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Things the President Actually May Not Be to Blame For
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According to a police report, two men who duct-taped up and robbed a 57-year-old woman in her house in Westerville, Ohio, in February got into an argument over how to proceed, during which one said, “This is all George Bush’s fault. He screwed up the economy.” Also in February a 29-year-old man was given a suspended sentence and fined for a December incident in which he scaled a fence at the White House in order, he said, to meet Chelsea Clinton; in addition to claiming that someone had put a cell phone inside his head, the man explained to a court in Washington, D.C., “George Bush told me to jump the fence and I jumped the fence.”
In December 70-year-old Miichiro Yamashita received a suspended sentence for bringing 25 sticks of dynamite to a hospital in Gobo, Japan, and threatening to blow the place up unless medical staff relented and gave Yamashita an injection he’d sought to treat a stomachache. In February a female customer at a Rally’s restaurant in Kenner, Louisiana, allegedly slashed an employee on the face and arm with a razor blade after her fish sandwich was served with tartar sauce rather than the mayonnaise she’d requested. (Police said a second woman accompanying her also beat the victim with a metal cane.) And in the same month Kimberly Dasilva, 40, was arrested in Boston after allegedly filling condoms with a potentially explosive mixture of Drano and gasoline and mailing them to six addresses, including a college admissions office and two strip clubs she’d waitressed at; according to court records, Dasilva said she was tired of being mistreated by men and “couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Australian Whale Vomit Find Worth a Fortune” (an Agence France-Presse dispatch from Sydney in January on a family’s discovery at the beach of a 32-pound lump of ambergris–a rare substance produced by sperm whales and long used to make perfume–valued at about $295,000). “Why I Still Breastfeed My Eight-Year-Old Girl” (a February article in the News and Star of Carlisle, England, about a local mother dedicated to breast-feeding as long as her children desire it; her older daughter, who was weaned at age five, requested a onetime return to breast milk for her ninth birthday).
