Okay, show of hands… Who here hasn’t fantasized about ripping off a tripod leg and going all Billy Jack on somebody? I myself have concocted whole action sequences in my head while pacing about some deserted sallyport (look it up). But to actually do it? In broad daylight? As cameras rolled? Gentility forbids! Besides, you know what kind of tensile strength it takes to wrench a limb off a modern-day camera stand? I’m w-a-a-y too lazy for that. Plus, I got CLASS – a mental condition not shared by the crazy bitch, er, distraught family member who – in under sixty seconds – brought more shame to Detroit City than any twenty members of the Kiss Army combined. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to step away from this paragraph and collect my thoughts.

Ahem.

You know, we’ve seen a lot of savagery here at Schmuck Alert Central. Handcuff tantrums, slow-motion moonshiner spit, a veritable parade of ill-advised dropkicks… But in all our days of screening rash of acts of video, we’ve never before witnessed the kind of tripod atrocity as the wanton utensil sacrifice depicted in the clip below.  As with many crimes against the camera, it happened outside a courthouse. That’s where the families of both the victim and defendant in a murder case left an arraignment Saturday afternoon. Free from the supervision of the courtroom’s drowsy bailiffs, the relatives waste no time cursing each other and the predictable collision ensues.

Third verse, same as the first.

Or so we think, for after a few moments of rampant apoplexy, one young lady sheds her pink jacket and does something wholly unexpected. She makes a beeline for the nearest tripod, body-slams the damn thing, then throttles that weak-kneed beast in front of God and everybody. This is a new maneuver in the annals of news crew abuse and quite possibly, a sign of the apocalypse. I can only wonder what’s going through the photog’s mind as he pans from the general chaos around him to the methodical dismemberment of the three-legged creature he takes with him everywhere he goes. The mind reels. Worse yet, the woman manages to separate said leg, no easy feat I assure you. She then brandishes it a bit before finally following her family down the street, all the while twirling the broken leg like some demented drum majorette from Hell and leaving the rest of civilization speechless…

Schmuck!