Good Week, Bad Week

Good week for:

Hybrid vigor, after a Pew study found that a record-high 15 percent of new marriages in the U.S. in 2008 involved two different races or ethnicities. In 1961, when Barack Obama’s African father married his white mother, the intermarriage rate was 2 percent.

Getting from here to there, after China unveiled the 380A, the world’s fastest high-speed train, which can travel up to 236 miles an hour. The new train will make the trip from Shanghai to Beijing—which took 19 hours just a decade ago—in four hours.

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Anamika Veeramani, a 14-year-old girl from North Royalton, Ohio, after she correctly spelled the word “stromuhr,” winning the 2010 national spelling bee. Indian-Americans have won first place in eight of the past 12 spelling bees.

Bad week for:

The ‘grim eater,’ a New Zealand man who attended up to four funerals a week in order to feast on the free food and take some home in Tupperware containers. A funeral director finally realized what the “mourner’’ was up to, and alerted other funeral homes.

Remorse, after New York magazine reported that convicted swindler and Ponzi scheme operator Bernie Madoff told a fellow inmate, “F--- my victims. I carried them for 20 years.’’

Doggie bags, after an Australian restaurant started demanding that customers eat everything on their plates or be banished from eating there again. “Please also note that vegetables and salad on the side are NOT decorations,” says a statement on the menu from chef Yukako Ichikawa. “They are part of the meal too.”