VBVW for October 12, 2007: Oral Medication

• The Very Best •

The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a new high of 14,163 while the Standard & Poor’s 500 hit its own new record. And just last month, people were predicting that blood would run in the streets as the market came crashing down.

40-year-old Jason Lewis completed a 13-year round-the-world journey, covering over 46,000 miles in his pedal-powered boat. He is the first person to circumnavigate the globe on human power alone. And we’re pretty sure he did it without steroids.

You don’t know it but Gerhard Ertl has singlehandedly improved your car, your computer, and your planet’s chance of survival. On Thursday, Ertl’s 71st birthday, he won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for work that helped determine how catalytic converters clean car exhaust and why iron rusts.

• The Very Worst •

Five countries are already laying claims to the oil deposits becoming accessible beneath polar ice as glacial chunks break off and melt into the sea. Let that sink in for a minute.

Marion Jones gave up the five steroid-fueled medals she won at the 2000 Summer Olympics. At this rate, statistically speaking, all sports cheaters will be exposed in the next five years . . . which may also mean the end of all professional sports.

Former professors of Oral Roberts University are suing the pants off university president Richard Roberts. Among the accusations is that he flew his family around on the university jet (their university has a jet?), had students campaign for Republicans (students vote Republican?), and otherwise darkened the good name of his father, university founder and televangelist Oral Roberts (televangelists take it orally?).