Gylve Nagell, a member of a Norwegian rock band, only agreed to run for local councilor in his hometown of Kolbotn only as a backup, thinking it would help boost voter turnout. He never wanted to win, and to make sure he didn’t, Nagell’s campaign posters showed him holding his pet cat, with the caption “Please Don’t Vote for Me”. It didn’t work the way he had planned.

Gylve, better known as Fenriz, half of Norwegian heavy metal band Darkthrone, will be required to attend important council meetings and listen to his constituents’ complaints, after winning a seat on the Kolbotn local council. The news came as a huge surprise to the young musician, as he claims he only agreed to run after officials in Kolbotn asked him to do it in an effort to boost voter numbers. “Basically, they called and asked if I wanted to be on the list [of backup representatives]. I said yeah, thinking I would be like 18th on the list and I wouldn’t really have to do anything,” he told music site Clrvynt.

He never made any effort to win, but as the actual election approached, Fenriz says he started to get a feeling that he might actually end up a councilor against his will. So he tried to very openly sabotage his own campaign by using a photo of himself holding his pet cat with the caption “Please Don’t Vote for Me” as a poster. But his hometown was apparently so impressed by his lack of interest for the official position that they voted for him overwhelmingly. “People just went nuts,” as he puts it.

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Turns out Santa Claus is real, and he actually lives in North Pole! Don’t get too excited though – North Pole is a suburb in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Santa Claus is the legal name of one of its residents, although he definitely looks the part.

At North Pole, the atmosphere is festive all year. The streets are always decorated in holiday spirit, the light posts look like candy canes and the streets have names like ‘Snowman Lane’ and ‘St. Nicholas Drive’. So it’s only befitting to have a ‘Santa Claus’ live there. According to his Facebook page, Claus is “the only man legally named Santa Claus ever to live in North Pole, Alaska.”

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“So I’m a level 68 orc rogue girl. That means I stab things…a lot! Who would have thought that a peace-lovin’, social worker and democrat would enjoy that?!” This was the statement that won World of Warcraft gamer Colleen Lachowicz a seat in Maine’s State Senate.

Democrat Colleen Lachowicz has recently won a seat representing Maine’s Senate District 25, and believe it or not, her Republican adversaries helped her to it. It just so happens that Colleen is an avid gamer who spends a lot of time playing the incredibly popular online multiplayer video-game World of Warcraft. In this fantasy universe she is known as Santiaga, a level 85 orc rogue assassin, who as the player herself admits, spends a lot of time stabbing things. Little did she know that her gaming antics would actually help her win a seat in the State Senate. Apparently, her Republican Party rivals thought it would be a good idea to set up a website portraying Lachowicz as someone with a “bizarre double life”, and making her look like a violent person by describing her in-game behavior. This uninspired smear campaign actually won Lachowicz international support from the gaming community and eventually helped her won the race for the Senate.

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Sole Sánchez, a Spanish politician from Menorca, Spain, has recently been accused of sexism over a poster showing her boobs being groped from behind by a man.

Sánchez, a candidate of the Democratic Party, decided to use her best physical assets in the election for the town council of Ciutadella, so she and her colleagues opted for a poster in which she displays her breasts being groped from behind by a man, accompanied by the slogan “Dos Grandes Argumentos”, which translates as Two Big Arguments. They’re big alright, and I’m sure they would have won her the ballots of male voters, but the opposition had something to say about the matter.

The Esquerra de Menorca party denounced Sole Sánchez to the Institut de la Dona (Institute of Women) and claimed sexist use of her body. he defended herself by saying no one is more feminist than her, but everyone has the right to use their body as they see fit, and if all the opposition can do is just sit and watch, that is their problem. She was forced to withdraw her posters, including some in which she appeared in clad underwear with her hands and feet tied in a sadomasochistic way. Read More »