BEMIDJI, Minn. Sergeant Jim Campy has aged out of active duty patrolling the streets of this town of approximately 15,000 in northern Minnesota, but he says the carnage he sees as a “desk” jockey working the on-line fraud unit can be just as bad as an armed robbery of a convenience store. “We have a lot of lonely farmers who fall for come-ons from women around the world,” he says shaking his head. “It’s always a thousand dollars more, their flight was cancelled, they need to pay off a local official, yadda yadda. It bleeds these poor old saps dry.”
Dressed up to get messed up.
But Campy is alarmed by a disturbing new trend that has brought more than just financial distress to his lonely male townsmen; a Freedonian mail-order bride website that actually delivers the goods to unattached males seeking a little love and companionship to get them through the long winter nights. “It’s one thing to take a man’s savings for nothing,” he says. “It’s quite another to stick him with one of these Bohunk women for the rest of his life.”
Freedonia is a Central European nation that was formed after World War II from scraps of Sardinia, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Carpatho-Ukraine, and an abandoned shopping mall. In foreign affairs it is generally not aligned with either eastern or western powers because its primitive state television network interferes with pocket compasses.
“You’re not wearing THAT to the tractor pull–are you?”
The country’s economy is based on agriculture, with rutabagas and cardamom seeds being the leading exports. The need for field labor produces women who are “strong like bulls, but not quite as nice,” says Adorno Zleiwjek, professor of animal husbandry at the University of Plotz-Gradoski. “Any American male who pays more than a nickel to date one of these cows ought to have his head examined.”
Miss Rutabaga of 2025
The website–freedonianwoman4U.com–has a backlog of 7,235 eligible females seeking to escape a life of toil, poverty and boorish dating prospects. “I work on my hair for hours and Zlask Vitornik merely belches across the table at me while he plays ekdinkzi,” a table dice game favored by Freedonian men with poor math skills, says Eleieak Oraklisk, a twenty-year old mimeograph operator. “I hear in America men will buy drinks for women in order to fondle their breasts, which would be a fair trade.”
For men who consummate the transaction, reactions are often subdued by the imposing figures that Freedonian women cut after baling hay for much of their girlhood. Do you like your new wife, this reporter asks Slobodan Mkrisku through a local translator. When he hesitates for a moment to consider the question, his World Wide Web bride slaps his head and snaps “Tell him you love me and life has never been better,” she barks, to which he meekly replies “Yes, dear.”