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April 24th, 2024

Diversions

Ironies

News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

By News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd

Published Sept. 8, 2017

Ironies

The Wall Street Journal reported in February that among the most popular diversions when Syrian households gather to escape the country's bombs and bullets is playing the Hasbro war board game Risk (even though the game's default version contains only five armies -- not nearly enough to simulate the many Syrian factions now fighting).

The parliament of Australia's New South Wales, entertaining a February citizen petition to cut societal "waste," admitted that the petition's required 107,000 signatures (already on a USB stick) would, by rule, have to be submitted in hard copy (4,000 pages), even though the pages would immediately be electronically scanned into a format for data storage. [Wall Street Journal, 2-16-2017] [Sydney Morning Herald, 2-26-2017]

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