2020: A year in 9 weird stories – POLITICO Europe

November 30, 2022 ndowd

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It’s been a very, very strange year.
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Paul Dallison writes Declassified, a weekly column looking at the lighter side of politics.
Obviously there’s one big weird story of the year: Cher visiting the “world’s loneliest elephant.”
No, wait, it was a global pandemic that meant you couldn’t go out, see grandma or cough in public without people looking at you as if you were a terrorist; reduced people to fighting over toilet paper; and if you did sneak out to go and buy a baguette, you had to be dressed like Hannibal Lecter or Daft Punk.
The coronavirus led to most, but not all, of Declassified’s weirdest stories of the year. The way the world is going, the list for 2021 will be carved on a rock while I hide from zombie tigers (or something).
Had this story emerged during the depths of the pandemic, the reaction may well have been “Oh, and that happened.” But back in January 2020, news that the boss of one of the world’s biggest companies fled from the authorities by hiding in a musical instrument case was pretty shocking. When Nissan’s Carlos Ghosn fled house arrest in Japan in late 2019, he did so in a large box.
Lebanese news channel MTV reported that a “paramilitary group” entered Ghosn’s home under the guise of a band playing at a “Gregorian dinner” and later left with Ghosn hiding in a double bass case. The case was reportedly so large that airport staff at Osaka’s Kansai International Airport were unable to scan it, allowing Ghosn to sneak himself out of the country and into Lebanon through Turkey. The story makes the 2020 list because the details didn’t emerge until January and also because that’s when Yamaha tweeted the following: “We won’t mention the reason, but there have been many tweets about climbing inside large musical instrument cases … A warning after any unfortunate accident would be too late, so we ask everyone not to try it.”
In May, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen did the political version of standing on the high street shaking a tin — she hosted a telethon to raise money to tackle the coronavirus. She got €7.4 billion in pledges, with some countries promising a lot and others not getting out their wallets at all. Pop superstar Madonna, however, pledged a not-insubstantial $1 million to the cause.
When Declassified suggested that this meant she got to join the European Union (not at the expense of Estonia and Lithuania, who didn’t stump up any fresh cash, but in place of the already out-the-door U.K.), some British media thought it was serious (which says a lot about how people view the EU). The story was then reposted on social media by … Madonna.
Meanwhile in Russia, it was 1959! According to a former member of the Russian parliament and current head of the Union of Women, an ice cream called Rainbow should be banned because it promotes homosexuality. Ekaterina Lakhova told President Vladimir Putin that advertisements for the multicolored ice cream could lead to children becoming “accustomed to” the LGBTQ community’s rainbow-colored flag.
“They’re quietly promoting these nice rainbow colors, using nice words, they’re advertising an ice cream called Rainbow,” Lakhova told Putin, seemingly undermining her own argument by pointing out that it’s only ice cream with nice colors and children like nice colors and rainbows. “I have the same negative feelings about the rainbow as I do about the swastika,” Lakhova said, clearly keeping everything in perspective.
We have the, er, esteemed Dr. Stella Immanuel to thank for this one. She stood on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court and loudly proclaimed that “nobody needs to get sick. This virus has a cure — it is called hydroxychloroquine; I have treated over 350 patients and not had one death.” If she was in charge of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, it’d be 90 percent hydroxychloroquine and 10 percent dreams.
Such bold boasting got people to look into the background of a doctor who had been praised by noted medical expert Donald Trump as being “very impressive.” Turns out she holds some rather unconventional views. She claims that medical issues such as cysts, infertility and impotence are caused by people having sex with “spirit husbands” or “spirit wives” — so shagging witches and demons in a dream world. Or, as the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer put it: “Real-life ailments … stem from the demonic sperm after demon dream sex.”
Lockdown rules have been — and still are — rather confusing. And none more so than in Spain in the early days of the pandemic when it was forbidden to go out, even for a walk. That is, unless you were walking a dog. It led to people hiring out their dogs to exercise-deprived neighbors and, when all else failed, to people taking other animals for a stroll. Turns out the rules only applied to dogs, and police fined or warned people for walking a goat, a chicken and, er, a crab. Just to be clear, Catalan police said the ban extends to canaries and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs.
Spaniards weren’t deterred. You can fine a human, so the thinking went, but surely you can’t fine a dinosaur! Sightings of dinosaurs (or, just maybe, people in dinosaur costumes) were reported across the country throwing out the rubbish, roaming free … and being stopped by the police.
Coronavirus had such an impact that people in Ghent were (literally) shitting themselves. The Belgian city became slightly less appealing because of wildkakkers. In the summer, with public toilets closed down because of the pandemic, many people who were caught short simply relieved themselves in the great outdoors. Locals kicked up a stink. The city’s ombudsman, Helena Nachtergaele, told Het Nieuwsblad that during the lockdown “there appeared to be a great shortage of classic toilets. This resulted in the phenomenon of ‘wild poop.’”
This entire list could have been full of Donald Trump and yet the strangest U.S. election story didn’t feature the soon-to-be-ex-president directly at all. The Trump team’s booking of Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia for a press conference instead of the city’s Four Seasons hotel could only have been improved if it had featured Rudy Giuliani spouting baseless claims of voter fraud in the parking lot of a groundskeeping company situated between a sex shop and a crematorium. Oh wait, it did have those things!
One Twitter user was quick to suggest that the premises be purchased by the U.S. government and turned into “The Donald J Trump Presidential Library, Museum and Total Landscaping Warehouse.” And the owners of the landscaping company were soon offering “Make America Rake Again” and “Lawn and Order” T-shirts for sale.
In November, the end came for Dominic Cummings, the most powerful man in British politics who merely put Boris Johnson in an ill-fitting suit and pushed him out in front of the TV cameras.
The defining image of Cummings was him sitting behind a trestle table in the Downing Street rose garden explaining why he broke the U.K.’s coronavirus lockdown rules in April. He insisted he had no regrets about making a 260-mile trip during lockdown, nor about a 30-mile detour he took before making the trip home.
Cummings told the press conference his wife became ill and the pair took the view it would be better to be near young family members who could help look after their four-year-old son. He said he drove from London to Durham in the northeast of England without stopping on the way and spent two weeks there while he and his wife recovered. Still feeling weak, Cummings drove the family 30 miles to the town of Barnard Castle to check whether a “weird” feeling in his eyes might prevent him from making the much longer journey back to London — because the obvious thing to do if your eyes are feeling “weird” is to go for a drive with your loved ones.
We all needed cheering up after a tough year, so thanks to Hungarian MEP József Szájer who, along with more than 20 acquaintances, was caught pants-down at a lockdown-busting sex party in the center of Brussels in December. Breaking the lockdown is bad enough but when you’re a far-right politician with a history of cracking down on LGBTQI rights and are caught at a gay orgy, the irony-meter goes through the roof.
Clearly realizing what the consequences were going to be when the police came knocking, Szájer climbed out of the window and shimmied down a drainpipe. In his backpack were, according to Belgian prosecutors, “narcotics.” He was dropped by his party, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, faster than you can say “rule-of-law violation.”
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