I know how hard it can be to produce good copy on a regular basis, but you know a story with a head like the following – from the LA Times’ TV critic, which popped up on Google News today – is going to be as ridiculous as you’d think: “Margaret Thatcher, Annette Funicello and the spectrum of sisterhood.”

The first graph confirms the fatuousness: “… a strange day took from us two women who helped a generation redefine what it meant to be a woman… as disparate as their careers and legacies were, they each contributed to shifting ideals of femininity and a modern woman’s movement often as dismayed by its successes as its failure.”

Oh, yeah? I remember when Groucho Marx and Elvis Presley shuffled off this mortal coil at about the same time. And I thought, wow, they each contributed to the shifting ideas of what it means to be a man in the modern world.

This is just too easy to mock. The process of putting this story together seems to have been the following: two famous women just died. Let’s put them together in death! Because they were both women who were, you know, kinda different from each other. Compare but especially contrast. By golly, women aren’t all the same! You can destroy a lot of patriarchal privilege with that kind of heavy insight.

Not that Maggie and Annette had nothing in common. Both were female, both spoke English, both had once been in the public eye, and both happened to die at roughly the same time. But can you imagine Prime Minister Thatcher sporting mouse ears or in a beach movie? (Go ahead, try.) Or Mouseketeer Funicello busting a coal miners’ strike or ordering the Royal Navy to clean Argentina’s clock?

Another story popped up today that I found much more interesting: “Nervous Europe Drives Demand for Dollars,” which was in The Financial Times. It notes: “The amount of dollar cash in circulation has risen by 42 percent in the last five years, with a main reason being demand from Europe, according to a top U.S. Federal Reserve official… The surge in demand for U.S. cash suggests that the world is worried about the safety of its banks and the future of the euro — but has no fear of inflation or default in the U.S.”

A little bit nuts, when you think about it. The euro’s dodgy, for sure. So what do Russians et al. decide to hoard instead? U.S. paper. (A special linen-cotton blend, actually). $100 Federal Reserve notes, to be exact. I guess it really is all about the Benjamins. Talk about talismanic power. I’m hardly a gold-standard crank, but last time I heard, Federal Reserve notes offer zero percent return, which is even lousier than a savings account, meaning that their value is slowly eroding.