The week in re(ar)view
Serving you misery since three weeks

Politics is about emotional blackmail and making promises. You may not care about politics but it cares about you. It's everywhere and Rising Stars couldn't escape. Look around and you will see women swallowing it by the bucketful in the form of Kahani Ghau Ghau Ki. Parents promise gifts to children who do well in exam. Bosses promise big raises to employees. Boyfriends and girlfriends promise eternal love until next year. When you grow old and withered you will emotionally blackmail your grown children to buy you the high tech microprocessor controlled set of artificial teeth that can chew on their own. You can't escape politics even when you read Rising Stars.

Eliminate hawkers to beautify Dhaka
13th October in Star City there was a news item about preparations for the upcoming Saarc Summit in November 12-13. Seems a different form of beautification process will take place. It involves removing the street hawkers who work so hard to sell you pirated CDs, rejected garment products, stale food and other delectable goodies. They create a nuisance on the streets and are apparently an eyesore especially when foreign Saarc hotshots will be passing through the streets in their air-conditioned limos. But won't that be a problem if these foreign leaders see that Dhaka is all beautiful and clean and poverty free? How on earth do we expect to get foreign aid if we cannot show our neediness?

Just to show how poor we are we will be sending all the journalists out on the streets to complain about low salary. That should bring in the aid.

Government worried about prisoners becoming intelligent
17 October there's a report about controlling the type and quantity of newspapers allowed to enter the city jails. Jailbirds will be allowed to choose between only three newspapers these being Amar Desh, Manabzamin and New Age. Anything else is too hard-line and cannot be tolerated. You see these three newspapers are very polite and bring up only the softer side of life. As we established earlier life is politics. We cannot have these jailbirds reading other newspapers that publish the truth and hence become agitated. That's the reason they are in jail in the first place. Also in the mind control agenda prisoners won't be allowed to watch anything other than the sycophantic news coverage of BTV.

Here's where we allow our in-house conspiracy theorist to earn some money so he can go buy some food. According to the theorist preventing prisoners from reading too much about government activities is a smart move indeed.

The government wants all the prisoners to watch and read news items where the government is glorified. Such news of good deeds will brainwash our hardened convicts who will fall in love with the ruling party. Then during election all the prisoners will be allowed to vote. The elections will be won by a landslide as the number of criminals outnumber the good people.

We love the big bang
Americans love guns and we love bombs. Bombs are everywhere and even found in mosques that we pray won't explode. Seems nobody likes to use guns except for the RAB (Rapid Action Battalion). Bet they would use bombs too if they were allowed and call the resulting chaos "blastfire".

October 6th Chittagong judges received bomb threats. Whatever happened to simply threatening you will be dead no matter what? Now you need to blow people up to smithereens? It seems we are becoming a bomb-astic nation. Half the people are worried about being blown to pieces and the other half want to do the blowing to pieces act.

By Gokhra and Mood Dude

Fat kid sets record!
Rising Star challenges all pizza lovers

Who would think Dhaka people could eat so much? But when food is offered free, even the thinnest people among us start to eat and eat in volumes! It's the same case when it's an all-you-can-eat offer although you have to pay for it. So it's not free food after all.

One such place is Pizza Hut where another unlimited offer has been started. Of course um…..due to inflation, the prices are much higher now from (130 to 300 Tk/person) but that gives a better incentive to people to eat, and eat and eat…
.even when you feel like vomiting. Part of the reason, is competition. When kids go there, they compete against each other to see who has the biggest stomach. That is what we saw the other day. There were 20 of us, and although the bill came a whopping 6000 tk, I am sure Pizza Hut suffered losses. One of us actually set the new Dhaka record for the most pizza's eaten 37 large slices! I am not kidding! When interviewed, this kid says, "Eating is my hobby…this is something I want to be really good in…especially since I am not good in studies." Of course our best wishes go out to this rising eater.

