Good week, Bad week

Good week for:

Bill Gates, who has ceded his Forbes ranking as the wealthiest man in the world by giving away more than $28 billion through his charitable foundation.

The farewell scene in E.T., which was voted the most tear-jerking scene in movie history in a survey of 2,000 movie fans.

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Alvin Wong, who may be the happiest man in the nation. Wong meets all the criteria in Gallup’s “Well-Being Index”: He’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married with children, lives in Hawaii, and makes $120,000 a year.

Bad week for:

NPR, after one of its fund-raisers was caught on videotape saying that the Tea Party is “seriously racist” and had “hijacked the Republican Party.” NPR, which had been fighting a Republican proposal to eliminate its federal subsidies, compelled the fund-raiser and CEO Vivian Schiller to resign.

Smuggling, after a Georgia woman was arrested at the Canadian-U.S. border when her “pregnant” stomach turned out to be a pouch containing 33 plastic bags crammed with 34,000 Ecstasy pills, weighing 21 pounds and valued at $3 million.

Literature, after a book titled What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex became a best-seller in Great Britain. It has 200 blank pages. Author Sheridan Simove said it was “gratifying to see my book outselling many other academic works whose authors claim to have worked even harder than I to further the extent of human knowledge.”