It’s been a slow week for stupidity worldwide, with the usual assortment of dumb stories having been shoved from the headlines by earthquakes in Chile and Taiwan, killer waves in the Mediterranean and the never-ending debate on health care reform. Actually, check that. Health care reform and the nothing being done about it may be the stupidest story of them all, but it’s just not funny.
Don’t get me wrong; there were people doing stupid things this week — 63 worshippers were killed in India when a stampede broke out at a temple giving away free food — but poking fun at dead people could be considered distasteful, Read More »
Here’s an interesting hypothetical question: If someone went on a hunger strike in India, where roughly 27 percent of the world’s undernourished population lives, how would anyone know?
The reason I ask is because K Chandrasekara Rao, a politician in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, has been on a hunger strike for 13 days now and shows no signs of letting up. Presumably, most of the people Rao represents would probably consider 13 days without food a typical fortnight, but we should not let that detract at all from the urgency of his protest. Read More »
What’s the most you’ve ever paid for a pen? Actually, I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let’s rein things in a bit and start with a simpler question.
Have you ever paid for a pen? Because I’m not sure I have, now that I think about it. I’m not saying I’m one of those people who steals all my pens from banks or anything. I’m just saying I seem to end up with plenty of pens without having to pay for them. Granted, a lot of them are engraved with bank logos, but I might have just stolen them from the people who stole them in the first place. Read More »
Imagine for a second that you are one of the millions of so-called “Untouchables” who occupy the lowest caste of Indian society.
You live in a mud hut in a filthy ghetto of Calcutta. You defecate in the street since you have nowhere else to go. You’re missing most of your teeth because you’ve never owned a toothbrush or visited a dentist’s office, and you have to beg for change to scrounge up enough money to feed your family. Read More »