The Most Outrageous News Stories of 2008
March 11– Ex- Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was snared by an FBI sting while with a call girl named Ashley Alexandra Dupre. Spitzer was forced to announce his resignation with a nonetoo-pleased wife at his side.
July 3– Thomas Beatie, a transgender male who kept some female reproductive organs, gave birth to a healthy baby girl. A few months later, Beatie was pregnant again.
July– Though not confirmed to be chupacabra, many speculated that this creature that washed up on a beach in Montauk, New York was the elusive Mexican beastie.
August 15 – A pair of men claiming to have the body of a dead Bigfoot monster in a freezer held a press conference in which they had claimed they would present incontrovertible DNA evidence. They never provided the evidence, and later their secret emerged: their Bigfoot was just a gorilla costume stuffed with roadkill.
September 10– CERN fired up the this machine to attempt to produce ultrarare Higgs Boson particles, but many predicted the singularity would rip the world to shreds. Luckily for us, it didn’t.
October 4 – A daring if ill-conceived plan to recover trophies and miscellaneous items that once belonged to Simpson from a shady sports memorabilia dealer lead to OJ’s arrest and conviction, which could mean life in prison for the ex-football star.
November 4 – After a long campaign, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. He is the first nonwhite person to occupy the office.
November 19 – In a show of utter disconnection to reality, the CEOs of the nations largest automakers flew to Washington in private Jets to ask for a taxpayer-funded bailout. They were asked by senators why they couldn’t fly commercial.
December– Photo evidence and firsthand accounts began to emerge of pirates off the coast of Somalia. The pirates had hijacked more than 300 ships over the course of the year.
December 14 – In perhaps the most embarrassing moment in his presidency, George Bush narrowly dodged two shoes lobbed by an Iraqi journalist. He joked about it later, but it will go down in history as an indicator of the esteem (or lack thereof) Iraqi people have for Bush.