From the "You can't make these things up" department

Is truth stranger than fiction? Well if it ain't, I'm a monkey's uncle. Whoops! That sounds kinda racist.

And so, evidently, did the title of a novel by Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, which prompted WordBridge, a Netherlands-based publisher, to bowdlerize not just the text itself but the title.

The work in question, whose new and improved title is shown at the left, has been cleansed for what FOX News calls "a new generation of readers."

It just doesn't get any better than this. I thought the silliness couldn't get any more intense than when a black county commissioner in Dallas County, Texas got all wee-weed up over the use of the term black hole, used to describe paperwork that had vanished down the office rabbit hole.

Now I know that was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to racial over-sensitivity. No more Black Death, y'all. From now on the outbreak of bubonic plague that killed between 30 percent and 60 percent of Europe's population in the fourteenth century will be known as the White Death. Or better still Whitey Death. Or best of all Honky Death.

There is much, MUCH more scrubbing to be done, but before we get to it, I have a few demands of my own. Let the disgusting term Jew's Harp be relegated to the same scrap pile of history as Conrad's book title. Oh, and that Shylock character Shakespeare created---you know the thieving bastard who exacted a pound of flesh? From now, he's no longer Jewish. He's ah . . . um---well, I don't know. I guess once everybody gets in on this racial hypersensitivity jag, there won't be any ethnicity about which anything negative can ever again be said or written.