Our department has been searching for another employee for the last several months. It hasn’t gone well (obviously, we’re still looking), and the one really impressive candidate took another job. We got another resume from HR today, and I was asked to evaluate it:

“I’d be tempted to bring him in just because he spelled everything right on his resume.”

That says it all…

Probably available: a 61-year-old Italian man living with his 81-year-old mother.

And if that’s all the information you had, it doesn’t sound too strange. You’d probably figure that the son lives with his mother to take care of her, which is perfectly reasonable.

Now what if you found out he gets a weekly allowance and has a some sort of curfew?

The man and his mother went to the police after the mother cut off his allowance and took away his house keys for staying out too late. The man countered his allowance was too small in the first place and that his mom’s a bad cook.

That would have made a great episode of “The People’s Court”.

I didn’t know you could get a hotline to the Taliban:

Amnesty International said it appealed for the release of 21 South Korea hostages during a phone conversation with the Taliban, warning the militants that holding and killing captives was a war crime.

That’s like warning a carjacker not to rob a bank because he might go to jail. Maybe Amnesty International hasn’t noticed, but the Taliban is already a pariah and has already committed war crimes. The Taliban will give up the hostages when it figures out there’s nothing to gain.