JUSTIN BIEBER
OFF TARGET The pop star reaches new heights of self-love writing in a guestbook at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam that if the teen hadn’t died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, he hopes she would have been a “belieber.” Bieber then takes to Twitter to describe his time at the museum, which displays Anne’s handwritten diary, among other exhibits recalling the atrocities of the Holocaust, as a “chill day.” While some credit Bieber for addressing this dark chapter of history, the only thing he really did was cause his rabid pre-teen fans to take to Twitter in his defense, arguing that had she not been murdered for merely existing, along with 6 million others, Anne Frank would, in fact, have probably been a Justin Bieber fan. Are this kid’s 15 minutes almost up?
FLOATING HEAD
PARTIAL SCORE The men’s crew team at Marist College in Poughkeepsie find a man’s head floating in the Hudson River, pull it to shore and the pictures go viral on the Internet. The only shocker here is the head was a 7-foot Styrofoam and fiberglass replica of a Greek or Roman statue.
CANNONBALL
BULL’S EYE The Long Island Rail Road announces the Cannonball, a premier express Friday afternoon train to the Hamptons and Montauk, will be departing from Manhattan instead of Queens this summer. The LIRR promises a smooth and comfortable 94-minute ride covering 75 miles without making a single stop before Westhampton. An extra $20 will get you reserved seating, beverages and snacks. You don’t even have to leave from Platform 9¾ to catch it – the Cannonball will depart from Penn Station’s Track 19 at 4:07 p.m. every Friday. We checked.
GUNS
OFF TARGET As the parents of Newtown victims watched, the Senate fails to pass a simple measure to curb gun violence, falling six votes short of expanding background checks of gun buyers. In other words, six of our senators would rather those like the Tsarnaev brothers wouldn’t have had to rely on pressure cooker bombs for their plans to target Times Square. They could have just armed themselves with an arsenal of automatic weapons without a care in the world. Good job, guys!
EINSTEIN
BULL’S EYE Scientists believe that eventually Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, published in 1915, will not hold true under extreme conditions. Without getting too wonky, a newly-discovered pulsar star and its white-dwarf companion nearly 7,000 light years from Earth, was expected by scientists to be just those extreme conditions. But the genius’ theory held true and once again, Albert Einstein: 1; The rest of us: 0.
BOY SCOUTS
PARTIAL SCORE The Boy Scouts of America proposes to lift the gay ban for kids and even gets support from the Morman community. Gay adult leaders, however, will continue to be excluded. One step forward, one step back.
