Archive: All the news that's unfit

These are hard times for humorists trying to scratch a living raising a smile from the wacky wonders of the world. The trouble is, real life is wiping the floor with us. The news these days is full of so many ridiculous, improbable items that comedians are being put under intolerable pressure to go one better.

And I'm not even talking about big-time international items like news that Iran might take over Rover, or the US authorities recent boast of having "nearly" captured Public Enemy Number Two Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (it won't have escaped your notice that "almost captured" is precisely the same as "still at large").

I mean the smaller, local items from your area. Here's what's being advertised in our local papers here over recent days. See how many of them you think I made up:

• A 22-year-old Moroccan girl died after visiting a faith healer to be cleansed of evil spirits, which process took the form of drinking an estimated 11 litres of water while he chanted Koran verses. The girl literally drowned. This was in Koekelberg. Last August a 23-year-old died in Schaerbeek from the attentions of a faith healer, who fed her emetics for eight days as a treatment for infertility.

• A 35-year-old Dutch-born woman from Tongeren in Limburg province spent one minute touting the joys of Belgium on the Oprah Winfrey Show. As well as telling Oprah about chocolate, beer and frites with mayonnaise, Maleka Berkers also pointed out that Belgian women think the American Dream is not in reality what the movies make it out to be. Collective gasp from chicks who were expecting a car.
  

• Men dream of sex, often involving women not their wives, and also of firing guns and driving fast cars, not necessarily at the same time, according to a recent sleep study. Women, on the other hand, dream of shopping, and sitting round the table with friends. This news is not exceptionable in itself, but what is incredible is that someone thought it worth reporting.

• Abroad, and a Frankfurt court has ordered Gunther von Hagens, creator of the flayed-corpses exhibition Körperwelten, to pay € 108,000 for using the title "Professor" without being entitled to. Von Hagens does have a professorship of sorts, awarded to him in China. But the court ruled this small fact was not made sufficiently clear by Von Hagens. The case was brought by Hamlet's old university of Heidelberg.

• Still abroad, and a shopping centre in Oude Pekela near Groeningen in the Netherlands has banned old people from assembling within the precincts, on pain of being ejected by police. The old folks, according to the centre's management, block the view of shop-windows, obstruct pathways and snoop on the contents of other people's shopping-carts. The centre already bans other disruptive elements, such as pets, skateboarders and young lollygaggers.

• Staying with crime, and thieves ripped off a family from Heers in Limburg twice on the same day. In the daytime they broke into the house and stole some jewellery, as well as the keys to the Merc. At night, as the poor benighted victims slept, the thieves came back for the motor.

• Doctors attending an emergency case will be allowed to drive over the speed limit if they warn the coppers first by calling 100, according to a new plan from health minister Rudy Demotte.

• More than 47,000 of the names listed in the central weapons register of the police are of dead people, some of whom fired their last salvo ten years ago. Nobody knows what became of the guns in question. And one in three of all weapons is registered under a wrong or a fake name, including multiple instances of a Mr. M. Mouse.

Yes, it's a funny old world, all right. It's enough to make a humour writer cut his own throat. And I'm not joking.

PS – Not a single one of the above stories was made up. There's no need to make things up these days.

From May 2005