Good week for used cars, and more

Good week for: Pontiac LeMans Tempest, Having company, Old jokes; Bad week for: Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, Sending in the clowns, Huntington, W.Va.

Good week for:

123ecklin, an eBay seller who asked $500 for his dilapidated 1963 Pontiac LeMans Tempest with no motor or transmission. After auto enthusiasts recognized it as a specially built drag-racing car that won races in 1963, the bidding reached $226,521.

Having company, after overcrowded British cemeteries were given permission to exhume bodies in order to rebury them deeper and bury new bodies on top.

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Old jokes, after a British publisher translated Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, a 1,600-year-old joke book from ancient Greece. One gag that presages the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch concerns a man who complains that the slave he just purchased has died. “By the gods,” replies the seller, “when he was with me, he never did any such thing!”

Bad week for:

Astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, who was repairing a solar panel on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station when she let go of a tool bag, and watched it float away into the void. “Oh, great,’’ she muttered.

Sending in the clowns, after the New York Stock Exchange let two red-nosed Bozos from the Big Apple Circus ring the opening bell in an attempt to add some levity to a gloomy bear market. The market closed 337 points down for the day.

Huntington, W.Va., which was named as the unhealthiest city in the country. About half the adults there are obese, and half its senior citizens have no teeth. Since the economy in Huntington is so poor, the subject of overeating “doesn’t come up,’’ said Mayor David Felinton, who is obese.

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