Good week for:
Starting your own navy, after the U.K. Ministry of Defense announced it would take bids on a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the HMS Ark Royal. Bidders have to outline their “intentions regarding the vessel,” the ministry said.
Fred Mack of Newton Square, Pa., who celebrated his 100th birthday by skydiving, fulfilling a promise he made to himself when he first skydived, on his 95th birthday. After landing, Mack said, “I’m still alive.”
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Texas justice, after a prosecutor there offered to let Willie Nelson pay a small fine to settle marijuana possession charges if he agreed to sing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” in court. “I ain’t gonna be mean to Willie Nelson,” said prosecutor Kit Bramblett.
Bad week for:
Air-traffic control, after two jetliners were forced to land without guidance at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Va., because the lone controller on duty after midnight had dozed off.
Revisionist astrobiology, after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez suggested that Mars once had an advanced civilization that was wiped out by predatory capitalists. “Maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived, and finished off the planet,” Chávez said.
Overreach, after a federal judge rejected the music industry’s demand for $75 trillion from the firm LimeWire for enabling people to download songs for free. Judge Kimba Wood noted that $75 trillion was “more money than the entire music industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.”
