Lynda Hurst has a piece in the
Toronto Star, sort of a year in review built around some of the nuttiest things people said in 2003; it turns out she had plenty of material to work with. Some of it will be familiar ("Mission Accomplished"), but most of it will not.
So it wasn't totally unrelieved gloom in 2003. Not while the barking mad were free-ranging among us.
Here's an excerpt:
But the cut-and-thrust of political rhetoric was just as dizzying overseas.
"Shut up, you minion, you monkey. Curses be upon your moustache," was Iraqi diplomat Izzat Ibrahim's elegant coup de grace in a pre-war dispute with Kuwait's foreign minister.
"In Italy, they are making a movie on Nazi concentration camps. I will propose you for the kapo," was Italian President Silvio Berlusconi's argument-capping quip to a German minister at the European parliament.
The indomitable Berlusconi was on a roll all year. After facing corruption charges in June, he shared his views on the judiciary: "To do their job you need to be mentally disturbed. If they do that job, it is because they are anthropologically different from the rest of the human race."
This probably echoed the opinion of University of Manitoba politics professor Rod Yellon. He lost a five-year battle against a ticket when a judge fined him $59 for ignoring a stop sign. Yellon had argued the word "stop" was "too vague."
As in some quarters it clearly is. Frances Polack in Hampshire, England, had a tattoo carved across the front of her chest, reading "DO NOT RESUSCITATE," set around a red heart with a line through it.
"I am not afraid of dying," the 85-year-old former nurse explained. "I am afraid of living when I should be dead."