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.”