Every Sunday, The Water Cooler will give a run down of the week’s oddest, funniest and most interesting stories from and about Pakistan.

Foreign Policy magazine’s Af-Pak channel (horrible name; excellent blog) has a story by Amjad Shuaib who reminisces about a cantankerous, combustible  fellow he used to know. That fellow happens to be former president Pervez Musharraf.

Given the public-relations drive the ISI seems to be on, you would think they don’t need to be told by Ambassador Husain Haqqani that denying foreign journalists visas isn’t the way to win the hearts and minds of the media. Apparently they do.

PML-N MNA Javed Hashmi want’s to dig up and publicly hang the corpses of long-deceased military dictators, including Ayub Khan and Zia-ul-Haq. He cites Oliver Cromwell as the inspiration behind the idea. It’s no secret that the PML-N is a reactionary political party, but I hadn’t realized till now that they are stuck in the 17th century. For what it’s worth, Hashmi served as a minister in a pro-Zia government.

A girl in China meets the qualifications needed to be a cabinet minister in Pakistan. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, the girl replied, “A corrupt official, because corrupt officials have a lot of things.”

We all know that Nando’s advertisements, with their humorous takes on local issues, have some of the funniest ads around. Their latest target, as can be seen here, is film star Meera. (via Huma Imtiaz).

Speaking of Meera, in an interview she gave, in which she spoke about her current ‘problems’, the actress managed to compare herself to Michael Jackson, Angelina Jolie and Madonna.

File this in the Department of Useless Gestures. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani will solve both the country’s sugar crisis and the obesity epidemic by forgoing sugar.