Readers Write re: Turkmenistan

From reader BML, a tumultuous tale of Turkmenistan:

my friend was in the peace corps there. one time he got arrested for “being outside after 7 pm without paying for a taxi” which was/is one of the random laws there. they kept him and the other people he was with in one police station for a while but then decided they needed to go somewhere else. but the paddy wagon wouldn’t start. so they asked my friend and his fellow peace corps “prisoners” to run behind the wagon pushing it until the engine turned over, then jump into the back and close the doors on themselves. which they did, mostly because it was funny. I think at some point they were hooked up to a “lie detector” that was clearly, like, an old overhead projector.

I’m an expert on overhead projectors. I’ve used every kind of overhead projector you could possibly imagine, from one end of this great nation to the other. I’ve even used those newfangled overhead video-projectors where there’s some kind of movie camera projecting stuff onto a screen. (Not to brag, but I used one at Harvard, the famous college, and at the HBO Comedy Festival too.) Anyway, if someone knows the hack to turn an overhead projector into a lie detector, let me know and I’ll do a video demonstration and post it on youtube and then we can all run our own overhead-projector-based autocracies!