Religious instruction, Boasting

Good week for:

Obama, Japan, after the small fishing town launched a publicity campaign linking itself to the U.S. presidential candidate with which it shares a name. Residents have been making bean cakes with Barack Obama’s face on them. “Maybe we’ll get some American tourists,” said Mayor Toshio Murakami.

Religious instruction, after the pastor of the Relevant Church in Ybor City, Fla., issued a “30-day sex challenge” for married congregants to fool around—with their spouses—every day for a month, in an effort to reduce the divorce rate.

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Dave Twohill, the drummer of a popular Australian band, Mental As Anything, who was awarded $10,000 for unfair dismissal. The other band members had fired Twohill for alcohol abuse, bad behavior, and poor drumming skills. A court ruled that he should have been given a warning first.

Bad week for:

MSNBC, after the cable network flashed a picture of Osama bin Laden instead of Barack Obama. Reporter David Shuster of the same network was recently suspended after saying that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had “pimped out” her daughter, Chelsea.

Britain, where a fisherman in a northern lake this week hooked the country’s first specimen of the dreaded snakehead, a voracious Chinese species with the ability to crawl on land and spread from lake to lake. “The reaction was, ‘Oh, s---,’’ said an official.

Boasting, after a Louisiana man who had just completed a videogame called a friend to announce, “I have killed them all.” Thomas Ballard had dialed the wrong number, and the frightened woman who answered called police. No bodies were found, but police arrested Ballard anyway on an old drug charge.