The Big Digs 2007

Boston unparalleled in its commitment to post-9/11 vigilance. Full-scale panic ensues when flashing circuit boards are discovered mounted to city bridges. The devices, mistaken for explosives, turn out to be a marketing campaign for the forthcoming cartoon movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but the two local artists who installed them are arrested anyway. The campaign runs in nine other cities without incident.

The certificate from the Blaine school of beauty, however, did check out. MIT dean of admissions Marilee Jones, who often warned against the urge for showy overachievement, resigns after the school discovers she fabricated degrees from Albany Medical College, Union College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Come on, since when is a $14 payoff going to influence the judgment of a U.S. representative? Marty Meehan sells his home to Lowell Sun editor Jim Campanini for $30,000 below estimated value. Months earlier, the Sun had published a controversial special section celebrating Meehan’s 50th birthday, splitting all ad revenues with the then Democratic congressman’s foundation.

Other than Capuano, we mean… Representative Michael Capuano defends the House’s defeat of a measure to make former lawmakers wait two years—rather than the current one year—before becoming congressional lobbyists. If the bill had passed, he says, “what you are telling me is I cut off my profession.”

Cheap DVDs are the new black. After months of anticipation, local fashionistas are disappointed when the former Virgin Megastore on Newbury Street reopens not as the rumored Prada store but instead as a Best Buy.

We’ll be in touch when we need someone to play Nurse Ratched. Kerry Healey is denied a spot on the American Repertory Theatre’s advisory board because some members were turned off by the aggressive tone of her gubernatorial campaign.

Subtraction by addition. The launch of BostonNow gives the city its second free daily newspaper.

You try working construction details and fighting crime. An audit reveals that the state police DNA lab is sitting on 16,000 untested evidence samples from rapes, murders, and other felonies going back to the mid-’80s.

Fortunately, the cop directing traffic at the site was on a Dunkin’ run, and no one was injured. The firm hired to clean up asbestos from a burst steam pipe in the Financial District uses the wrong equipment and ends up releasing even more of the carcinogen into the air. City inspectors later say the company lacks a license to work with asbestos.

Mee-ouch. An East Boston resident settles a feud by setting his rival’s cat ablaze and throwing it at his house.

Heard the one about the humorless bureaucrat who walks into a Store 24 and asks why the Lottery take is down? State Treasurer Timothy Cahill enlists Hill, Holliday to write his jokes for the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast.

It was a real no-brainer. Beth Israel Deaconess hires a British surgeon accused of sending to a German biotech company tissue samples taken, without permission, from the gray matter of a dozen patients.

He was only scanning for MILFs in the third row. Head coach Bill Belichick, whose reputation has already taken a beating for a rumored affair with a married New Jersey woman, is fined $500,000 when the Patriots are caught videotaping during a game against the Jets.

Narrow-minded BPD flunks promising investigators. The police department scraps the exam results of 540 officers hoping to become detectives because some had apparently managed to dig up inside information about the test questions.

The guests arrived fashionably never. Boston Fashion Week is scheduled in direct competition with the industry’s premier event, New York Fashion Week, prompting Gawker to write: “Aw, Boston. That whole thinking you’re the Hub of the universe thing might be backfiring.”

Department of Incorrections. At least 14 inmates in Massachusetts prisons are discovered to have been locked up well past the date they should have been released, including one man who served four extra years.

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