Odyssey Marine Exploration, and more

Good week for:

Odyssey Marine Exploration, a Tampa-based treasure-hunting company, which announced that it had discovered the wreck of the HMS Victory, which sank in the English Channel in 1744. The British warship may have been carrying 4 tons of gold coins, now worth $1 billion.

Aretha Franklin, after curators of the Smithsonian exhibit on Barack Obama’s inauguration asked her to donate her now-infamous “bow hat,’’ festooned with a giant, bejeweled bow.

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Public displays of affection, after India’s high court overturned an obscenity charge against a young married couple who had been arrested for kissing in public. Police had reported that the couple were “sitting in an objectionable position … and kissing each other, due to which passers-by were feeling bad.”

Bad week for:

Gratitude, after Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit erected a 6-foot statue of a shoe in honor of Muntazer al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush on his final visit to Iraq.

Consistency, after the White House admitted that President Obama—who says we can no longer keep “our homes at 72 degrees at all times”—has cranked up the thermostat in the Oval Office. “You could grow orchids in there,’’ admitted advisor David Axelrod. “He’s from Hawaii, okay? He likes it warm.”

An early spring, after New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg was bitten by a groundhog that he tried to drag out of its hutch to predict the end of winter. A bandaged Bloomberg later described Chuck as “a terrorist rodent who could very well have been trained by al Qaida in Afghanistan.”