Robots, Sweden are dicks.

A Swedish company recently had a robot assault a maintenance worker, snapping four ribs like so many rice krispies (sources did not indicate whether they also crackled and popped). At this time it is unknown if the robot had an Austrian accent and carried a sawed-off shotgun in a box of roses, so I'm forced to assume it did.

The maintenance worker in question was supposed to perform necessary maintenance on either the robot or a machine next to it. More than likely whistling to himself, certainly unaware that he was about to be involved in robotfighting (the most testosterone-fueled activity known to man other than grizzly bear rape), the man was caught off guard when the machine grabbed him by the head.

I would like to point out at this point that the ribs which he broke were not located in his head, which means that either the robot held him by the head and pummeled his body with its free appendages, or something considerably less awesome.

Swedish engineering at work

The worker managed to fight the robot off-possibly through use of a hydraulic press and/or pit of molten steel- and escaped with his life.

Sweden's response was to fine the company $3000. To put that in perspective, in Texas, the second DWI offense is, among other severe penalties (including driver's license suspension and jail time), $4000.

Apparently constructing man-hunting robots is only 75% as bad as driving after 5 beers.

Sweden gets a 6/10, robots get a 9.5/10 on the International Dickhead Scale.

Bill was a dick.

In Tarantino's masterpiece Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2, the late masturbation victim David Carradine portrayed the titular Bill. He was the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, and was presumably responsible for the death of dozens of people. However, those people are not the focus of the Dickhead Chronicles.

The focus of the Dickhead Chronicles is his treatment of one Beatrix Kiddo, also known as The Bride. He fucked all of his assassins, and happened to get Beatrix pregnant. Beatrix chose not to allow her daughter to be born into a life based around "jetting around the world, killing human beings, and being payed vast sums of money for it." She chose to move to El Paso, Texas and find a chump to marry. Bill found out about this, carefully contemplated, and came up with a reasonable, appropriate response:murdering her husband to be, along with his family and friends, and putting a bullet in her head.

Pictured: reasonable, appropriate response.

He ended up getting his comeuppance, but as he said, he is a "murdering bastard, and there are consequences to breaking the heart of a murdering bastard." And there are also consequences to breaking the heart of a dickhead.

Taking into account the severe breaking of boss/employee etiquette, I give Bill a 6/10 on the International Dickhead Scale.

Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was a dick.

In Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, R. Lee Ermey plays the drill sergeant in charge of the training of young marines. By training, I mean constructive criticism, a helpful attitude, and a persona of quiet, wise guidance. Here are the nine most helpful pieces of advice he offers in the movie, in no particular order:

9) "If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death, praying for war. But until that day, you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings! You are nothing but unorganized grab-ass-tic pieces of amphibian shit."

8) "Who the fuck said that? Who's the slimy little comet of shit twinkle-toed cocksucker down here who just signed his own death warrant? Nobody, huh? The fairy fucking godmother said it. Out-fucking-standing. I'll [physical train] you all until you fucking die!"

7) "I admire your honesty. Hell, I like you. You can come over to my house and fuck my sister!" *punches Private Joker in the gut*

6) "You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck!"

5) "I bet you're the kind of guy who would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach around! I'll be watchin you!"

4) "Private Pyle, I'm gonna give you three seconds, exactly three fucking seconds to wipe that stupid looking grin off your face, or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skullfuck you!"

3) "Private Pyle, you had best square your ass away and start shitting me Tiffany cufflinks. Or I will definitely fuck you up!"

2) "Move it! Are you quitting on me? Well are you? Then quit, you slimy fucking walrus looking piece of shit! Get the fuck off of my obstacle! Get the fuck down off of my obstacle! Now! Move it! I'm gonna rip your balls off so you cannot contaminate the rest of the world!"

1) "Were you born a fat slimy scumbag puke piece of shit, Private Pyle, or did you have to work on it? Move it up! Quickly! Hustle up! The fuckin war will be over by the time we get up there, won't it, Private Pyle? Move it! Are you going to fucking die, Pyle? Are you going to die on me? Do it now! [...] Do you feel dizzy? Do you feel faint? Jesus H. Christ, I think you've got a hard-on!"

I was originally planning on commenting on each of those statements, but I really don't think anything I can say can do justice to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman's effective leadership skills.

Pictured: Effective Leadership Skills

Hartman ends up punishing the entire platoon (brigade? I don't know, I can't be bothered with things like research) every time Private Pyle makes a mistake. This causes them to respond by beating Pyle mercilessly with bars of soap wrapped in towels. The constant abuse from the sergeant combined with his utter social ostracism leads to Pyle's mental breakdown. Though he makes it all the way through boot camp, on the last night he murders Gunnery Sergeant Hartman and then turns his rifle on himself (Spoiler. Fuck off, the movie came out like 20 years ago.)
Because he announced in his opening monologue that he was a raging dickhead, he gets some grace points, ending up at a 6.5/10 on the International Dickhead Scale.

Captain Hook is a dick.

Captain James Hook is the antagonist in the beloved story of Peter Pan. He is also known as being the lovable source of many children's nightmares.

I see no way this could be terrifying to a five year old.

He is the captain of the Jolly Roger, and the sworn nemesis of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. He spends his time kidnapping children, swearing violently, abusing his crew, and trying to trick Peter into letting his guard down so he can stab him.

"Would you have a seat over there?"

