BEST OF THE WEEK

A Swedish department store has stopped selling North Korean designer jeans. The jeans come in two models: relaxed fit (the “Kim Jong Il”) and slim fit (the “Everyone Else”).

The leader of a spam e-mail group has been fined $15 million. As part of the punishment, he received the news one dollar at a time via 15 million e-mails. Fortunately, he found a woman in Nigeria who will give him the money if he just sends a bank fee. He was described as the leader of a “spam gang”. Not to be confused with a recent sex scandal at Spam headquarters, which was a “Spam gang bang”. Spam gangs are probably the least scary gangs of all time. Like they say: “Don’t bring spam to a gun fight.”

A new study says that loneliness can be contagious. So if you don’t want to catch it – stay away from people.

Stock markets plummeted after Dubai said it couldn’t make payments on its $60 billion debt. But I don’t think Dubai really gets it, since it also announced plans to build the world’s largest debt clock.

South Africa wants to sacrifice a cow to bless the World Cup soccer tournament. But animal rights activists want to stop it, because it would be the first cow killed by humans since about three seconds earlier.

The Obama family turned on the National Christmas Tree, which was covered in red and yellow lights. Fox News immediately reported: “Obama Lights Tree Celebrating Communist China”.

November saw the unemployment rate drop to 10%. However, most of that was just people hired by the media to camp outside Tiger Woods’s house.

Somali pirates have taken a huge oil tanker headed for the U.S. Now we might really get some action on them, because you don’t mess with America’s oil. The wrath of Navy SEAL snipers is nothing compared to 200 million American commuters.

The National Zoo is sending a four-year-old panda to China as part of its panda loan agreement. This marks the first time that the feds have ever been able to pay off a loan to China.

The Vatican has condemned Switzerland’s new ban on Muslim minarets. You know, when even the Vatican says you’re being intolerant of Muslims, maybe it’s time to step back and think a bit. And the Pope is protected by the Swiss Guard. Now he’s going to have to hire a Swiss Guard Guard.

Scientists were excited about a man controlling an artificial hand with his thoughts for the first time. However, they were later disappointed to learn that he just had ESP.

The climate summit in Copenhagen adopted Bob Dylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall”. However, considering when serious climate control will ever happen, I think a better Dylan song might be “Blowin’ in the Wind”.

Hofstra University has sadly decided to end its $4.5 million football program. A teary-eyed Hofstra spokesperson said that from now on the money would be wasted on academics.

The government of Madagascar has released a comic book to explain the nation’s constitution. Now, you might be wondering why Madagascar has a system so much more mature than our use of news pundits....

The woman who bragged to US Magazine about an affair with Tiger Woods said: “I hope Tiger and I can remain good friends.” So now we know two things about her – she had an affair with Woods and she’s batshit crazy.

Many people are questioning whether to have dangerous shows at malls, after an accident at an acrobat show. Excuse me, but these are the same malls that promote Black Friday. Worrying about a death-defying acrobat show after Black Friday is like not showing a vibrating massage chair to earthquake survivors.

Banks say it’s been very hard to quickly arrange documents to modify loans for people facing foreclosure. I guess they lost all the amazing workers who sped through those piles of dodgy subprime mortgages a few years ago.