Weekly Review

By Paul Ford

It was hurricane season.¹ It became clear that Karl Rove had leaked information about Valerie Plame to the press. In response, President George W. Bush, who had previously announced that he would fire anyone in his administration who was found to have leaked Plame's identity, announced that he would actually fire only proven criminals. "I don't know all the facts," said Bush.² Bob Woodward offered to serve some of Judith Miller's jail time.³ Suicide bombers killed at least 170 Iraqis, including twenty-six children who were waiting for American soldiers to give them candy,⁴ and Saddam Hussein was charged in the death of 150 Shiites in 1982.⁵ Eleven U.S. soldiers were charged with beating Iraqis,⁶ and a Florida man, worried that his three-year-old son might become a gay sissy, was accused of beating the boy to death.⁷ Bernard Ebbers was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison,⁸ a dangerous monkey named Buddy was loose in Columbus, Ohio,⁹ and Dennis Kucinich was in love.¹⁰ The atomic bomb turned sixty.¹¹ Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath died.¹² A thirteen-year-old boy in Kalamazoo accidentally burned down the family meth lab.¹³ Four six-hundred-year-old papal seals were found in a toilet shaft in Germany, ¹⁴ and a native Alaskan was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for killing six walruses.¹⁵

NASA postponed the launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery.¹⁶ London began to scan the bodies of tube passengers,¹⁷ and Disney World started scanning the index and middle fingers of all visitors.¹⁸ People in Colombia were granting amnesty to militia groups in exchange for peace. “A few months ago,” said one man, “I would never have dared walk out here to show you this grave.”¹⁹ Three Texas teens were in trouble for teabagging a fourth.²⁰ An eating-disorder and female-self-esteem expert collapsed in a Connecticut supermarket after huffing nitrous oxide from whipped cream canisters,²¹ and in Traverse City, Michigan, a woman drowned in a vat of cherries. ²² A Brooklyn woman was acquitted of manslaughter due to lack of evidence; she was accused of killing her husband after he mocked her for her lack of callipygian rondure.²³ A St. Charles, Illinois, man was accused of seducing an Akita through a chain-link fence,²⁴ and in Enumclaw, Washington, after a man died of internal bleeding from having sex with a horse, police were investigating a reputed bestiality farm. “We've got more investigating to do,” said a sergeant.²⁵ A blind man in Florida got lucky with his guide dog, a yellow lab named Lucky.²⁶

The twelfth major U.S. investigation into Guantánamo Bay found that forcing an inmate to behave like a dog was not inhumane.²⁷ Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who returned to Pakistan after three years in Guantánamo Bay, said that writing poetry kept him sane while imprisoned. “They may have weapons and missiles,” he wrote, “but we can find no sign of manhood in this army.”²⁸ A study found that the blood of newborn babies contained an average of two hundred industrial chemicals and pollutants including pesticides, perfluorochemicals, and waste from burning garbage.²⁹ A Bear, Delaware, woman was charged with injecting her two-year-old son with human feces.³⁰ The United States was spending twice as much per capita on health care as was spent by twenty-nine other industrialized nations,³¹ and prayer was found to be no help for heart patients.³² California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to quit his job editing muscle magazines, which paid at least $1 million a year. “I pledged to put the people of California front and center,” he said after receiving a great deal of press criticism.³³ It cost $75 to bleach your anus in Los Angeles.³⁴ An explosion in a Chinese coal mine killed eighty-one miners,³⁵ a three-express-train crash in Pakistan killed 132 people, ³⁶ and a typhoon struck Taiwan.³⁷ The NHL and Player's Association came to an agreement and announced that hockey could start up again.³⁸ A Tennessee man was charged with desecrating a venerated object and sent to jail after he burned an American flag.³⁹ Hoping to stave off the development of super-intelligent monkeys, a panel of scientists issued guidelines on the insertion of human stem cells into monkey brains.⁴⁰ William Rehnquist announced that he would not retire from the Supreme Court,⁴¹ the bones of a mammoth were found in Silicon Valley,⁴² and an eight-year-old Malaysian boy caught a fish which jumped into his throat and choked him to death.⁴³