Spencer Wolfe

Sepo land, brilliant!

Time once again to review the winners of the Annual “Stella Awards.”

The Stella Awards are named after 81 year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot
coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonald’s (in USA). That case
inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous, ridiculous, successful
lawsuits in the United States. Here are this year’s winners (from 5th to 1st
place)

5th Place (tie):
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.

5th Place (tie):
19-year-old Carl Truman of Los Angeles won $74,000 and medical expenses when
his neighbour 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 neighbour’s hubcaps.

5th Place (tie):
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. In my opinion this is so
outrageous that it should have been 2nd Place!

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 neighbour’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 neighbouring 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 (RV) motor
home. On her first trip home, having driven onto the freeway, she set the
cruise control at 70 mph and calmly left the driver’s 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.

Mr Abe’s stunning resignation has shocked Japan both with its timing and with its meaning. Unpopular and unimpressive in office, there is almost a sense of relief that this disastrous administration is over. But as Japan experienced in the 1990s one Prime Minister leaving does not guarantee that a better one will take his place. The principal candidates – Messrs Aso, Tanigaki, Fukuda, Yosano and Nakagawa, as well as outsider Ms Koike – are all LDP insiders who will have to face the challenge of achieving electoral popularity with a party platform of traditional values. Those traditional values were espoused by Mr Abe, and look what they did for him, but the LDP is not quick to accept changes in direction. The party might decide that a quick and clean decision is necessary, in which case one of the favourites such as Mr Aso gets the job, or it might decide that it has to face reality and accept more voter-friendly policies, in which case we have a battle on our hands and a less obvious candidate may get it. It will be an interesting week.

The policy implications are vast. The Abe administration did not have a great economic agenda and for the last 12 months the economy has largely been on autopilot, with few major reform initiatives. This has resulted in greater bureaucratic influence over policy making, which while not necessarily a bad thing in the short term, in the long run would result in less market-oriented small government policies. Does the next Prime Minister look at the election results and think that the LDP needs to reconnect with the regions – resulting in some unwelcome pork barrel projects and spending? Or does the next Prime Minister look at the fiscal position and make Japan face up to the awful inevitability of tax rises? And will we have a government which is business friendly and agnostic about the nationality of business? These are important issues; in an environment where the LDP has to court popularity, and where few of the candidates have what one might call an Economist type of policy platform, we cannot be optimistic.

Quoted from the Economist Tokyo