In Whangārei a firm that sells security cameras was burgled twice in one week – as though the burglars couldn't believe they had actually done it the first time so did it again to make sure.
In Brooklyn, New York, a completely preventable, potentially fatal disease – measles – resurfaced in such numbers that a public health emergency was declared, with fines for those who refused to be vaccinated. All because a band of misled partisans refused to accept facts are facts when it comes to health.
Which makes it all too easy to believe that – as a recent US poll found – only two thirds of people aged between 18 and 24 believe the Earth is round, and the number of people who believe the Earth is flat has grown exponentially in the past couple of years.
The first photo of a black hole fired imaginations worldwide and was hailed as a big win for science – which as we've seen has been on the back foot lately – and Albert Einstein. Observers said the picture showed the black hole looked exactly like the great physicist said it would. But I've Googled "Einstein said black hole would look like a giant glazed bagel" and can't find it anywhere.
The US president continued to show more of the symptoms of pre-dementia, including getting names wrong (Tim Apple), getting words wrong (oranges for origins) and getting family members confused (saying his father, not his grandfather, was born in Germany). And nobody's doing anything about it.
One of the world's richest and most powerful men – Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg – finally commented on his company's role in the live broadcast of the Christchurch mosque massacre by effectively brushing it off as not his problem, thereby giving support to the growing number of people who are convinced that he is not actually a human being.
Ace Ventura actor Jim Carrey got into a social media brawl with Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's granddaughter and far-right European MP, Alessandra Mussolini. He made fun of her grandfather's grisly death by tweeting a (really bad) drawing of it and she responded by calling him a bastard.
We learnt that Mussolini's granddaughter had been voted into the European Parliament.
US citizens were asked to – and many did – believe that a four-page summary was an adequate and accurate account of the 400-page report of a 22-month long inquiry into certain irregularities around the Trump presidential campaign and that it exonerated their president of several serious allegations.
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland's sequel, Through the Looking Glass (1871) Alice finds a world turned upside down: characters run without getting anywhere, scream in pain when nothing has happened, and talk nonsense and get taken seriously. Uncanny, isn't it - as though Carroll could see 150 years into the future and simply wrote down what he saw.
