For the 20th time in the blog’s history, it’s time for all the weird and wacky stories from around the world. It’s the Not News of the Week.

Canada caused quite the diplomatic crisis last week. Federal transport minister John Baird was supposed to be attending gala in Toronto but wasn’t able to make it to the event. To explain his absence, Baird sent someone a text message saying “Thatcher has died.” A Prime Ministerial aide was dispatched to confirm the news and write a statement mourning the death of Margaret Thatcher. However, calls to Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street (the British Prime Minister’s residence) indicated that Thatcher was still alive. It turns out Baird was skipping the gala because his cat, named Thatcher, had died. When British journalists found out about the incident, they naturally had a field day with it. The aide who was told to write the statement was quoted as saying that if the cat wasn’t dead, he would have strangled it.

Microsoft also has egg on its face after an executive confirmed what everyone was thinking for a long time. Simon Aldous told a British electronics trade magazine that “What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7… is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics.” Many bloggers, magazine writers, and users have said for a while that Microsoft was trying to copy the look and functionality of Mac operating systems. This was especially true of Windows Vista and 7. However, Vista was a steaming pile of crap and the jury is still out on how good 7 is. Talk about taking your brand equity down another peg by opening your mouth.

In a case of irony, fighting virtual wars is much more appealing to Canadians than actually going to war. Worldwide, the new Call of Duty video game is expected to sell upwards of 13 million copies. If you pro-rate that projected number to get a rough number for the copies that will be sold in Canada, you get about 65,000 (though I’ll admit that the likely sales in Canada will to 100,000). While EA is revelling in its latest financial windfall, the Canadian Armed Forces is scratching its head. Their goal for 2009 was to recruit about 8,000 new soldiers. They only managed 7,700. While I don’t want to turn this into a political commentary, that’s the sort of thing that happens when the Canadian military is using substandard equipment in a battle that should have been over ages ago.

The next time that you think you can pull a technological fast one on an old person, you might want to reconsider. A 61-year-old woman was becoming suspicious of the amount of time her 68-year-old husband was spending on the computer and even more suspicious when a message popped up on the computer. So the wife decided to get to the bottom of things by posing online as a 14-year-old girl. When the husband propositioned his wife’s online alter-ego, she called the police. The husband has since been found guilty of various charges related to child pornography. Needless to say, the couple is now getting a divorce.

A man in Wisconsin unwittingly discovered an easy way to hunt for deer. In the middle of mating season, bucks have a tendency to go a bit nuts as they battle to impress does. Well, one buck charged at what it thought was another buck that was encroaching on his territory. It turns out that it was 640-pound concrete statue of an elk that he charged into. The 180-pound buck was able to bowl over the elk statue but collapsed and died 20 feet away. In order to keep the dead buck, the man had to go to the county conservation warden for a hunting tag. The warden filled out the tag with the note “lawn ornament fight – lost.”