New talent show bans women and singing

A NEW TV talent show has been launched in which singing, dancing, music and women are banned. These four things are deeply evil, say the producers of Buraydah’s Got Talent. How perceptive.

Instead, the Saudi Arabian show features male contestants delivering religious chants, thrilling the judges, who will no doubt exclaim: “Abdul, you nailed it, I was totally almost tapping my feet there.”

Hardest job in the world: SellingBuraydah’s Got Talent to overseas TV channels. “Buy this and your whole country will come to a standstill as excited citizens wait to see if the winner is this chanting bearded guy or that chanting bearded guy.”

Still, having acted as judge at several talent shows in Asia, chanting bearded guys are not the worst thing out there.

That title would be reserved for parents who think their nine-year-olds are the next Lady Gaga and dress them in appropriate (i.e. inappropriate) costumes.

Yet one has to admire the way the Buraydah folk localized the show and hope others are inspired to do the same.

Beijing’s Got Talent: Entrants, all bespectacled men aged 80 to 200, each have to silence an elderly dissident within a set time.

Myanmar’s Got Talent: Entrants, all military generals, have to lose elections and lock up the winners.

Moscow’s Got Talent: The only entrant allowed, Mr Putin, has to find believable excuses to take his shirt off at international summits. “Goodness me, it’s hot in here.”

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IN OTHER NEWS…..

CHINA FOR the first time sent a woman into outer space on Saturday. See what happens if you refuse to have an abortion?

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MORE THAN 100 coffins found in Bulgaria contain skeletons pierced with stakes to stop them leaving their graves and terrorizing living people, archeologists reported last week. Vampires? Telemarketing salesmen? You decide.

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THE NOBEL Prize was last week slashed from US$1.4 million to US$1.1 million. I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous. Who’s even going to get out of bed for that?

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MY EUROPEAN friends were last month boasting about their sexual sophistication. While leaders in Asia and the Americas must adhere to the highest standards of society’s morals, the guy just elected to run France is associated with two women, and is married to neither. He lives with one, while the other is mother to his four children.

(Happy man)

It did sound rather daring and sophisticated. I’m sure Asian and North American leaders were rather jealous.

Until last week.

Paris newspapers revealed that the two women are at war with each other and the man between them can’t manage his own family, let alone a country.

It’s true what they say: The best thing about polygamy is having two women; the worst thing about polygamy is the same.

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INCIDENTALLY, our experts have noticed that the two women, Valerie and Segolene, are actually THE SAME WOMAN.

Look what happens when we overlay the two pictures together. Francoise Hollande has actually married the same woman TWICE.

He has basically married a slightly younger looking version of his original wife. Wonder how long he can keep doing that?

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THEY SAY Kanye West is getting ready to propose to Kim Kardashian. Better dust off the trophy for “World’s Most Annoying Family.” Suddenly I find myself in favor of forced sterilization. Let’s hope they move to China.

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TALKING OF celebs, party girl Lindsay Lohan crashed a borrowed Porsche last week. What an idiot! No, not Lindsay, the person who loaned her the car. Imagine the conversation:

“Hi, I’m Lindsay Lohan, the famous substance-abusing movie star who has crashed numerous cars and my career. Can I borrow your Porsche?”

“Sure! What could go wrong?”

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OH NO. THE Phantom Housecleaner has been caught. A person has been breaking into homes in the US, washing the dishes, taking out the trash, and vacuuming the carpets. Not a joke.

By the quality of the work (“not terrible”) victims could tell that the housebreaker was female.

When I first heard about her, I wished she’d break into my office, preferably making regular twice-weekly visits.

But the mystery cleaner’s career is over. Last week police caught Sue Warren of Cleveland, Ohio, after she cheekily left one victim an invoice for US$75 bearing her name and address.

This news was sent to me by an unmarried male reader who said: “Please publicize this story to inspire ‘copycat’ housebreakers to do the same thing in Asia.”

He particularly wanted someone to break in and deal with his former flatmate’s fridge, which had “not been opened for 13 months” and was making strange noises “as if a slime monster had evolved inside”.

I asked him why he didn’t just clean it or pay someone else to do it.

He said: “It’s not that I’m a total coward and a miser or anything, but I guess I’m a total coward and a miser.”

Later it occurred to me that there ARE equivalents to the Phantom Housecleaner in Asia.

Several times I have stopped at traffic lights in India or China or Indonesia and a young man has washed my windscreen unasked.

These guys ask for a few coins, which I give them, partly to reward their enterprise, but mostly because they give me this mad glare which tells me they would insert their sponge-on-a-stick thing deep into one of my orifices if I didn’t.

The fridge guy called back later with a question. If “whatever has evolved” in the fridge is unknown to science “how much will I get for it?” he asked.

I told him that life forms which evolved from food were always highly poisonous. “You should count yourself lucky if you get to keep your life.”

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A US COURT fined an Asian doctor US$3 million last week for “failing” to warn his patient that being in a bisexual orgy could be fatal. Can someone please warn the US judicial system’s credibility that decisions such as these could be fatal? It may be too late.

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THE DEAD BODY of a guy called Vicente Benito was found in his home in the village of Canizal (total population: 520) in Spain last week, the media reported. Doctors reckon he had been dead for 20 years.

I guess this is what is meant by the “slow pace of village life”.

Typical conversation in Canizal must go like this: “Have you seen Vicente recently?”

“Yes, I popped in to his place three or four decades ago, he’s fine.”

(Europeans have a relaxed attitude to most things)

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A RECENT SURVEY said that marijuana smokers get into fewer car crashes than alcohol drinkers. Not surprised. It’s hard to get into a traffic accident when you can’t find your car.

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IT'S HARD to be funny in recent times with so much gruesome news around. Top stories are the cannibal pyscho, the China abortion scandal, massacres in Syria and the various financial/ political crises in Europe: not exactly great material for light-hearted commentary. To top it all, it’s been raining heavily all week where I am, and there’s some virus going around so everyone is sniffing and depressed.

So why am I feeling so happy? Found the answer in Time magazine this morning. Dads are irrationally happy simply because they are Dads, according to the biggest study yet of happiness. Here’s a paragraph from the article:

Parents have less free time and less sex, with more exhaustion, frustration and time spent idling in the carpool lane, than the kid-free segment of our society. So why do we do it? Maybe because despite all the rigors and annoyances, the love between parent and child is unprecedented in its passion. It’s blinding and fierce and feels completely different than romance. I don’t know if scientists have looked into whether parents smile and laugh more than non-parents, but I’ll bet they do. Kids are funny. They are you before you became hardened and wizened, before you experienced sorrow, before you went all cynical on the world.

Whether you have a child or are someone else’s child, let’s celebrate family members just now (this week starts with father’s day ). This morning, my brother stumbled on this old pic of your humble narrator just after we had our first child.

Okay, so the baby’s Chinese, but don’t you think he looks just like me? No? Maybe the hair?

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