For links to the originally reported items, go to the Harper’s Weekly Review, from which the following were taken:
The European Commission posted a 44-second videoclip of 18 orgasms to YouTube in support of European cinema. Critics complained that the title, “Let’s Come Together,” was too suggestive and that the pun fails to work in all EU languages.
One hundred and ten children were swept into the Irish Sea.
A Hong Kong woman who blinded her boyfriend in one eye six years ago was jailed for jabbing a chopstick into his other eye.
An Iowa State University study suggested that the happiest marriages are those in which the husband defers to the wife in all decisions.
It was revealed that Wal-Mart has collected on at least 75 of the 350,000 life insurance policies it had secretly taken out on its employees.
Experts claimed that prescription pills were becoming the new marijuana on college campuses.
At Gore’s 24-hour, seven-continent Live Earth concert for the environment, Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon addressed the crowd. “Everyone who did not arrive on a private jet,” he said, “put your hands in the air.” Le Bon then put his hand in the air.
Egypt outlawed female circumcision.
A Miami man was charged with elder abuse after his mother, who was found in a trailer covered in red ants with newspapers shoved into her anus, died.
And, finally, my favorite:
A study claimed that men with high testosterone make irrational decisions.
Just a side note on the elder abuse issue. Sometimes it takes every ounce of self-control and empathy to keep from venting one’s frustration and exhaustion on the person who’s the cause of both. It’s very much like what you might feel toward the much-loved infant who has not slept in 24 hours and who keeps crying and you can’t figure out why and you just want it to shut up. While I have never done violence to either of my children or to my mother, there are times when I can understand how some otherwise competent adults just totally lose it. I don’t have any answers. I just grind my teeth a lot.