Let me stipulate up front, for those readers unhappy about my having poked fun at really small people (who happen to look like old men dressed up as newborns): What I’m about to write about is not funny. Not at all. Not a little bit. Definitively not funny.

There. Can I proceed to make fun of this?

So, it seems, according to the BBC, that last year the local residents of Maharashtra state in India “sacrificed” eleven children in “black magic rituals.” Nothing new there, you say? Yet another magic-realism story minus the love (but probably with added cholera)? A passage to India that ends up in the seventh circle of Hell? A suitable boy who kills children to make children?

Perhaps so.

But this story is a little different. The BBC relates that the criminals were a childless couple in a village of 300 people. They had been married twelve years but had been able to produce nary a crotchfruit (BBC makes no effort to determine if they had really been trying).

Said couple decided to kidnap children from the village (did I mention only 300 people live there?), perform arcane and murderous rituals upon them, and then hope for babies to rain from the sky like nuts from the banyan tree in Siddhartha. (Fact-check: Are there nuts on a banyan tree? Ed.: If Wikipedia counts as a fact-check, no. They bear fruits with seeds, but no nuts.)

Horrible. Awful. Inhumanity of man. All conceded 100 percent without argument.

However, what also struck me was the ratio being employed here: eleven kids to produce one? What kind of math are they doing in India?

To this place is where we Americans have outsourced our very future? Get thee to an abacus!