Weekly Review
A gota fría above the Mediterranean sea caused as much as nine feet of rain to flood the streets of eastern Spain, sweeping up cars, derailing a high-speed train with nearly 300 passengers aboard, and killing at least 215 people; the Spanish government deployed helicopters and more than 1,600 soldiers to search homes and vehicles for trapped residents and dead bodies; and Spaniards called their country’s king a “murderer” for what they felt was his lax response to the storm, hurling at the royal couple mud and eggs, which their security forces blocked by opening umbrellas.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Meteorologists predicted that a tropical depression in the Caribbean would strengthen into a tropical storm, flood Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, develop into a hurricane, and strike Cuba, which more than 66,000 people have already fled amid island-wide blackouts brought on in large part by a fossil fuel shortage that the Cuban government said would not be fixed by a shipment of almost 500,000 barrels of oil from Mexico; and in the Mexican state of Campeche, a lost Mayan city was identified beneath the jungle canopy that more than a millennium ago was home to as many as 50,000 people, a population an anthropologist described as evidence of suburban sprawl during the Classic period that raised “all sorts of questions” about how to to explain the collapse of so large a civilization.10 11 12 13 14 15 16 In Argentina, a woman fended off a knife-wielding attacker with a larger knife she happened to be carrying, an octogenarian in Ohio who was attacked in the hallway of his building by a man with a rusty machete fended him off with a pair of nunchucks, and a sheriff in Ohio announced that he will not come to the aid of anyone who votes for Democrats.17 18 19
Americans began in-person voting in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, which pollsters in the closing weeks of the campaign predicted would be determined by people living in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; in Wisconsin, a man was convicted after helping his son conceal the bodies of four people he’d killed in a cornfield; in Arizona, a man was arrested after driving around the state for four years with his father’s frozen corpse; in Georgia, a man was arrested for driving with two dogs tied to the back of his car; in North Carolina, a man was arrested for selling at least 1,000 homemade machine guns to “people from the mountains”; in Michigan, it was reported that a man living in the woods of the Upper Peninsula captured video of himself being “knocked out cold” by what he claimed was a bigfoot; in Nevada, it was reported that a desert motel was haunted by clowns; and in Pennsylvania, a state senator proposed creating an office that could repeal a ban on for-profit fortune telling.20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 New York City legalized jaywalking, IKEA announced that it would donate 6 million euros to a fund for the former prisoners of Soviet-administered East Germany who had been forced during the Cold War to build its furniture, and two Australian mathematicians found that one chimpanzee that spent its lifetime chained to a typewriter had a 5 percent chance of producing the word “bananas,” that all 200,000 of the world’s chimpanzees, even if they were immortal, could never produce the complete works of Shakespeare, and that, due to the projected heat death of the universe, no amount of “monkey labor” would ever be “a viable tool for developing non-trivial written works.”28 29 30
Scientists found that drunkenness is prevalent in the animal kingdom, citing earlier findings that fruit flies consumed alcohol after being rejected by a mate and then subsequently became less selective; a 38-year-old man was arrested in Japan after concealing his phone number to call his wife more than 100 times a day in what he described to police as an “act of love”; and the fewer than 60 residents of the Japanese village of Ichinono reportedly sewed puppets to display in fields and woods and stave off loneliness.31 32 33 “We are,” said a resident, “outnumbered.”34 The owners of the United Kingdom’s largest collection of bricks ran out of room for their 6,000-piece exhibit; thieves in Hertfordshire ran off with England’s largest known inflatable planetarium; thieves in London made off with tens of thousands of pounds of cheese; and the Landlord and Tenant Board of London considered whether a woman should receive compensation from her landlord after allowing her to live in filthy conditions that resulted in her having a cockroach surgically removed from her ear.35 36 37 38 In Singapore, a court considered a dispute between two siblings and ordered the sister to stop going into the brother’s room to clean it as he slept; a man in the Greek city of Thessaloniki was arrested for breaking into homes and smelling strangers’ shoes; it was discovered that Boeing charged the U.S. Air Force nearly 8,000 percent above market rate for soap dispensers; and a Russian court considering the case of Google’s blocking pro-Russian YouTube channels fined the company 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 rubles, a sum more than a billion trillion times the size of the global economy.39 40 41 42 —Joe Kloc
