"Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check."

Why on the outside? Because it will make it easier to enforce the decree that "all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour," as the new dictator of San Marcos declares in Woody Allen's Bananas (1971). Venezuela's maximum leader and the world's chief proponent of Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, is making Allen's parody look almost prescient. For example, Chavez recently denounced golf as a bourgeois sport and wants to nationalize his country's courses to provide housing and parks for the poor. As Cybergolf reports:

"I respect all the sports, all of them, but there are sports and there are sports," Chavez told supporters on his national TV show, Aló Presidente ("Hello, President!"), this summer. "Can someone tell me, 'Is this a sport of the people?' "

"Noooooo," government officials in the audience replied.

Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that a politician has tried to rile the plebes with a fake controversy in order to distract a restive population from his country's real problems.