VBVW for April 27, 2007:
Planet-Sized Progress
• The Very Best
A new planet that may be able to sustain life has been found. Gliese 581 c is located in the constellation Libra, and based on its size and relationship to a nearby star, may have temperatures similar to those on Earth. Battlestar Galactica fans and Trekkies–pack your bags!
Rosie O’Donnell is quitting The View. Anything that reduces the amount of public face time this harridan gets is a wonderful thing.
The Saudis broke up a terror plot, marking the first time they’ve actually done anything significant about terrorism. Of course, the plot aimed to target Saudi oilfields, so the Saudis probably took it more personally than they would planned attacks on their allies.
• The Very Worst
Zimbabwe’s inflation rate hit 2,200 percent. Once one of Africa’s more developed country, today more than 80 percent of Zimbabwe’s people live in poverty.
Hundreds of Buddhist monks protested in Thailand, demanding that Buddhism be made the country’s official religion. Wait a minute; aren’t these guys supposed to be protesting war and man’s inhumanity to man? They’re acting more like Jerry Falwell than Siddhartha.
Schools around the country are banning iPods after finding that kids are using them to cheat on tests. Students are embedding test answers in songs and playing them back during exams. It really is true: one bad Apple spoils the whole bunch.
VBVW for April 20, 2007:
Gaffes And Guns
• The Very Best
Customer uproar over the nonstop computer upgrade cycle has forced Dell Computer to resurrect the Windows XP operating system. Dell had planned to offer only the new Vista operating system, leaving existing customers in the lurch. Take that, Geek Squad.
Joseph Nacchio, the ex-CEO of Qwest Communications, was found guilty of insider trading for stock sales worth tens of millions of dollars. Take that, greedy CEOs.
Cho Seung-Hui commits suicide.
• The Very Worst
President Bush rebuked the Democrats’ plan to tie military funding to troop withdrawal, repeatedly emphasizing it is “unacceptable” to veterans, soldiers, families and the rest of America to delay our troops’ return home in any way whatsoever. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the very next day that tours of active duty would be extended from 12 to 15 months.
Thirty two workers were killed when showered by molten steel at a metal factory in northeast China. Industrial accidents killed more than 127,000 people in China in 2005.
U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales uttered a variation of the phrase “I don’t recall” 64 times while being grilled on Capitol Hill over the firings of eight U.S. attorneys. This issue isn’t about firing employees — no law against that — but about how the highest profile lawyer in the country spent five weeks preparing for his testimony and could barely remember his own name.
VBVW for April 13, 2007:
Flying Blind, Deaf and Dumb
• The Very Best
British pilot Miles Hilton-Barber is flying halfway around the world, from London to Sydney, in a microlight to raise money for charity. Two reasons why this is remarkable: (1) a microlight is a tiny and fragile plane that looks like a snowmobile dangling from a hang glider; and (2) the pilot is blind. Hilton-Barber aims to raise one million pounds ($1.9M US) for the ‘’Seeing is Believing'’ project.
Stem-cell transplants have been shown to stop and possibly reverse the effects of Type 1 diabetes. A study released this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that the therapy has left test patients completely free of insulin injections for months, and one of the patients hasn’t needed insulin in three years. Critics who don’t understand where stem cells really come from, do shut up.
Paul Wolfowitz, the president of the very staid and very conservative World Bank, was booed and jeered by his very staid and very conservative employees after he admitted to getting his girlfriend a job at the State Department. Wolfowitz had repeatedly lied about using his influence in the hiring, and the company meeting ended with World Bank staffers hissing and calling for his resignation. That’s what we would have done.
• The Very Worst
After Watergate, the Presidential Records Act was passed to ensure all White House correspondence is traceable. Thirty years later, the Bush administration is updating Nixon’s “erasing of the tape” by claiming 6 years’ worth of email correspondence have been “lost.” Investigators believe the messages might have linked the US attorney firings to Karl Rove. They also wanted to check if Laura Bush is the one spamming us from Classmates.com. The guy at Kinko’s can recover lost data — Rove done disappeared it.
Don Imus is kicked off the air for an asinine but typical remark, proving once again that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are the President and Vice President of Black America. Never mind that Jackson once called New York City “Hymietown” and that Sharpton wanted the Duke lacrosse players thrown in jail the moment charges were levelled against them. It’s time to impeach these two idiots.
England’s Lake District is known as one of the most beautiful places in the Western world, but the board of tourism is afraid the YouTube generation won’t care. So they produced a rap video (rap is a rhythmic style of music widely popular until about 1998). MC Nuts, a squirrel with a sweatsuit and a pituitary problem, raps his version of a famous Wordsworth poem while frolicking on the banks of a lake that inspired the poet. The vid’s closing line: “Respect Wordsworth.”
VBVW for April 6, 2007:
Waterworld
• The Very Best
Michael Phelps set five world swimming records in five days, apparently without the help of steroids. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before the rumors and accusations start. Plus, we hear that his mother slept with Aquaman.
The French unveiled a new high speed train that has reached a speed of 357 mph. By contrast, most U.S. high speed trains barely crack 60 mph. Running full-out, the French train would hypothetically make it from New York to Boston in half an hour. Currently, Amtrak and its crapo-motives take nearly four hours to do the same run. Cars on crowded I-95 do it in less than three.
A team of quantum physicists have shown it’s possible to store a bit of data on a single atom. Their work was published in this week’s Nature Nanotechnology, known for its naked fold-outs of Max Planck. A bit is not much data, you say. Well, just how much room do you think an atom takes up? Ballistic anisotropic magnetoresistance steals the spotlight — again.
• The Very Worst
The White House blasted speaker Nancy Pelosi for attempting diplomatic measures with Syria’s president — then quickly shuffled a Republican congressman off to Damascus to do the same. The administration’s policy to date has been to isolate Syria (since we are so well loved in the Middle East, we can afford to ice those guys out). We have to ask both Bush and Pelosi: Whatever happened to the ol’ “politics stops at the water’s edge” thing?
Global warming used to be a prediction, but scientists this week provided a detailed report to the UN of how smokestack and tailpipe emissions are already turning our atmosphere into a planetary pressure cooker. The report comes in the same week that a congressional committee grilled an oil lobbyist who was hired by the White House to review and “soften” government documents concerning climate change.
The Sea Diamond cruise ship sank near the Greek island of Santorini after striking a reef. Now it is a reef. Of the 1560 passengers and crew on the $78 million cruiser, 1558 were safely evacuated. At VBVW press time, divers were still searching for a missing French man and his daughter.
