BEST OF THE WEEK

Smugglers are now bringing Cuban refugees in speedboats. But some refugees died recently, so the Coast Guard asked Cubans to not use speedboats. Yes, please go back to using rafts made of cardboard. Because those are soooo much safer.

In Romania, a village has elected a dead man as mayor. Not metaphorically dead, like Hillary Clinton, but really actually dead. I guess he was just really stiff competition.

Gas in California is so expensive that some people are crossing the border into Mexico to fill up their tanks. When I was a kid, the only time people got Mexican gas was from eating burritos.

Yesterday, a girl in Michigan got hit by lightning but had no serious injuries. So the doctors told her she should buy a lottery ticket. She did and won $20! Which will pay for about, oh, five seconds of her trip to the hospital. What a lucky girl!

Some estimate that Barack Obama could raise as much as $200 to $300 million from private sources, especially since school is out for the summer. Get those lemonade stands running, kids!

Barack Obama says he’ll reject public campaign funding, despite an earlier pledge. When asked why he changed his mind, reporters couldn’t hear Obama’s answer, because his mouth was blocked by piles of privately donated money.

Summer scarves are becoming popular with women, because with more of them wearing flip-flops, they aren’t meeting their general quota of insanely uncomfortable clothing.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has pledged that “lackeys” will never run Zimbabwe. Then he arrested everyone who didn’t agree with him.

A Belgian beer company is trying to buy Budweiser, but Budweiser is resisting, because the Belgians might make them start selling actual beer.

A court in Chicago has acquitted R. Kelly of all child pornography charges. That damn legal system -- always getting in the way of hard-working comedians trying to make jokes!

Experts say that people who become addicted to cell phones turn irritable, withdrawn, and antisocial. Then what are they doing on their phones? Maybe that’s why they’re on the phone all the time -- they keep running out of people they haven’t ticked off. And if they’re not talking to anyone on the phones, I think that’s a different problem called ‘schizophrenia’.

The Egyptian government has banned a 92-year-old foreign man from marrying a 17-year-old girl, because it’s worried about the trafficking of women. However, the government will approve the marriage if the man deposits a very large sum of money. But isn’t paying a massive sum of money to take a young girl out of the country called… ‘trafficking’?

So this weekend, the UN handed control of Kosovo over to its citizens. They inaugurated their new flag too. Yeahhhh, no one is ever going to forget what Kosovo looks like. Man, couldn’t they have put some weird little antenna enclave sticking out somewhere? This is like Wyoming putting its outline on its flag. “We are proud to be a rectangle!” You know, Kosovo kind of looks like Texas. Except, of course, Texas has a lot more guns.