Good week for:
Defying your parents, after 12-year-old Jaxxyn Wood of Kentucky stayed up to 3 a.m. playing computer games and smelled an electrical fire in the kitchen. He woke his family and got all nine people to evacuate, thus saving their lives.
Democracy, after a Tennessee man whose pet raccoon, Rebekah, was confiscated by state wildlife authorities announced he was running for governor so he could get his furry friend back. “This is all about the raccoon,” said Mark “Coonrippy” Brown.
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Staying indoors, after a “polar vortex” dropped temperatures in all 50 states below freezing, with lows of 7 degrees in Alabama, and -27 in parts of the Midwest. It was so cold that the Chicago zoo moved its polar bear indoors into a heated room.
Bad week for:
Playing hide and seek, after an Australian man hid naked inside a top-loading washing machine to surprise his girlfriend, and had to be freed by police, who used olive oil as a lubricant.
The nuns of Lucena, after Pope Francis rang the Spanish convent to wish the sisters a happy new year, but left a voice message when no one picked up. “What are the nuns doing that they can’t answer?” the pontiff joked in his message. “I am Pope Francis.”
Impulses, after a 12-year-old Maddie Gilmartin of New Hampshire stuck her tongue on a frozen flagpole to see if it would stick. Her parents saw her stuck to the pole, flailing her arms, and had to free her with warm water. “Just think before you do something,” Maddie managed to say later with a sore, swollen tongue.
