Feet Tragically Obscured     

Good news from the watery Philippines, where tragic flooding ends on a happy note.  Renowned shoe fetishist and drag queen ideal Imelda Marcos’s shoe collection at the Marikina Shoe Museum was plucked from the rising waters by quick thinking museum staff.

Now the Marcos family can concentrate on the career of Strongman Scion Bong-Bong Marcos.

Cost Some Jack?
President Obama has announced himself “saddened” by the death of Gabon’s 42-year dictator, Omar Bongo Ondimba. Sadness perhaps not shared by Gabon’s population, who despite enjoying recent “generally free and fair election” have other troubles: 

“The following human rights problems were reported: limited ability of citizens to change their government; use of excessive force, including torture toward prisoners and detainees; harsh prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; an inefficient judiciary susceptible to government influence; restrictions on the right to privacy; restrictions on freedom of speech, press, association, and movement; harassment of refugees; widespread government corruption; violence and societal discrimination against women, persons with HIV/AIDS, and noncitizen Africans; trafficking in persons, particularly children; and forced labor and child labor.”

Bongo knew from trafficking, importing French prostitutes when not getting “handsie” with Miss Peru.

  Making Waves?   

Gone but not forgotten, former Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s self-defenestration has already been reduced to trivia in America, withmembers of  MSNBC’s online beloved community invited to sort out his death details, multiple choice style!

MSNBC asks, “Are you smart?”

How much do you remember about the week in news? Take msnbc.com’s weekly quiz and find out what you can recall.

6. In South Korea, meanwhile, the nation was shocked when a former president, Roh Moo-hyun, disgraced in a corruption scandal, committed suicide. How did he end his life?

By throwing himself off a cliff in the mountains near his home
By shooting himself at his party’s headquarters
By asphyxiating himself in his car
By hanging himself

Kids Explain The Darnedest Things

John Emerson’s Social Design Notes blog studies recent self-explanations by museum and presidential library creators, and sums up the their evil work:

“I keep seeing this trend: stories of monuments and memorials sold on infantilism, using the lens of “childhood” to conjure an air of authenticity and gravitas.“

Emerson quotes the Washington Post on presidential library market maker Ralph Appelbaum’s Nigeria project:

“What does it take to make a Nigerian child?’ It’s an unanswerable question, but it provided the necessary aha moment that made it all come together, a positive theme that finesses some of the philosophical problems of a presidential library in a country riven by corruption, violence, and religious, ethnic, linguistic and economic divisions.”

Stiff Competition

Applebaum’s firm is the American equivilant of Lenin’s embalmers touching down in Angola and Vietnam, loosing upon the world our packaged solutions for immortality.

The Lives Of Others 

The haunting parallels of Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s lives infest the Internet, but what of Ronald Reagan and the latest New Reagan?

The unlikely Reaganaut is the bad boy of South African politics, Jacob Zuma, and the stories premise is amiable front man for expert staff achieved greatness.

Zuma is expected to be elected South African President Wednesday: Let’s examine the amazing life coincidences!

Got start as trade unionist.                                     Got start as trade unionist.

Challenged own party’s sitting president.       Challenged own party’s sitting president.

More than one marriage.                                          More than one marriage.

Arms scandal!                                                               Arms scandal!