Good week, Bad week

Good week for:

Shaving your head, after a new University of Pennsylvania study found that men with fully hairless domes are perceived as more dominant, stronger, and taller than other men.

The Onion, after the satirical newspaper’s story headlined “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad to Obama” was run as a factual story by Iran’s Fars News Agency. Fars later admitted it had been fooled, but insisted that it was true that most Americans prefer the Iranian president to President Obama.

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The 1 percent who are also the 47 percent, after the Congressional Research Service found that 2,362 people legally collected unemployment benefits in 2009 despite living in households with incomes of $1 million or more.

Bad week for:

Trying to improve on nature, after the German grocery chain Billa was widely ridiculed for selling pre-peeled, cellophane-wrapped bananas. “If there is an easy-to-open ready-packed food, it’s the banana,” said a spokesman for Greenpeace.

Greece’s reputation for competence, after a child’s runaway helium balloon caused a power failure in Athens, shutting down the country’s main flight information radar system.

Ordering the chicken, after the Red Flower Chinese Restaurant in Williamsburg, Ky., was shut down for allegedly serving road kill. Environmental health inspector Paul Lawson said it was the craziest thing he’d ever seen. “They didn’t know that they weren’t allowed to,” said Lawson.