The Reluctant Whore

Week #46 In Review


The past week was peppered with enormous events, there’s really no way around it. Italy was the host nation to the final step confirming the capture and imprisonment of Katie Holmes and O J Simpson more or less confessed to the murders he was acquitted of a decade ago in what amounts to possibly the worst TV idea in the history of television.

Bad TV was always a staple anyway and this week the Fed Ex divorce continued to remind us of that as Shar Jackson and Jason Alexander clamored to have their opinions about the divorce of Britney Spears and Kevin Federline heard. Despite the fact that The Borat film is one of the most culturally successful films in recent memory, it’s creator Sacha Baren Cohen was hit in the face in new York this week and sued by some embarrassed frat boys who appear in the film looking stupid. Because, it’s not fair to point out what everyone probably already knew anyway.

But, these were the stories you would have had to have been in a coma to miss out on so in order to grow and develop beyond the obvious, here now are some of the more pressing of the less reported stories that occurred during this, the 46th week of 2006.

A Brazilian woman this week was in hospital recovering well after being shot in the head 6 times by her ex-husband after she said she refused to get back with him. No doubt this was an experience that reminded her exactly why she dumped him in the first place; what a failure, he couldn’t even kill her properly.

And speaking of marriages that were experiencing mild to medium level difficulty, the pandas who were married in Thailand close to a year ago were being shown panda porn this week in an effort to get them in the mood enough to have sex and get pregnant. Despite the ice cake and internationally attended, media swamped marriage the zoo thoughtfully put together for them last year, the spark of sexual interest between the pandas is only flickering meagerly.

What was flickering anything but meagerly in Romania this week was tolerance for insubordinate students as the school board and parents of the students voted to punish unruly high school kids by forcing them to clean the school pigsty. Good students, it is assumed were allowed to taste the school vodka and brush the school mule.

But while Romanian pigs were being promised more luxurious quarters in Romania, Los Angeles pigs were busy being frozen whole and then mistakenly dumped all over a sidewalk this week in what looked like a conceptual pig and ice based performance piece but was really just the product of human error. Swedish elk error was the topic du jour for several days this week when an elk in the town of Molndal, Sweden terrorized the children by staggering aggressively through the streets after eating a pile of what was ascertained to be fermented apples causing to be drunk.

According to a census taken in 2001 there are more people in England and Wales who consider themselves Jedis than there are people who consider themselves Sikhs, Jews or Buddhists and this week they made the formal request for the UN to change the International Day for Tolerance the Interstellar Day of Tolerance which would more or less show a certain respect for their “faith”

And while on the topic of fanatical fans that appear to have lost a basic grip on reality, the mentally stable young David Fearn this week changed his name to all 21 official 007 film titles. The 23-year-old is now called - 'James Dr No From Russia With Love Goldfinger Thunderball You Only Live Twice On Her Majesty's Secret Service Diamonds Are Forever Live And Let Die The Man With The Golden Gun The Spy Who Loved Me Moonraker For Your Eyes Only Octopussy A View To A Kill The Living Daylights Licence To Kill Golden Eye Tomorrow Never Dies The World Is Not Enough Die Another Day Casino Royale Bond' and a Russian woman sued Coca Cola after she drank 5000 litres of Coca Cola and was ill. The Russian court awarded her around $US100.

While that ludicrous Russian woman helped legitimize the plight of the ludicrously stupid and lazy in Russia, a German woman more or less championed the same cause in Germany as she sued a gynaecologist for inserting a faulty contraceptive device into her. When it didn’t work she fell pregnant and by the time she found out it was too late to have an abortion. Now the doctor has to pay child support to the woman and her husband until the baby is 18.

Spain acknowledged the presence of stupid people and decided to try and act in their best interests this week as the Spanish Minister for Health called on Burger King to remove the XXL burger from its menus citing that the burger contains more fat than 10 fried eggs and speaking of food that is fascinating for reasons other than taste, a café in Cornwall began displaying the leftovers of famous people who have eaten there.

One thing that will hopefully not have anything left over is the dinner party hosted by Sir Gordon Wu that will feature slabs of his new prized truffle. Sir Wu, this week, paid $161,000 on the world’s largest truffle (despite the fact that he doesn’t really like truffles) simply because his wife likes the taste and in Brazil a cat allegedly gave birth to 3 kittens and 3 puppies after apparently mating with the neighbour’s dog. The three kittens died but the puppies survived.

Finally and reliably, the Germans opened up their own equivalent of the Body Worlds exhibition this week which, as would be required for the scat happy Germans, doesn’t just show what dead bodies look like – it shows exactly how they’re preserved in the first place bringing a required depth and extended focus on corpses that could only be possible in a place like Germany. And it's reliability like that that gives us comfort in times that involve weddings like that of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Real, tangible comfort.