This month's lineup features Iranian officials who deemed a woman too sexy to hold office, a certain big-city mayor (take a wild guess!) who's bent on banning e-cigarettes, even though they've helped plenty of people kick cancer sticks.
But for this month's top dishonors we head to the ritzy Bay Area city of Palo Alto. Renting a one-bedroom apartment will run you about $2,500 a month, and the city council has recently criminalized the much cheaper option of sleeping in your car. Tough economic times get a lot tougher for car dwellers who don't just have to worry about finding jobs and housing, but also avoiding arrest and hard time (up to a year in jail!).
Not to worry, says Palo Alto Mayor Gregory Scharff. The new ordinance merely provides police with a much-needed "tool" to punish those who do awful things like urinate and defecate on people's yards. (As if such offenses aren't already against the law!)
Meanwhile, elsewhere on planet Earth:
• “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” So it is written in the Book of Ecclesiastes (Chapter 1, Verse 9), and so it is how we can believe that the ancient Romans knew about ... nanotechnology. (I'll bet they didn't have cellphones, though.) (Smithsonian Magazine)
• And speaking of cellphones, did you ever want to keep one on the chain with your car keys? Sure you have. Just don't expect to do a lot of texting with it, even though you could, in a pinch. Or something. (Gajitz)
• In other technology news, you might have to get an implant one of these days to replace the farecard for the subway, but until then, this little decoder ring might do the trick, and it won't be found in your box of Cracker Jacks. (Gizmodo)
• In a completely unrelated story, breaking up is hard to do, especially if you're dumped by the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. If you think this couldn't happen in the West, remember what happened to the wives of Henry VIII. (Fox News)
• It happened to Thomas Edison, and it happened to Albert Einstein. A school put a child in the special ed program, and sometime after they let him out, he managed to learn to count on his fingers and toes, and win a Nobel Prize. Not a bad sequence of events. (The Libertarian Republic)
• Finally, most of us have heard about the ultimate skank-fest put on by Miley Cyrus at an MTV award special. (Sure, honey, you're all grown up now. We get it. We totally get it, okay???) But don't blame her, blame the culture, and listen to this perfectly good (ahem!) explanation on HuffPost Live. (Huffington Post)
And that's all the news that fits. As the week goes on, stay tuned, and stay in touch.
(H/T to ReasonTV for source material of opening commentary.)
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