There Is News Beyond Tr**p

In the big wide world of ours, there are tons of things going on that don’t include President What’s-His-Name.  In the great mediagasm journalists are having with the guy, here are a few things you might have missed.

In Mexico, the American DEA found a catapult that drug dealers were using to fling narcotics across the border — I assume marijuana.  And this wasn’t just your average medieval rock-tosser, either — the thing was huge.  There’s an “A” for ingenuity in there somewhere, but honestly, why didn’t anybody notice?  I can pick out where my car is parked with Google Earth, and one would think government satellite surveillance was a little bit more sophisticated than that.  But I guess it’s the same old story: when you don’t need a catapult, they seem to be everywhere, but the day you’re looking for one, they’re nowhere to be found.

Apparently, China has discovered that they have a gigantic gender imbalance.  They estimate that, by the end of the decade, there will be 30 million more men in China than women.  To put things into perspective, that’s more single men than the entire population of Austria, Switzerland and Sweden — combined.  The Chinese call them “leftovers,” and there are a number of academic studies trying to figure out how and why this happened.  But honestly, does it matter?  (Toothpaste out of the tube, etc. etc.)  Unfortunately, nobody is addressing the elephant in the room– which is what do you do with 30 million horny men, bubbling over with enough testosterone to melt the polar ice caps?  After all, baseball and cold showers can only do so much!

Oddly enough, the same day China admitted their gender situation, Playboy decided to bring boobs back to its pages.  Coincidence? Yeah, probably!  Pen and paper magazines continue their trudge to the grave, and a little nudity isn’t going to stop that for a nanosecond.  But there’s no law against full frontal irrelevance, I guess.

And finally, my favourite:

Grace Mugabe, wife of 92 year old President Robert Mugabe, who’s been running and ruining the beautiful country of Zimbabwe since 1980, was in the news.  (Honestly, I didn’t know he was married to anything but evil.)  Anyway, she maintains that her husband is so popular in Zimbabwe that, if he died, he could run for president as a corpse and still win the election.  Strange as this sounds, it actually happened — in Missouri, in 2000.  Incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was beaten by Democrat Mel Carnahan who died in a plane crash two weeks before the election.  What a major kick in the self esteem!  When your opponent is dead, and he’s the one who gets elected — well — that pretty much seals the deal that the people of Missouri don’t want you around, John.  All’s well that ends well, though, because in 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft Attorney General.  And we all lived happily ever after.