Dedication, and more

Good week for:

Dedication, after an Italian doctor continued performing brain surgery on a patient while having a heart attack. “I’m not a hero,” said Claudio Vitale, who had angioplasty after he finished the operation. “I couldn’t leave at such a delicate moment.”

Mothers of teenage boys, after a Japanese astronaut spending three months aboard the International Space Station began testing chemically treated underwear that doesn’t get stinky even if worn for a week. “Nobody has complained,” said astronaut Koichi Wakata, “so I think it’s so far, so good.”

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Japan, which won its second straight World Baseball Classic tournament, beating the U.S. team in the semifinal and South Korea in the final. “Asian baseball may be increasingly reconsidered as the birthplace of baseball,” gloated the newspaper Nikkei.

Bad week for:

Taking responsibility, after a 62-year-old woman accused of stealing $73,000 from her Arlington, Wash., church allegedly told detectives, “Satan had a big part in the theft.”

Feminism, after a new poll found that 25 percent of young women questioned would rather win first prize on America’s Next Top Model than the Nobel Peace Prize. Half said they’d marry an ugly man if he were rich.

The McInnes family of Hungerford, U.K., which discovered that 18-year-old Rory had painted a 60-foot penis on the roof of the family home to see if it would show up on Google Earth. A helicopter pilot noticed, and when flummoxed father Andy McInnes asked Rory why there was a giant penis on the roof, the teen said, “Oh, you’ve found it, then.”