By Carla Kelly 

Maybe one reason people do crazy things is because they’re creative and they get bored. Or maybe they’re drunk, creative and bored. Case in point: A drunk in Australia recently tried to blow up Brisbane using a television remote control. According to police records, Geoffrey Martin Fryatt, resident of a luxury golf resort, threatened his neighbors with a knife and told them he was taking them all to that fairway in the sky, via chemicals he was going to set off with his remote.
    That he was having a bad day was probably an understatement. According to his attorney, Fryatt was more disturbed than usual because his financial advisor had managed to steal most of his life savings. Apparently his luxury lifestyle was about to vanish, and Fryatt decided to end it all with his TV remote. That had all the force and validity of trying to commit suicide by jumping out of a basement window.
    Fryatt’s stunt was strictly a no-harm-done kind of thing, something that might barely raise eyebrows during spring break at Fort Lauderdale, except that the judge pointed out that “people are genuinely scared of explosions.”
    I agree. I don’t live on the edge like Fryatt, but I’ll confess: You know those cans of biscuits in the cardboard tubes, the ones where you peel off the wrapper and the can explodes open? Darn things make me nervous, mainly because I never know when that pop! is going to come.
    Because of my personal issues with the Pillsbury Doughboy, if I’d been Fryatt’s neighbor, I’d probably have urged 20 to life, rather than the year’s probation he received. No indeedy, some of us really don’t like sudden explosions, even those that might – or might not – be set off by a television remote.
    Fryatt accepted probation, but was concerned that it might interfere with his plans to travel abroad to do some humanitarian aid work. Maybe if he doesn’t have to handle any television remote controls, he will do fine in Chad or Somalia. At the very least, he’ll see a host of other problems far worse than his own.
    Maybe he was bored. Fryatt’s creativity made me think about the Dalton Gang, who romped and stomped in the Oklahoma-Missouri-Kansas corridor that was home to bad boys in the decades following the Civil War. Some thugs, disguised as former rebels, were still sore about losing to damnyankees. (By the way, I believe that’s still one word, south of the Mason-Dixon line.)
    The Daltons were related to the Youngers and had some kinship ties to the James Gang, too. When I worked in public relations for a big hospital in southwest Missouri, I took a call from a reporter from Oklahoma whose last name was Younger. Curious as always, I asked her if she was related to Bob, Bill or Jim Younger, who did hard time in a Minnesota prison after their abortive 1876 raid on the First National Bank of Northfield.
    She said, yes, they were relatives, and we had a chuckle about it. From the distance of 100-plus years, it’s easy enough to laugh about notorious relatives. The reporter would have been distant kin to Bob, Jack, Emmet and Grattan Dalton, who specialized in robbing trains. That’s the colorful stuff that makes family reunions interesting.
    Maybe the Daltons were bored. Maybe they were drunk, like the Australian. In 1892, the Daltons got the bright idea to rob two banks simultaneously in broad daylight in Coffeyville, Kansas.
    Nobody said these guys were geniuses. Because they were known in the area, they wore fake beards, which didn’t stop the locals from recognizing them. Maybe the Groucho Marx glasses and moustaches were a giveaway.
    The gang robbed both banks and ran into a firestorm of bullets when they tried to escape. Two Daltons were killed, plus other gang members. Emmet Dalton was shot 23 times, but lived to serve 14 years of a life sentence before he was pardoned. He moved to California and sold real estate, obviously a crook to the end.
    After the shootout, the corpses were photographed, a common practice in the nineteenth century. This has given me hours of entertainment, gawking at photos of desperados shot with bullet and camera. Many had one bullet hole in the forehead. Those lawmen were good shots. Imagine what they could have done with a TV remote.