I really hope newspapers stick around. They are the best record of human folly and mischief that I can imagine. Last spring, for example, in one day I was certain that a parallel universe had truly arrived when I read these reports:

• Deval Patrick had deftly stripped former police officer, accused sexual assault observer, and failed candidate for congress Jeff Perry of his $110,000 sinecure on the cape.

• The state’s education department had given its out-of-date food to prison kitchens.

• Romney, the Bain venture capitalist who tied up companies with debt and fired a good many of their employees, was running on a platform of creating jobs and disavowing the successful Massachusetts health care plan in its fifth anniversary that has made our state the first in the nation in saving babies’ lives.

• Manny had quit rather than submit to drug tests, exposing his habits of you know what.

• The “Christian” former presidential candidate and man about town Pat Robertson was defending the Ivory Coast’s defeated president and murdering thug, Laurent Gbagbo.

• The mayor of Washington D.C. was arrested for disorderly conduct as he demonstrated against Congress’s budget deal.

• There was also a story about Orthodox Jewish girls’ problems with eating disorders, which apparently don’t affect Arab girls.

And that was just in one day.

Last week I had another of those moments of shock and awe at the weirdness of people’s behavior.

• The Globe was complaining that Americans would not be celebrating because the women’s soccer team had lost the world cup to Japan. Actually, I was celebrating. Those young women were great. They had played hard, fast and skillfully. It took Japan an overtime and a penalty kick phase to beat them. I’d say both Japan and America won. You can go with jingoism if that’s your stunted inclination, but you can also go with admiration and the satisfaction of a game well played, and the winning is only a small part of the whole experience.

• Letter writers were all in a tizzy about Brian McGrory’s tongue-in-cheek column about banning all bicycles in Boston. They didn’t get it. “Why pick on bikers?” they whined. He hadn’t. It was a joke. Oh, well.

• Schadenfreude is a word we desperately need in the English language. There was a lot of glee at the troubles of Rupert Murdoch and his seemingly impregnable empire. Even venerable Scotland Yard’s officials were having to resign. The fall-out probably isn’t over yet. For those of us too unimportant to have our phones hacked, it’s a rich story.

• Then there was the listing of the most popular television shows, dvds, magazines, movies and music. Rapper Lil Wayne, a convicted felon, was on the list. “Gnomeo and Juliet,” a movie we shut off after about 15 minutes because my 9 and 11-year-old grandchildren told me it was too boring to watch, was one of the most popular dvd rentals.

• The city of Cambridge was defraying federal tax costs for same-sex married employees, which will incite the Defense of Marriage people into a satisfying display of high dudgeon. In 20 years, across the nation, same-sex marriage will be so ho-hum. In most of Massachusetts it already is. Since 2004, most of us have now been to at least one same-sex wedding, most of us now know several same-sex married couples, and it hasn’t changed the lives of heterosexuals one bit. But it has provided our communities with one more injection of stability. Isn’t that one of the main advantages of marriage anyway?

• And let’s hear it for the capture of Whitey Bulger. The hearings, the trials, and the questions of who helped him when are going to absorb us for years.

Somehow television and the Internet don’t let us truly savor the weirdness of human life to the extent that newspapers do. Like the paperless office, predictions of newspapers’ disappearance are exaggerated.