The week in a nutshell

I'm looking for a good title for this thing -- any suggestions?

Impress your friends
Alcoholics everywhere rejoiced Monday when the Supreme Court ruled that state laws restricting the shipment of wine from out-of-state businesses are unconstitutional. This also means that not all of us will have to leave home and go on some crazy journey like those guys in "Sideways" just to get sloshed.

Newsweek did a bad, bad thing, relying on one anonymous source for a story saying that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Quran down a toilet to get prisoners to talk. On Monday, the magazine retracted the article, which has been blamed for causing Muslim protests and violence that left 15 people dead and many more injured. The White House immediately began berating Newsweek and the media in general for creating problems between the United States and the Muslim world.
Because clearly things had been going soooo smoothly up until the Newsweek article...

Frank Gorshin, best known as the Riddler on the "Batman" TV series in the '60s (and in perennial reruns after that) died Tuesday at age 72. May he Riddle in Peace.

In other obituary news, Henry Corden, the voice of Fred Flintstone, also died last week. He was 85.

The Sun in London and the New York Post on Friday and Saturday published pictures of Saddam Hussein in his underwear in his cell in Iraq. The pictures caused an uproar over whether they violate the Geneva Conventions (one aspect of which requires protecting prisoners of war from "public curiosity"), but on the bright side they eliminated one more place that Saddam might be hiding those supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Just, like, a week after scientists were saying that the discovery of the rock rat could very well be the last discovery of a new mammal species, they announce that they've found a new kind of monkey. I think they're just holding out on us. By the end of the month, we're going to find out that unicorns are real.


Boring, but you should know about it
The government is looking to put defensive, and possibly offensive, weapons into space. No word on when they'll start replacing the moon with a Death Star.

Scientists are also working on creating the world's most powerful laser, which would generate the heat of the sun. And you thought I was just joking in the previous item.

A South Korean says that he again cloned human embryos, creating stem cells tailored to an individual. You're probably either very supportive of this kind of research and its possible benfits or staunchly opposed to it for moral reasons, so ... umm ... I'm just going to quietly slip into the next item...


It wasn't all bad
Los Angeles residents on Tuesday elected the city's first Hispanic mayor -- Antonio Villaraigosa -- in 133 years. Let the name mispronunciation begin...

Afleet Alex stumbled to his knees after being cut off by another horse but recovered to win the Preakness Stakes on Saturday, proving you can't keep a good horse down.

The force is strong with this one: "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith" made more than $50 million when it opened Thursday, breaking box office records for a single day.

Britney Spears' new "reality" TV show debuted Tuesday to a paltry 3.4 million viewers, finishing last in its time slot and giving me hope for humanity.


What the ...?!?
A kid in Indiana crawled into one of those toy vending machines with the crane. His parents tried to get him out, but the crane kept bumping into the glass and dropping him before they could get him over the hole. Eventually, they ran out of quarters.