Captain Hook once had a man thrown into the "boo box" to be executed with fucking scorpions. His crime was conspiracy to mutiny. Ha ha! Just kidding! He placed a bet against Hook being able to kidnap Peter Pan's children. A bet. As in a wager. Remember the time you and your buddy were drinking and he said he was gonna bring home the girl across the bar? Remember how you entered into a friendly wager with him, saying he wouldn't? That was a capital crime on board the Jolly Roger.

Roulette was probably punishable by flogging.

Captain Hook, you get a 7.5/10 on the International Dickhead Scale. However, I don't think they have the Internet in Neverland, so you'll probably never see this.

The Ascaris worm is a dick.

Most parasites are dickheads; they don't do anything productive, they leech what they need to survive from something bigger, stronger, and better adapted to the world at large, and they leave their host weaker and worse off as a result of their actions. So, in many respects, they are like bicycle cops.

Pictured: upholding the law

But, they get a bit of leeway, because they are just following their method of survival. However, the Ascaris worm exceeds all expectations of dickery. When they are present in people, it is referred to as Ascariasis. About 1 in 6 people in the world currently have this infection. Because I like lists, I will give the expected life cycle of the Ascaris worm as it relates to humans in list form.

1) The egg is swallowed, by eating contaminated meat or plant products contaminated with feces.

2) The egg hatches in the intestines.

3) The larvae, driven by primal instinct to be a total fucking douche, burrows through the intestinal wall to the lung. It also burrows through muscle, and any important organs that happen to be in the way, depending on where in the intestines it hatches.

4) Once in the lung, the human body coats the worm in mucus. It is couged up and swallowed.

5) The worm passes through the digestive tract, and stops in the intestines, where it lives out its adult life.

6) The worm lays its eggs in the intestines, and they are passed out in the feces.

If you noticed something strange about #3-5, congratulations, you are not as big a prick as the Ascaris worm. If you didn't, go back and read it again-the worm burrows through your internal organs and ends up exactly where it started. I see absolutely no reason for this; it must be simply because the Ascaris worm is a total douchebag. That's like breaking into someone's house, stealing all of their valuables, loading them into your getaway car, and then waiting for them to get home so you can beat the shit out of them before you make your getaway.

They also look horrifying:

Guh.

The Ascaris worm gets a 9/10 on the International Dickhead Scale.

Christopher Columbus was a dick.

This October 12th, we will be celebrating the day Columbus discovered America. We call this Columbus Day. Venezualans call it the Day of Indigenous Resistance. They call it this because the Day the Native Culture Got Sodomized was already taken (citation needed).

Columbus started this day off right by dicking one of his crew out of a small fortune. The first person to sight land was supposed to get a pension for life of 10,000 maravedis (at current exchange rates, about twelve bucks). The sailor tried to collect his reward, and Columbus informed him that he himself had "seen a light" the evening before, and the sailor would get nothing (Zinn 2). To give you an idea how much money this was back then, consider the following: In 1755, after two hundred sixty more years of inflation, the Homestead Newspaper valued a "Mulatto boy" named Harry at $27 (Indentured Servants and Slave Prices). So basically, Columbus cheated an employee out of the equivalent of a free slave, every two years, for life. Before breakfast.

He then came ashore, and met a friendly people called the Arawak. They were very generous and friendly, giving Columbus and his men presents. Columbus, seeing the tiny gold earrings they wore, assumed the island had gold floating around everywhere... like pollen, or genocide. He took a bunch of slaves back to Spain, lied to the King and Queen about what he found, and came back with more ships. That's when the real fun began. Spanish gold lust got to the point over the next few years that they forced all the natives to bring them gold every three months (Zinn 4). They gave a token to each person who brought it, and whenever they caught a native without this token, they cut off his fucking hands and let him bleed to death.

Might have looked something like this.

When the spanish were bored, they would "cut slices off [the natives] to test the sharpness of their blades". If they fought, they were captured, and either hanged or burned alive. If they ran, the Spanish hunted them down with dogs. The Arawak people responded with mass suicides. All told, in 2 years, Columbus and his men were responsible for 125,000 deaths in Haiti. To put that in perspective, if modern-day Tallahassee had been the place ol' Chris had landed, he would have killed 3 out of 4 people. In 2 years (Zinn 4-7).

Columbus, you get a 10/10 on the International Dickhead Scale. Congratulations, dick.

Citations:

"Indentured Servants and Slave Prices" http://curry.edschool.virginia.edu/socialstudies/projects/jvc/unit/econ/msstatemsg.html 27 March 2009

Zinn, Howard. A people's history of the United States. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Warden Samuel Norton was a dick.

I realize that some people may not know who Warden Samuel Norton is. I encourage those people to rethink their lives.

Warden Norton is the warden of Shawshank Prison in The Shawshank Redemption. He enjoys the classic warden hobbies of buying worm-ridden food, employing an openly sadistic captain of the guards, ignoring shower rape, and working on his smirk.

"I'm sorry, but preventing shower rape's just not in the budget."

Tim Robbins' character, Andy Dufresne, is in prison for a murder he didn't commit, and is making a habit of being raped in places much more creative than a shower. Tool sheds, laundry supply rooms, and projection rooms are all fair game. Warden Norton realizes that he has a chance to exploit his captive slave labor, and offers Andy a deal: temporary rape immunity in exchange for embezzling and laundering a fuckload of money. Andy accepts, and they live happily ever after, thriving off of each other's mutual favors.

Ha! Just kidding. Instead, evidence surfaces showing Andy's innocence, and Norton has the only witness shot. Andy threatens to stop, and Norton informs him that he will be "cast down with the sodomites."

7/10. Fucking prick.