MY WIFE AND HER girlfriends had to buy LOADS of new clothes during a holiday jaunt in Yunnan, China last month because (as she explained): “We checked weather details on Google and the information was all wrong.”

I found this explanation utterly unbelievable, or if my wife is reading this, utterly believable.

(Yunnan clothes)

Whatever. Anyway, I thought no more about it until last week, when the media revealed that Yunnan has been named the capital of Asia’s“bulk purchase” spouse industry.

Apparently had my wife and her girlfriends turned down the wrong alley they could have been sold as a job lot!

Enterprising individuals in Yunnan have set up a spouse import-export industry, the Global Times reported last week.

Adopting the Groupon concept, they find people life partners for as little as US$5,000 a person, offering bargain rates depending on how many spouses are required “in a single order”.

The service has been popular with Yunnan peasant farmers, who have trouble finding wives, largely because they are Yunnan peasant farmers. (Worldwide, relatively few women finish the “My Dream Man Is A….” sentence on dating application forms with the words “Yunnan peasant farmer”. Curious, that.)

The farmers band together to apply so they get a “bulk wife discount” (not to be confused with a “bulky wife discount” which is an entirely different matter).

After inspections, selections, visits, etc., the importers bring in a fresh shipment of Vietnamese rural women, for whom a Yunnan peasant farmer actually IS “a dream catch”. I make NO COMMENT on their standards, except to say that everything is relative.

But I suspect some Vietnamese ladies revise their dreams, since the guys have a clause in their contracts promising a second woman “If the wife runs off” after the wedding.

People who are already happily married, let’s count our blessings.

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NEWS IN BRIEF

LAST WEEK, I spent ten minutes reading “How to Never Be Found”, the website (now deleted) written by psycho cannibal killer Luka Magnotta. Never to be found? Police found him in four days. I want ten minutes of my life back.

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THE PEOPLE of Shingo, in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, claim Jesus moved from Israel to their neighborhood 2000 years ago, married a local girl, took Japanese citizenship and started a family. At Shingo’s annual festival last week, 500 tourists watched as locals danced and chanted the word “Nanyadoyara”, which has been handed down for generations, although nobody knows what it means. I strongly suspect it’s ancient Hebrew for “Yeah, we’re totally off our rockers.”

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PUT ON my sunglasses and excitedly went outside to stare at the sun last week. Couldn’t see the transit of Venus. In fact, after five seconds, I couldn’t see anything at all. One reader emailed me to say: “This morning I saw the greatest celestial phenomenon this century, or there may have been a speck of dirt on my lens. How does one tell?”

Some people have no imagination.

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HOW WOULD you feel if someone deposited a vast amount of yellow slimy stuff in your office? You’d rejoice if you were a tax collector in parts of Tibet, where tax bills are paid in yak butter, I hear from a reader who recently visited that part of the world.

I wish this was allowed in other places. We’d queue up to fling our annual payments to the tax collector: “Catch this, sucker.”

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