BEST OF THE WEEK

Director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie script was recently stolen. However, it could have been a far greater tragedy for cinema -- it could have been stolen 30 years ago, when he was still making good movies.

Why is China being asked to intervene with the Burmese junta about dealing with protesters? What’s the Chinese government going to do? Offer tips? “When we shoot our unarmed protesters, we aim for their heads. That way, we can still grind up their livers and sell them as tiger penis.”

In London, counter-terrorism squads evacuated a building because of a feared chemical attack. When they broke down the door of the Thai restaurant where suspicious fumes were coming from, they found… Thai food. Apparently it overwhelmed the usual London odor of greasy fish and beer. “What’s that smell? It doesn’t seem like rancid beans. It certainly can’t be coming from a restaurant.”

When the president of South Korea arrived in North Korea, he was greeted by hundreds of thousands of North Koreans waving plastic flowers. Plastic, of course, because they ate all the real ones.

Seventy-one percent of American men are overweight. The U.S. has apparently decided that if it can’t have the highest human population in the world, it can have the highest human volume.

You can now download the Bible to your cell phone. It’s being sold with the video game “Halo 3”. You can also get free texting with God, but then you have to keep buying new phones, since his messages come chiseled into the screen.

In Afghanistan, a boy from the movie “The Kite Runner” is being evacuated from the country because of fears that people will kill him. That’s the same reason why Ben Affleck can’t go back to Boston.

Drug use across the country has dropped, but that might just be because the baseball season is over.

Hamburger meat is being recalled because the Topps Meat Company was recycling the previous day’s meat into new meat, contaminating the whole batch. Similarly, the government is thinking of recalling all jokes about Britney Spears and Senator Larry Craig.

A man in Oregon was banned by his local city council from gardening in the nude. He says he just wanted to give the cucumbers an example to live up to.

The president of South Korea drove to a summit in North Korea in a Mercedes S600 Guard limousine, which can withstand machine gun fire and grenades. But this is North Korea -- you’re either going to get attacked by nukes or slingshots. There’s no in-between.

A bank in New Jersey named Commerce Bancorp is being bought by a Canadian bank called Toronto Dominion. I think the first sign of trouble at Commerce Bancorp should have been that they couldn’t spell the word “bank”. And isn’t “Toronto Dominion” a scary name for a bank? “Toronto will take over you all!”

eBay has admitted that it paid too much for the internet phone company Skype. Skype has had trouble making money for the strange reason that it doesn’t charge anything.

A town in southern Spain has tossed the world’s biggest salad. The Guinness Book of World Records made sure that the world’s biggest man was there to have his salad tossed.

Scientists say that although better lifestyles reduce the risk of cancer, the biggest risk is still getting older. Yes, we have far too many people ‘getting older’ these days without even considering the risks. In fact, the number of young people getting older today is nearly one hundred percent.

In Argentina, a 24-year-old man has married an 82-year-old woman. “I don’t care what other people say,” said the groom, Anito Nicolo Smith.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are helping the Clinton Global Initiative, or CGI, to rebuild New Orleans. That’s because movie stars already have a ton of experience with CGI. They want to help build an enormous blue screen behind the city, maybe throw in some dinosaurs.