszilla
Way to go, Four-eyes McWaveyhair.
#3. "Mrs. Geo O. Haman" Created Chain Letter Fraud
Speaking of things some of you are too young to remember, before all of those bullshit scam emails in the form of messages from Nigerian princes, obscure foreign lotteries and suspiciously typo-filled queries from your bank, those scams were carried out with actual, physical chain letters you got in the mail.
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"Mail" was that papery stuff people used to shove in boxes in front of your house.
There were always two types -- the kind intended to scam you out of money, and the kind that were just intended to be forwarded and thus spread as far and wide as possible (the latter was the old equivalent of the "Post this on your wall if you want to stand up for abused children" stuff you see on Facebook today).
Both types of chain letter go back hundreds of years. The innocuous ones like this one from 1795 were annoying, but ultimately harmless. But then in 1888 somebody figured out how to make some cash off of it, and the scam chain letter was born.
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"My wife will die if I don't forward $50? Little does he know, I hate my wife."
A New Hampshire resident named Ms. Wood received a letter begging funds for educating the poor whites of Cumberlands. We're not sure who exactly was behind this -- our only existing clue to the author is the name "Mrs. Geo A. Haman," which, given fraudsters' notorious disregard of real-name usage, we're going to go out on a limb and assume wasn't the person's true identity.
While today's scams are focused on stealing your bank account information, Haman was dealing with people of the 19th century. They were simple folk who tended to keep their money under mattresses or buried in the backyard. So this enterprising scammer figured out the only way to make real money was with volume, by soliciting small donations from long chains of people. To save on postage, you encourage each victim to forward the letter to multiple people on your behalf.
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"Hassling my entire family is a small price to pay for vague promises of future wealth."
This, given the speed and reliability of postal services of the day, meant the payoffs weren't too mind-boggling: "Mrs. Haman's" letter, for instance, solicited exactly five 10-cent donations: from the recipient and four of her friends.
Modern scammers have learned a lot since those early days -- namely, that the appeal to greed is far more profitable than the appeal to charity. And although "Mehmet IV, a Nigerian prince of some importance" might not wipe his royal ass with today's equivalent of half a 19th century dollar, the person behind him would likely give an approving nod to Haman's pioneering spirit of preying on the gullible.
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Mrs. Geo Haman, patron saint of scamming the elderly.
the Halloween candy one made me think of the beginning of Halloween 2 at the hospital, the kid is drooling blood because there were razor blades in his candy :O
ReplySo I spent all day yesterday telling people that it was soooooo rare to find poison or razor blades in Halloween candy and how it's soooooo silly that everyone freaks out about it. "Seriously!" I exclaimed. "You guys should read Cracked!"
ReplyToday on the local news, there's a story about how a kid found a razor blade hidden in a Reese's that he got for Halloween...
Sonofabitch.
#7: Adam and fricken Eve....
Reply#6: Simon Cowell, for, if not killing music, then at least breaking both of its legs.
Reply"So, we guess the moral of the story is: If someone is going to poison your child's Halloween candy, chances are it's going to be you."
ReplyThis is one of the greatest lines in the history of the site.
I was thinking about it. I guess technically altering pictures of people to make them look better has existed since before ancient Egyptian times. Unless we are just talking about photography. But still, things like that have been going on forever. I guess we shouldn't expect any different. It only surprises me it took that long to figure out.
Reply"the fact that Pixy Stix suck balls"
ReplyI think you guys need to check your facts, because Pixy Stix rock like a motherfucker.
Was it Upright Citizens Brigade that had a Pixy Stix analog that they treated like cocaine?
gasp how dare women like me love the way they look I hate this thats why with shows like drop dead diva and movies like precious I am happy because my nieces are subjected to this and I don't want them thinking that if they don't look like the supermodels they're worthless
ReplyDon't forget to breathe.
