Mood – Slowing before we grow but making $7,753 from selling homework downgraded by Elon Musk (3/10)
The Weekly – Unable to distinguish between fact and fiction
In a week so full of unlikely truths that we had no need for fiction, we didn’t know what to believe. MPs asked if Boris was okay after he broke off an important speech to wax lyrical about Peppa Pig World, while JPMorgan’s CEO upset China by saying the bank would last longer that the Communist Party. As Elon Musk said he had a plan ‘to become interstellar,’ Japan launched a search for potential astronauts with optional science backgrounds. A cryptocurrency named ‘JRR Token’ was blocked by lawyers for the creator of Lord of the Rings and NFT was announced as word of the year. At some points it seemed just as well that there could be a shortage of alcohol this Christmas.
NOT BELIEVING OUR EYES
Some events were so grisly we wished they weren’t real, with the English Channel experiencing its biggest single loss of life in peacetime and a North Korean ‘Squid Game’ smuggler sentenced to execution by firing squad. Germany’s health minister’s warning that all his countryfolk will be ‘vaccinated, recovered from COVID-19 or dead’ by the winter’s end was followed by the discovery of the most significant variant of the virus to date. This girl in a nightclub injured her ankle and was left cordoned off on the dancefloor for almost three hours as dancers gyrated around her. This half-eaten ‘zombie shark’ kept hunting for food with a huge hole ripped in its side.
SEEING THE QUIRKY SIDE OF LIFE
Despite the week ending with the markets taking a tumble, we found cheer where we could, with IKEA unveiling plans to rent tiny 107 sq ft homes in Japan for less than $1 a month, one ‘remarkable Roman mosaic being dug up in Rutland and another that once decorated a ship used by the emperor Caligula turning out to have been used as a coffee table for 50 years. And, as this Hackney man received the world’s first 3D-printed prosthetic eye, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport proved that there’s truth in the old adage about pigs and flying not going well together.
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