Fantasy Islands

In retrospect, it seems like such a simple plan: Assassinate Bill Gates, steal nuclear material from Area 51 in Nevada, and blow up the bridges leading to and from America’s commercial capital—Staten Island. The tales that emerged during last week’s trial of accused would-be Herald Square terrorist Shahawar Matin Siraj, which also borrowed a page from the Hillary Clinton playbook—change your hairdo and put on a Yankees jersey in order to blend in—were hardly the only products of deluded minds last week. President Bush told a child that ten years from now, Americans will be driving hydrogen-powered cars and women will be spreading democracy across the Middle East. Two innovative plagiarism defenses were trotted out—Raytheon chief William Swanson defended copying from a 62-year-old management guide for his book by saying, “The originality was never the rules themselves but my expression of them in terms of my own experience.” Nineteen-year-old Harvard undergrad and fiction wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan claimed she’d been tripped up by her photographic memory. “I can honestly say that any of those similarities were completely unconscious and unintentional,” she told Katie Couric. New York’s former favorite troubled teen, Amy Fisher, suddenly remembered that she’d been on Ecstasy the morning she popped a cap into the side of Mary Jo Buttafuoco’s head. Larry Silverstein was finally bullied into giving up his grip on the Freedom Tower and decided that he couldn’t wait to start building at ground zero. Bully Karl Rove took his fifth trip before a grand jury, which led some to wonder if he’d one day be receiving advice from prison sage Roger Toussaint, who was getting more mileage out of his five days in the Tombs than Bush in a hydrogen-powered car. “The inmates give you survival information,” he told the Daily News (like how cigarettes are $20 per?). The husband of Donna Ingber, the producer accused of carrying on an affair with Maury Povich, could have been speaking for us all when he assessed the rumors with a clarity that was rare for the week. “It’s all bogus,” he said. “It’s crapola.” Next: David Blaine Hires City’s Top Aquarium Man

Fantasy Islands