You Couldn't Make it Up...

Once again, reality is trying its damnedest to prove that it can be even more bizarre than anything I can make up for The Sleaze. I refer, of course, to the story that police in Turkey have released a number of young women from a fake Big Brother house. Apparently they had been duped into believing that they were on a reality TV programme when, in reality, they were being 'exploited for sexual purposes'. You'd have thought that they'd have gotten a bit suspicious when they found that all the tasks they were required to perform involved them taking all their clothes off. Surely the contest to see who could insert the largest vegetable up themselves, alone, would have been a bit of a giveaway? The whole sorry saga reminds me of a story a few years ago about how several women had been duped into publicly baring their breasts by a con artist who phoned them up claiming to be a doctor and told them that they were to be given a mammogram by satellite. Of course, all they had to do was take off their bras, stand at an open window and angle their breasts upwards. There's one born every minute...

Another recent news story which caught my eye was the fatal strangling of a British consul in Jamaica. Mystery surrounds the murder, with the victim being found outside his house, although the property hadn't been burgled and the consul apparently hadn't been robbed. My first reaction was that it was clearly down to SPECTRE or some similarly nefarious secret organisation. As I seem to recall, British officials being murdered in the West Indies was a fairly common occurrence in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. as the story has now gone rather quiet, I can only assume that 007 has been dispatched to the Caribbean and a D-notice imposed on the whole affair by M. I confidently expect that in a couple of months time we'll hear that a mysterious half-Chinese, half-German scientist with mechanical hands was behind the murder as he tried to cover up his plans to divert American space rockets from their proper trajectories. Shortly after that we'll no doubt hear that, before he could be questioned, said scientist died in a tragic accident when he drowned in a pile of guano on his private island...