Good week, Bad week

Good week for:

Besse Cooper of Monroe, Ga., who celebrated her 116th birthday. “I mind my own business, and I don’t eat junk food,” said Cooper, believed to be the world’s oldest living person.

A tooth for a tooth, after Nepali farmer Mohammed Salmodin bit a cobra to death after it bit him first. “A snake charmer told me that if a snake bites you, bite it until it is dead and nothing will happen to you,” explained Salmodin, who survived his bite.

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Will.i.am, after the hip-hop artist’s new single, “Reach for the Stars,” was downloaded to NASA’s Curiosity rover and beamed back to a group of schoolchildren on Earth—the first song ever broadcast from another planet.

Bad week for:

Driving in Washington, D.C., after a national insurance study ranked motorists there the most accident-prone in the nation. Drivers there have an accident every 4.8 years, compared with every 13.8 years in the safest city, Sioux Falls, S.D.

Amateur beekeeping, after police and professional beekeepers confiscated 3 million bees from a home in Queens, N.Y. Yi Gin Chen had 45 hives packed into his backyard, and the swarms terrified neighbors. “It’s gotten out of hand,” he acknowledged.

Richard Eggers, 68, who was fired by a Wells Fargo bank in Des Moines when a background check found that he’d been arrested in 1963 for putting a fake dime into a laundromat washing machine. “It was a stupid stunt,” Eggers said, “but I don’t think that it warrants a termination almost a half a century later.”