OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE

By Ben Pryor The coronavirus continues to wreak havoc, with reported cases and deaths continuing to rise as it spreads to other Asian countries and the world. Medical science is reporting progress towards a vaccine, but the timeline is months. Thankfully, the fatality rate remains small and the disease broadly survivable, if highly unpleasant. With the preponderance of recent pandemics crossing to the human population from the animal kingdom, at some point we might conclude a policy of eating anything that’s been born, irrespective of how exotic or where it’s been since, comes with unwanted Talking of mass panic and hysteria, the race for second place in the US election kicked off at the Iowa Caucus and descended into the kind of acrimony that makes the Donald’s Twitter finger twitchy. Due to a coding error, the results app declared almost everyone the victor. In the end Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg (pronounced Boot-edge-edge rather than the butt gag we’re all trying to avoid making) tied with 11 delegates each. Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren finished third and Sleepy Joe came fourth, which is only a good result if a five-a-side team is playing soggy biscuit. The Donald was busy making the State of the Union speech (which Nancy Pelosi tore up when he finished) and being acquitted at his impeachment trial. A two-thirds majority BUBBLE

would have required 20 Republican senators to convict him, with only Mitt Romney voting to do so… as he sat there chewing on the sourest of grapes.

Scotland’s finance secretary Derek Mackay, long tipped to succeed Nicola Sturgeon, has resigned hours before delivering the Scottish budget, after admitting messaging a 16-year-old boy on social media over a period of six months and telling him he was ‘cute’; with Alex Salmond and Jimmy Krankie as his role models, there was only one way this was headed. justice reform and promote her SKIMS brand of shapewear; no thought that hocking the latter might cheapen your currency a smidge when opining about the former? The wife of the former head of the International Bank of Azerbaijan, currently serving 15 years for fraud and embezzlement, has lost her appeal against an order to provide proof of where the £11.5m a company registered in the US Virgin Islands used to buy her house in Knightsbridge came from; don’t think we need Sherlock Holmes on this one. 21

A woman dressed as Minnie Mouse punched a security guard on the Las Vegas strip before two others – dressed as Mickey and Goofy – intervened to break it up; real housewives of Disneyland is off to a cracking start. Kim Kardashian appeared on Good Morning America to talk criminal And finally, a jilted husband hacked off his love rival’s penis and stabbed him to death for having an affair with his fortune teller wife in Thailand; you’d think that’s the kind of thing she could’ve foreseen and warned him about. Until next week, I’m off to play ‘I am Spartacus’.