The President of the United States isn’t worried about artificial intelligence (AI).

He thought it was no match for natural stupidity. In which case, you could say he had, well, a natural immunity. 

No, the  Overweight, Orange  Oddball did not think AI was a clear and future danger. Neither were the wars in the Middle East or Ukraine, climate change, a possible nuclear Armageddon, or another Covid-style pandemic.

The Rotund Robespierre had been invited to address the 80^th Anniversary of the United Nations  General Assembly. And so he did.  

With some caveats. 

First, he didn’t follow protocol, speaking for an hour instead of the allotted 15 minutes. And he was less than diplomatic. 

If anything, the Pugnacious President pulled out his primer on How-to-Lose-Friends-and-Aggravate-Everyone-You-Didn’t-Care-For-Anyway.  

And what was the major threat facing humanity in the World According to Fatso? 

Going by his speech to UNGA, it was renewable energy. 

The corpulent commander-in-chief was unambiguous about his disdain for climate change. He swept aside two centuries of data with a manly wave of his hand, dismissing the threat as “the biggest con-job ever” and “a hoax.”

The masculine myth-buster went on to assail the UN for pushing the “nonsensical notion.” 

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle said “A lie cannot live.” The poor fellow clearly hadn’t met many politicians.   

The Donald, however, was of a different stripe. The news channel France 24said Trump’s UN speech was “peppered with lies.” 

“Lice?” said His Stoutness in horror. He thought it was bad enough the UN pushed the climate change poppycock and now it was harboring vermin? 

Actually, Fat Head was furious with the UN. He felt he’d been  “sabotaged” by the august body. It was an ingrate, he concluded bitterly, because he had single-handedly settled “seven wars in six months” and it didn’t even notice. Nor was he a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize. 

The “sabotage” was three-pronged, therefore, thought through, and a Clear and Present Danger. 

His escalator had stopped mid-climb: his teleprompter had gone on the blink, and his mike had gone out.  

Prime facie, it was the stuff of treason. The First Twerp’s  bloodthirsty press secretary, Karoline Levitt, enthusiastically agreed threatening “severe punishment” to Whom It May Concern. 

The one thing the portly  POTUS agreed with was his greatness. Don’t believe me? Just ask him.

Indeed, he revealed it to the entire assembly. He predicted ruin to Western countries which allowed unchecked immigration.

“I can tell you I’m really good at this.” he confided modestly to a surprised assembly. His bleak prediction: “All you countries are going to hell!” 

He told them because he knew that he knew. And it seemed to be a person-to-holder thing. 

While decrying the climate-change bunkum, he revealed: “Trump has been right about everything. I don’t mean to sound braggadocious but it’s true.”

He continued in a quieter, even admiring tone, “I have been right about everything,” he said as an awed smile crossed his face, leaping from wrinkle to wrinkle like a nimble mountain goat across the Alpine crags. 

“My work here is done,” thought the portly potentate proudly.  

Not quite though. Before he retired, El Rotundo advised pregnant women to skip Tylenol – the US version of Panadol – if they didn’t want autistic babies. 

That was his genius. Women can sometimes make fools of men but The Donald was strictly a do-it-yourself type. 

ENDS 

If you are a sensitive person, the 21^st Century, with its relentless bombardment of sensory info, may not be the place for you. 

Say you understand the Morse code: a tap dancer would drive you crazy. 

Similarly, all the info out there could make any would-be scientist  unsure. As was Tomaki Kojima who felt he might be indecisive but wasn’t sure.

So when he finally hit on an idea for scientific study, sure enough, it was a doozy.  

Tomaki et al  wondered if painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them.  

The Japanese team meticulously put tape on beef cows and then spray-painted them with white stripes.

It was Tomaki-san’s eureka moment: fewer flies were attracted to the cows and they seemed less bothered by said insects. The zebras carped that they knew all along but their grumblings were dismissed. 

There’s only one problem. The intrepid scientist admitted it might be “tricky” applying his findings on a large-scale.

Tomaki-san and his team won this year’s Ig-Nobel Prize for Biology,

Since 1991, the Ig-Nobel Prize has “honoured” research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.” 

The Prizes are awarded by actual Nobel laureates with the prize money being another doozy: a solitary banknote for the amount of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (USD 0.40). Even so, the note has since become a collector’s item.

Mr Tomaki’s award for a zebra’s fly-resistant powers left both thrilled.

The zebras chastely declined comment but Kojima-san was rapturous. “Unbelievable. Just unbelievable,” gushed the ignoble biologist who painted himself with stripes to honour the occasion. “It’s been my dream.” 

Another penetratingly perspicacious paper pondered the types of pizza lizards preferred to eat. Today’s lizard diet could be tomorrow’s Herpes Defence. Who knows?

The year’s winners, honoured in 10 categories, also include a European group that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language, and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades. He’s come out with a book for the ages: Watching Nails Grow; How To Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You. 

The 35th annual Ig-Nobel prize ceremony is organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights meaningless research weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced.

This year’s ceremony included a section called the 24-second lecture where top researchers explain their work in 24 seconds. 

Among them was Gus Rancatore, who spent most of his time licking an ice cream cone and repeatedly saying yum and Trisha Pasricha, who explained her work studying smartphone use on the toilet and the potential risk for haemorrhoids.

Other winners this year included a group from India that studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack, and researchers from the United States and Israel who explored whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume. 

There was also a team of international scientists that looked at whether giving alcohol to bats impaired their ability to fly.

Flying under the influence might be batty? Stranger things have happened. 

Finally, there was an Italian  paper on the physics of pasta sauce. As an aside, this team was bet by a Chinese scientist that it couldn’t make a car out of spaghetti.

To quote one of the Italians: “You should have seen her face when we drove paste.”

