Everybody knows I love dumb criminal stories, and here are two great ones.

For starters there was the robber in Canada, who had just about everything go wrong that could go wrong. While trying to rob a convenience store he slammed the till with an aluminum baseball bat, jamming it before the clerk could open it.

It gets a lot worse, especially the part where the clerk escapes and bars the robber from leaving through the doors, and then the part where the robber escapes by the roof but then crashes through the store’s ceiling. The only good news is, he wasn’t the dumbest cook of the week.

No, that honor goes to an would-be robber in Iowa. According to a Des Moines Register story, this guy was also trying to rob a convenience store, and claimed to have a gun in his coat pocket. The problem was, the clerk could tell that it was just the guy’s finger. “I could see his thumb sticking out of his coat pocket,” the clerk said.

The clerk accused the crook of not having a gun, the guy said yes indeed he did have one. You’d think an argument like that would be fairly easy to settle. Anyway, the guy left, empty-handed, unless you count his thumb. 

I have a gun… California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger shows a thumb-up in a 2004 photo. REUTERS/Kimimasa Mayama