I heard on the January 26 episode of "Wait Wait... Don't Tell me!" about President Bush's misconceptions about the favorite painting he hung in the Oval Office. According to The Bush Tragedy:

In an April 1995 memo, Bush invited his staff to come to his office to look at a painting.... The picture is a Western scene of a cowboy riding up a craggy hill, with two other riders following behind him. Bush told visitors — who often noted his resemblance to the rider in front — that it was called A Charge To Keep and that it was based on his favorite Methodist hymn of that title, written in the eighteenth century by Charles Wesley. As Bush noted in the memo, which he quoted in his autobiography of the same title: "I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves." Bush identified with the lead rider, whom he took to be a kind of Christian cowboy, an embodiment of indomitable vigor, courage, and moral clarity.....

He came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.

Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled "The Slipper Tongue," published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught."

See also the Slate commentary (where I found the above quotation and some of the links), which uses this as an example of how Bush prefers what he wants to hear to what the truth happens to be".

link (via Neatorama and Consumerist)

From the New York Times (January 9, 2008):

Two men were arrested on Tuesday after pushing a corpse, seated in an office chair, along the sidewalk to a check-cashing store to cash the dead man's Social Security check.

Some comments by my co-workers:

In Chicago they would have been taking him to vote. -- Bart Locanthi

In LA, it would have been a movie screening's focus group -- Bryan Baker

Readers?

Link site FARK is known for the clever headlines used to point to interesting articles. [Warning: crude language ahead.] Their top wordplay headlines of 2007 included:

• Mom wants schools to ban books filled with sin. There goes my trigonometry textbook
• Bingo hall worker B-10 and robbed
• Police officer charged with molesting mentally handicapped girls. This is not just an abuse of his authority, it's fucking retarded
• Cannibal who ate fellow inmate had previously asked authorities to separate him from cellmate; finally threw up his hands out of frustration
• Teen walking along Long Island Railroad shocked that she gets to be the conductor
• Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo