Not a day goes by without a Constipated Ass-embly member making a donkey of him- or her-self. Sometimes they are caught selling red passports, others are arrested for being part of kidnapping rings, some are convicted murderers who drive around with the PM, others vandalise the Great Hall of the People. Compared to such fun and games, it would be trivial to bring up the case of a legislator who was caught red handed hiring someone much smarter than himself to sit for his SLC exam. The media should give the guy a break, he was just trying to further his education. His only mistake was to get caught.

As we heard last week, the restaurant business has collapsed because of the ongoing crackdown on driving under the influence. Sales of liquor have plummeted, and so has govt revenue from the tax on alcohol. The crackdown had reduced Nepal's Gross National Happiness pretty drastically, but now comes word that it may actually bring down our GDP growth as well. Private hospitals have registered 80 per cent drop in income from their emergency wards because of the sharp reduction in the number of traffic accidents. Some hospitals may actually default on their bank loans, thus having a domino effect on the banking sector. There is one slight silver lining: the breathalysers have a limited number of plastic pipes so they have become a vector to pass on communicable diseases mouth-to-mouth, thus increasing business for hospitals.

The other reason Nepal's economy is shrinking is because the casinos are going bust. So there is a plan afoot to get the cabinet to approve a proposal from the First Son and the erstwhile First Son-in-Law (now sleeping partners in the Yakyetiyak Casino) to allow Nepalis in to gamble and inject cash into state coffers. For this, the scions of the former and current royal families have mobilised other casinos to donate generously to the war chests of cabinet members. The Baddie union gets a cool 15 percent take of the daily take in all KTM casinos, but that income has shrunk worryingly because of a drop in Indian and Bangladeshi gamblers.

Legalising the entry of Nepalis would kill two chickens before they are hatched: the Baddies would get a source of income so they don't have to extort us, and the state treasury would be regularly topped up.

Cash or credit? Well, as far as the Maobaddies are concerned they want both. But at the moment, they mostly want credit, and that is what the intra-party feud is all about. Smelling a coup, BRB wants to at least get some credit for untangling the peace process, while PKD wants to get all the credit for resolving the constitutional deadlock. To his credit, Comade Bhayankar wants to have all the credit, and if he can't have it he doesn't want anyone else to have it either.

The intra-party feud within the Mau Mau is now getting physical. They are splitting each other's heads, so a party split may be near. Bal Krishna ("Comrade Manslaughter") Dhungel got a knock on his head in Salleri recently courtesy the ultra-hardliners. The Baidya faction of the Kranti-curry Union has declared all out war on rivals. In Kathmandu, the Kiran Ba faction doesn't commute to Paris Hill anymore, it has moved in with Comrade Hitman at the Newa Council building in Kopundole where the revolutionaries are all masked, not because they want to protect their identity, but to ward off the stench of the nearby Goo-mati River.

Nepal and Brazil have a visa waiver agreement for diplomats of each other's countries. But a visiting Brazilian minister had to wait one-and-half hours this week to get her visa on arrival at KTM. Which means PM BRB will get reciprocal treatment when he goes to Rio in June?