Great list. Why in the name of God would somebody poison not just other people's children's candy, but their own child's candy on Halloween? Period! Why! I'm glad that a-hole was executed. That's just horrible. Personally, it probably should've been somewhere up the top of the list.
Replythree words that form the motive for a good half of the crimes on this earth. For the money.
he probably tried to poison the other kids in a bad attempt to disguise the source of said poison. It would have looked more suspicious (and it did) if only 1 kid got sick when there was a group of them that all went to the same houses
I f*****g hate chain letters and chain emails. And both one of my brothers, and one of my female cousins used to send them to me, until I told them to f**k off with that bullshit.
ReplyI almost spat at my screen when you put the mugshot up of Cuntrags O'Bryan. At least it had a happy ending. They executed that piece of s**t
Reply"and we continued to call them floppy discs even though they were square and, later, rigid unfloppy plastic"
ReplyActualy, I believe they're still round and floppy; only the outter container is square and rigid.
That is correct. And funny enough, you can make that out in the close up shot.
"live to regret his roll"
Replywas that a fat joke?
Nice one, Evans! Good article.
ReplyGeo A. Haman isn't a crazy made up name. This is from the 1800s...she is the wife of George A. Haman
ReplyPeople who let photoshopped pictures of good looking people affect their body image are f*****g idiots. People who get an eating disorder because of this s**t deserve it.
ReplyIts going to be funny when you die alone, buried under the pile of hoarded crap you used to fill the gaping hole in your empty, empty head.
You should really mostly blame the media for convincing young women that being anorexic is the perfect body image, not themselves.
In 1988 40 cents would have been decent pocket money. I've seen a 1920's catalogue; back then $5 would buy you a new designer dress.
Reply40 cents would've been about a (generic) soda and a half in 1988. So I'm going to go ahead and assume you mean 1888 and 50 cents. In which case, yeah, it was about a third of a day's pay.
Didn;t the "razor blade in the apple" end up being a total fabrication?
ReplyAnyway, we have a whole new way of ruining Halloween now; people are too f*****g lazy & cheap to decorate their houses; few people visit undecorated houses & skip neighborhoods where few houses are decorated.
Last year we were the only decorated house in the neighborhood, & according to the kids, one of only 3 houses giving out candy. I told the kids they could each take as much candy as they could hold in one fist (both fists for the smaller ones) & we still had a ton of candy left over; only 50 kids came to the neighborhood, & it's a good, nice looking neighborhood too.
Here's another one that should've made the list: John Walsh, aka host of "America's Most Wanted."
ReplyYes it was very tragic that his son Adam was abducted and killed by a stranger, but he had to go and make every parent in America paranoid about child abduction. Statistics show that abductions by strangers are very low. Most abductions are by an estranged parent who wants custody, or some other relative.
As a result of John Walsh's campaign to make every parent a paranoiac, you no longer see children playing outside, engaging in creative, spontaneous, interactive imagination-building.
That wasn't John Walsh's fault (who put a lot of scumbags away with his needed TV show), it was Atari's fault! Seriously, they pretty much started the video game rage in the US and we've been addicted ever since. Yes, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Microsoft have and are contributing to this, but I'm going to blame Atari. They suck.
It's not the parents who keep the kids in, it's the kids who WANT to stay in. They'd rather chop up hookers with a cutting torch than throw around a football. They used to play hide and seek, now they can hide bullets in various "bad guy" bodies.
The worst thing is I can't blame them. Video games are freakin' sweet. It's not better than the outside though. And to be fair, I know a lot more parents who have to turn off the game systems and force their children to go outside than those who are keeping them in due to "boner-crazed rapists" or whatever.
While there is something to the video game theory, media fear-mongering is way, way more harmful than any video game could ever be.
Barely-related fact: The first computer 'bug' ever was an actual bug that got inside the computer and shorted out a circuit.
ReplyI believe it was some sort of moth.
The moth's last words were "ILOVEYOU".