SLOW NEWS DAY: I seem to have hit a dry spell, an occasional problem here at The Passing Parade; there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot to take a cheap shot at these days. As Juvenal or some other long dead Roman put it, the times do not admit of satire. I thought of doing something about Sudanese Disappearing Penis Syndrome, whose main symptom is explained by the name of the syndrome, and comment on the irony of this syndrome appearing in a country where the practice of female genital mutilation is common, but nothing really came of it. The syndrome is apparently spread to male Muslims by shaking hands with infidels or by the using the public rest room in the Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, an action filled epic starring Charlton Heston and Sir Laurence Olivier as the madly mod Mahdi bra now available in the lingerie department at Sears, where America shops for value. The owner of Khartoum’s rest room, Mr. Abdul ibn Abdullah, vociferously denied that his rest room had anything to do with the sudden rash of vanishing penises in the Sudan, claiming that this was deliberate misinformation spread by agents of Zionism and the Ethiopian Tourist Bored with trying to get low priced tickets to Miami during the winter months. Mr. ibn Abdullah said on Sudanese television, both of them, that his rest room was the most sanitary in all of Khartoum, especially now that he’d had the wall painted up to a height of 2.5 meters, well beyond the propulsive power of any normal man’s bladder, and he was now offering fresh unused hygienic rocks imported from America guaranteed to clean in one pass through the crack vile.

It appears, however, that Sudanese authorities will soon ban the public rest room as well as shaking hands with infidels as an emergency measure needed to stop the epidemics of vanishing penises. Sudan’s minister of health suggested today that instead of shaking hands with infidels loyal and patriotic Sudanese should urinate on them instead as a way of guaranteeing that their penises hadn’t disappeared; Sudan’s minister of tourism added that all foreigners coming into the Sudan, a bare dry arid sere mostly desert country with lots of camels and marled burrows, should bring a raincoat and galoshes with them until the epidemic had passed. But however good a subject this may be, I just couldn’t do anything with it.

Then I thought of fish puns. After all, the previous post is just one long extended pun on the word herring, so why not do more fish puns? I thought it was a good idea at the time. I could go on and on about fish puns, how as a boy I would swim all day in stagnant fish puns and how bad I smelt at the end of the day and how the terrible smelt gave me a haddock and then I’d have to listen to my mother carp about it when I got home (okay, so I’m groaning too; the haddock is a rip off from the Marx Brothers). Or I could write something serious, like just what is it about canned salmon that makes it impossible for them to hold on to a job, and why isn’t the government doing something about their extraordinarily high unemployment rate? I don’t know; everything after the haddock seems to be a stretch. Tuna? Too easy. Sharks? Too hard. Barracudas? Mother in law jokes are not politically correct anymore.

So I remain at a loss for subject matter here. The California fires are mostly out looking for an agent, the Democrats are still arguing about whether white Southern pickup owning males should be deprived of their 7-11 franchise, and forty six people have been publicly executed in Times Square for smoking cigarettes indoors; we live in dull and monotonous times, folks, very dull indeed. But I’ll think of something soon.