Week 1

Without further ado we charge on into a new week. In the land of plenty the donkeys and the elephants (couldn’t they have chosen more exiting animals as political symbols – who wants to vote for a donkey?) partied hard on Super-Tuesday and nothing changed. The democrats still can’t decide if they like the new kid on the block – who’s black, which is a big deal there, if you didn’t know – and the grand old lady of Arkansas – who’s a woman, which is also a big deal. The land of the free and the home of the brave has never had a woman president or a black president. Hmmm. Makes you wonder. But there are still the republicans, and there is nothing like an ex-POW to melt your heart. Better than the guy who skipped out of the army reserves. And he was president twice!

But there are more important things happening in Freedomland. The word of the day is recession. They tried to avoid it. Bankers and economists used every synonym and euphemism they could, but it came back to bite them in their soft and flabby bits. Unfortunately it’s biting Europe, Asia and the rest of the world there, too. Stock markets are sliding inexorably south. Investment bankers are searching for somewhere, anywhere, to put their money. And even the Maharishi Yogi – remember him? The Beatles? Transcendental Meditation? Think and get rich? – checked out. He’s moved on to a better place, a higher plane, and left behind him wealth unimaginable. Not bad for a spiritual sage. Now if we could only recycle some of that moolah back into the economy, maybe we could thwart the recession?

Oh, and the CIA says that it used waterboarding, which is still denies is torture, although it says, as an addendum, that extreme measure need to be used to protect the homeland from desperate terrorists. And they only used waterboarding on three people, and that was five years ago, etc. Amnesty International is not convinced. “We must have the tools to enable the detection and disruption of terrorist plots and other threats,” said the National Intelligence Director, who included Russia and China, Iran and North Korea, and computer system vulnerabilities, as “other threats”. You can just see them waterboarding the board of directors at Microsoft because their recent offer to buy Yahoo threatens the security of the millions of computer users who have Yahoo accounts.

Yes, there is some serious shit out there. Opium production in the south of Afghanistan is expected to increase. Now we know why we went to war there. Junkies around the world look forward to better quality dope at lower prices. But if you thought it was all good news, the anti-drug lobby has just released another study – one in a long line of recent studies – showing that extensive cannabis use causes gum disease. Hah, don’t think there are no consequences for your actions. Don’t smoke weed. Your teeth will fall out. Also extensive meat eating causes heart disease. Let’s criminalize that, too. And don’t get me started on sugar.

In conclusion, and on a note rather more upbeat, the Italians have made an important contribution to medical science – fashion, too – by showing, in a medical study, that high heals improve your sex life. As if we needed a medical study for that. Love them, hate them, regardless of how you feel about squeezing your feet into a pair of five inch stilettos, you know when you put them on that you just doubled your chances of getting laid – and that goes for men, too. Apparently high heels are good for the pelvic muscles, which are good for… etc.

That’s all for this week. There will be more next week. Remember, there’s a whole lot of shit out there, and most of it we don’t get to hear about. So ask yourself, who decides what is important?