What is more fantastic, is when we compiled all the crusts left, we found there were an amazing 234 crusts- in total! That's like an average of 11 pizza slices per person! The manager actually came out and took pictures of the crust mountain we made, and claimed that no-one in pizza hut ever showed such voracious eating talents. Of-course we do not know, whether he was happy or sad about it…but who cares. Oh…
and did we mention how many glasses of Pepsi were gulped down? Believe it or not, about 120 coke glasses! That's about 25 liters of Pepsi which was drunk down! Although we found it rather hard to get up later…
boy were we satisfied! So, again we will proudly announce the record, which, since is published, in the Rising Star is official:

Most Pizza Slices Eaten: 37 by Shakku
Most Collective Pepsi Glasses drank: 120
Most collective pizza slices eaten: 234
This record stands for all 20 people group! So if you plan to beat us, go to a pizza place that sells regular sized pizzas, start eating and then send us the photo. We might publish it! Beat us… that's an open challenge!

By Adnan M. S. Fakir & Golam Rezwan Khan

You know college hunting is getting to you when

1. You reprimand the populace for verbalizing vernacular for you do not require those obscenities in your cranium for the reason that you are striving to saturate it with SAT vocabulary
2. You go crazy trying to figure out what's new about the new SAT and the iBT TOEFL
3. Your inbox contains more e-mails from colleges than from your friends
4. You hate the narrator of the TOEFL speaking section who keeps on saying, 'What does the woman mean?'
5. You've memorized all the college rankings made in the history of college rankings
6. In your efforts to butter up a teacher for good recommendations, you've put yourself in a position where you either have to run errands all over the school for the teacher or you're recommendation's toast
7. Your internet bill is off the charts, more so than usual
8. You have a dream where TOEFL registration forms are floating around, laughing at you (guess who this happened to!)
9. You ask anyone and everyone you know if you could borrow their MasterCard so you can apply online
10. You've been to the American Centre so many times, the lady at the entrance has your name, address and telephone number committed to memory
11. When the paper-wala comes you earn a quick buck by selling 2 kgs of college brochures to him

By Verity

Humpty Dumpty

The real story

We all know of the happy rhyme,
The one that's been said throughout time,
Of Humpty Dumpty and his great fall,
When he fell off the great big wall,
What was he up to in the first place?
Before he slipped and smashed his face,
Such questions I asked as a small boy,
Have led me to uncover this dreadful ploy,
So here it is, the true story,
Which will strip Humpty of his glory,
Humpty was quite simply a crook,
Whatever he wanted, he just took,
One day he read in the local Gazette,
About something he just had to get,
The king of the castles chest of treasure,
He said, "Would give me immense pleasure"
Humpty thought up of a cunning disguise,
The most devious costume ever devised,
What on earth was it? I hear you beg,
Humpty resembled a hard-boiled egg,
The king meanwhile hadn't a clue,
If he had, what could he do?
You see the king was a gormless twit,
The sort of person you just want to hit,
It just so happens that the king was bored,
Happiness was something he couldn't afford,
So with that in mind, he picked up his gun,
And shot at some rabbits, just for fun,
Humpty climbed up the great big wall,
Hoping like hell he wouldn't fall,
He wasn't expecting that he would meet,
The king and his gun at thirty feet,
The king shot him between the eyes,
The face blown off his clever disguise,
He then fell down with a deep thud,
And fell on the floor covered in blood,
The king was to be had for murder one
All in the search for a bit of fun,
Having said that, you just had to admit,
A shot square in the face, what a hit!
He sent all his horses, his men and a writer,
To go and tend to the poor blighter,
But seeing as he lost half his head,
It was quite clear that Humpty was dead,
"We've got to do something!" said the King,
He stamped dramatically, his head in a spin
"Having me in jail just wouldn't be funny"
"Too many people going 'you dropped the soap honey'"
So with that, the writer wrote up the story,
His version was, admittedly, less gory,
So this is what the censored version got to:
(You were expecting another line weren't you!)
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All the kings' horses and all the kings' men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again

By Shakeeb Hassan