I love getting the free Harper’s Magazine Weekly Review email newsletter, written by Paul Ford (see update below). It’s a sentence-by-sentence snapshot of the awe-inspiring, humbling, infuriating, and funny events that happened in the preceding seven-day period. We live in a strange world. Here’s the first third of this week’s Review:
A car bomb killed 10 people at a Shiite shrine in Najaf,
Iraq, and a suicide bombing killed 85 people at a Shiite
mosque in Baghdad. The U.S. military announced that
1,313 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the sectarian
violence of March. “Civil war,” said Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak, “has almost started among Shiites, Sunnis,
Kurds, and those who are coming from Asia.” The case
against Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an Iraqi cameraman
for CBS who was arrested in April 2005 after filming the
wreckage of a car bomb, was finally dismissed for lack
of evidence. The Bush Administration continued to plan
a major air attack on Iran; a highly placed government
consultant said that President George W. Bush believes that
“saving Iran is going to be his legacy.” Doctors in London
reported that a man who has taken 40,000 doses of Ecstasy
was having trouble with his short-term memory. A physicist
in Connecticut was looking for funding for time-travel
experiments. His proposed machine, he said, “uses light in
the form of circulating lasers to warp or loop time.” A
chiropractor in Ohio was in trouble for telling his
patients that he could cure their ills by traveling back
in time to when the injury occurred (a practice he calls
“Bahlaqeem”), and a Swedish doctor in Norway was fired
for using an “anal massage” technique to cure different
kinds of pain, such as headaches. “I am different,”
explained the doctor. Doctors reattached a section of
Ariel Sharon’s skull. The Massachusetts legislature voted
to make health insurance mandatory for all state residents
by July 2007. Australia agreed to sell uranium to China,
and an Australian nudist, attempting to kill a spider,
suffered burns over 18 percent of his body after he poured
gasoline into the spider’s hole and lit a match.
Reader comment: Mike says:
Worthwhile noting that the author of the Weekly Review is Paul Ford, who has been Boing-Boinged before (cf. Gary Benchley entry), and has a truly amazing website with his writings at FTrain. He also collaborated with “Blue’s Clues”-host-turned-rock-singer Steve Burns on his website.