The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, 2007

17. Quite a blow. After receiving a warning from the FDA, Redux Beverages agrees to stop calling its energy drink Cocaine. It changes the name first to Censored, then to No Name.

18. There will always be an England. A contributor to the website of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds complains that he is being censored when a filter in the site’s Microsoft software automatically replaces the word“cock”—the common designation for a male bird—with asterisks. “As bird lovers will know,” he writes, “a Parus major is a great tit, and while a **** doesn’t get past the forum censors, tits do not cause offense.”

19. What Lindsay Lohan will be driving in ’08. New Jersey Superior Court Judge Joseph Falcone dismisses drunk-driving charges against a Zamboni operator even though he tests positive for alcohol. The judge rules that the ice-grooming machines aren’t motor vehicles because they are not street legal.

20. Oh, that explains it. “The police, since my trouble, have not worked out for me.”— O.J. Simpson, on why he took matters into his own hands to reclaim memorabilia he says were pilfered. He is charged with kidnapping and armed robbery.

21. Right back atcha ... To build buzz for its animated show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network places electronic lightboards throughout Boston, triggering a bomb scare that shuts down two bridges, an expressway, a subway station, and a stretch of the Charles River. The devices depict a character from the show saluting passersby with an upraised middle finger.

22. Worth a shot, anyway. A Tanzanian native, claiming ancestry in both the Gogo and the Yao tribes, sued Google and Yahoo, alleging that they had misappropriated the tribal names.

Match Game, 40,000 B.C. Connect the Neanderthal with his shockingly unevolved deed:

28. I mean, since there wasn’t any bloody ice on my bloody sidewalk … In an interview with a British rock magazine, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards admits to snorting his father’s ashes: “He was cremated, and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow.” A day later Richards denies the incident, explaining, “I was trying to say how tight Bert and I were—that tight!”

29. Faux de Cologne. Sonntags Zeitung, a Swiss newspaper, publishes a two-page ad for Gucci Eau de Parfum that turns out to be a hoax by a prankster who took a picture of himself posing naked next to a bottle of the high-end scent.

30. Remarkably, he has yet to be weeded out. In July, as Bear Stearns executives futilely attempt to prop up two hedge funds that ultimately collapse amid the subprime meltdown, CEO James Cayne spends ten of 21 workdays out of the office, playing golf and competing in a bridge tournament in Tennessee. According to the Wall Street Journal, his fellow bridge enthusiasts claim that Cayne sometimes smokes marijuana at the end of tournament sessions.

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