ENDS

Waitress: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” 

Actress Mae West: “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” 

Despite its rules, the English language is supple enough for us to have fun with it. 

There’s word play, for instance. Take palindromes which are words or sentences that read the same forwards or backwards. 

Simple ones would be “civic” or “madam.” Or my mother tongue, Malayalam.  

The classier ones would include this most-referenced epigram: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama 

Or this, famously ascribed to Napoleon: Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

This was how the First Meeting began a very, very long time ago: Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. 

And this guy seems to have a serious problem: Murder for a jar of red rum!

Then there are oxymorons which are phrases where contradictory words are put together to produce an unexpected, even comic, effect. In the original Greek, it literally means “keen stupidity”.

Shakespeare used them (“Sweet Sorrow”). So did the Beatles (“A Hard Day’s Night”) and Paul Simon (“Sound of Silence”).

Some movie titles had them in genuinely intelligent ways. Some  examples would certainly include True Lies; Eyes Wide Shut; and Back to the Future. 

There are funny, even ridiculous, examples. “Friendly fire” isn’t, while “controlled chaos” has never been held in check.  

Another  “definite maybe” is  “civil war.” It’s an absurd and     lunatic phrase. Wars are never mannerly, courteous or polite. If anything, they are frightening, beastly and heartless. 

It gets worse in a nuclear war. In that instance, Abraham Lincoln’s famous condition takes a turn for the hearse, morphing into: “All men are cremated equal”. 

The latter was a pun, craftier jokes that exploit the different meanings of words. Most are self-explanatory as in: my friend drove his expensive car into a tree and saw, first hand, how a   Mercedes bends.  

Life is a series of ups and downs which in jokey fashion might be described thus: One day you’re the best thing since sliced bread; the next, you’re toast.

Rodney Dangerfield was a New York comic famous for delivering killer lines in woebegone fashion: “My ex-wife still misses me but her aim is improving.”

He also had this: “I just found out I’m colour blind. The news came completely out of the green.”

Some jokes come fast and furious: Have you heard about the dyslexic who walked into a bra?

When asked to make a sentence with “lethargy,” TV host Johnny Carson famously replied with a lisp:  “What the world needs is more, not leth-argy”.

And the comic cracked this after the film came out: “Never argue with a dinosaur; you’ll get jurasskicked.”     

Then there’s wit, the ability to come up with intelligently funny, even scathing, stuff. 

This from John Lennon: “So what if I don’t know what apocalypse means? It’s not like it’s the end of the world”.

The poet and writer Dorothy Parker could be sarcastic. She had this to say about Katharine Hepburn’s performance on Broadway: “She ran the  gamut of emotions – from A to B.”

But she could also be practical: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”.

Even so, the master of the bon mot would have to be English writer, playwright, and full time cynic Oscar Wilde: “Some men cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” 

And there is very little to beat his wry observation:  “True friends stab you in the front.”

ENDS

You know what they say about two wrongs? 

They’re only the beginning. Look at North Korea. First there was Kim Il Sung, a self-professed military genius who invaded South Korea in 1950 only to be booted out at great cost to life, limb and everyone but himself: he continued to flourish as North Korea’s Great Leader. 

He could be counted on to run any economy into the ground. And he did it with a skill not seen since Bernie Madoff. 

His greatest triumph came in 1990 when the North Korean economy collapsed following the break-up of the Soviet Union. 

His successor was the pudgy Kim Jong Il. Dear Leader tried to make North Korea an export-driven economy not unlike Malaysia but his plan of exporting large, ornate and grandiose statues of himself didn’t find a ready market until the self-confessed economic genius hit on the idea of slipping in nuclear bombs as sweeteners. 

The international outrage that followed forced him to reconsider. Even so, he  took comfort in the advice he received from Vladimir Putin: “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your preferred choice.” 

His son thought he would not follow in the footsteps of  his less-than-illustrious ancestors.

“Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin,” cried North Korea’s soon-to-be Big Enchilada and he turned out to be prescient. The  beefy boy grew into a dumpy despot with more chins than Elizabeth Taylor.

He thought he’d done a better job than his predecessors.

For one thing, his country had more nukes, tanks and soldiers than they had food for the people but that, thought the ample autocrat, was “neither here nor there.” 

The trick now was never to allow his enemies any access to his  heath records.

Example: When Fatso recently met Vlad the Russian in Beijing, the portly plenipotentiary’s staffers wiped down all items he touched. The “Look Ma, no DNA” routine comprises part of security measures to counter foreign spies.

It gets weirder. The corpulent Czar even packs his own toilet. Where Supreme Leader is concerned, it’s “Love Me, Love My Crap.” 

Nothing is beyond belief: he even has his own Patrol for Poop-Protection. 

Such measures, apparently, are standard protocol since the era of Kim’s predecessor, his father Kim Jong Il.  The special toilet and the requisite garbage bags of detritus, waste and cigarette butts are so that a foreign intelligence agency, even a friendly one, does not acquire a sample and test it. 

Apparently, Israel’s Mossad spy agency had charted Yasir Arafat’s complete health profile through a stool sample. 

It’s routine so to speak. In 2019, after a Hanoi summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, Kim’s guards were spotted blocking the floor of his hotel room to clean the room for hours, and taking out items including a bed mattress.

You might say paranoia ran deep in his heart. But the tubby tyrant didn’t care. He knew his enemies were just jealous because “the voices only talked to me.” 

In truth, Korea’s Jabba the Nut was a Marxist so he should have  been an atheist. But he played it safe and declared he was agnostic. 

Even so, he is still a mental mess having been diagnosed as a paranoid dyslexic. The armies of paranoia marched behind his eyes. 

That’s why he spends all his time worrying if there is a Dog. 

ENDS