Good week, Bad week

Good week for:

Trickle-down economics, after Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney handed about $50 in cash to Ruth Williams, a South Carolina woman who told him she was struggling financially. “God told me to pray for Romney,” she said afterward.

Catharsis, after Sarah Griffiths, 41, who lost her father in 1995 to a factory accident at the Campbell’s Soup Tower in the U.K., was chosen to push the button triggering the building’s demolition. “When I felt the thud as it hit the ground, everything felt complete,” said Griffiths.

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Caveat emptor, after 10 people purchased sealed iPad 2s at a Canadian store and found that the boxes contained only rectangular slabs of clay. Thieves had made the switch.

Bad week for

Forgetting to silence your phone, after a conductor stopped a performance by the New York Philharmonic because an audience member’s cellphone kept ringing. “Are you finished?” conductor Alan Gilbert asked the phone’s owner, who was heckled.

Deep-fried cheesecake, after celebrity chef Paula Deen, known for her high-fat, high-sugar cooking style, acknowledged that she had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

False alarms, after a British Airways flight midway across the Atlantic mistakenly played a recording telling passengers that the plane would “shortly be making an emergency landing on water.” Panicked passengers spent 30 agonized seconds thinking they were “plunging toward a cold, watery grave,” one passenger said.