New Mayor of Ecuadorian Town: A Foot Powder

This may sound like a mere joke or urban legend, I know, but this comes straight from the mouth of Snopes, THE authoritative source on what is and isn't really true and what is just an urban legend or misunderstood bit of humor, and they promise that it's true. They are very rarely wrong about anything.

I thought that Donald Rumsfeld losing that election to the dead guy (for real; hey, I'd rather have had the corpse too) would never be topped, but this little item takes the cake. In Picoaza, Ecuador, the people have apparently wised up to their previous trust of the like of politicians so much that in the recent election, they voted a brand of foot powder called Pulvapies to be their new mayor instead of any of the candidates. (I'm guessing the people who make the ballots are going to think twice about that "write-in" option next election.) They seem to have got the idea from an advertising slogan going: "Vote for any candidate, but if you want well-being and hygiene, vote for Pulvapies." I guess they saw that and thought, "Hey, it probably would be a better idea than to vote for any of these bozos." Voters in other municipalities had voted for the foot powder too; it just won only in that one town. I probably would have done the same: I'm sure foot powder would do better than any of the local politicans where I live.

Don't think it sounds so unbelievable: on Maddox's uber-popular website (which he in his typical humility titled "The Best Page in the Universe") he once ran a poll over who would make for a better U.S. president: Bush Jr. or a box of tic-tacs. The tic-tacs (which I unhesitantly voted for) won by a landslide (80%-20%). I wish we had tic-tacs instead of Obama.

Well anyway, the Snopes article doesn't say what the Ecuadorian government is doing about the problem, only that "the national electional tribunal is now grappling with [it]". I guess that means they haven't figured it out yet. If I were them I'd let it be. Nobody's tried having an inanimate object in charge of a large area before and I think it might make for a refreshing change. Inanimate objects may not do anything helpful but that's certainly not likely to be much of a change, and at least they don't lie to the public and invade other countries.

Original Snopes article here