Christie. (Getty)

Sometimes we like to imagine what life would be like if everything had turned out differently—if everything we’d wished for this week had actually come true.  We like to imagine, for instance, that we’d be in line for the new iPhone 5 and that it would be so shiny and magical that it wouldn’t matter that we still get no reception anywhere in Manhattan where you’d actually need to make a phone call.  We like to imagine that Chris Christie is running for President because we like outsized… personalities.  (We’ve sprained all of our extraocular muscles rolling our eyes at Michelle Bachmann but she seems to have more staying power than Mitt Romney’s hair gel.) We like to imagine Derek Jeter hammering some of Justin Verlander’s 100 mph fastballs into the nosebleed seats at Comerica Park. We like to imagine that Girl Scout Council employees are paragons of public service and would never, ever embezzle $310,000 of organizational cookie money for cosmetic laser procedures and cruises.

But, alas, none of it’s true. The iPhone 5 is really the iPhone 4S; New Jersey is, in his own words, “stuck with” Governor Christie; the Yankees lost ALDS game 3 and Yaasmin Hooey, the former finance director of Girl Scout Council of Greater New York pocketed what the New York Post characterized as “88,000 boxes” of Thin Mints’ worth of, among other things—you guessed it—cosmetic laser procedures and a cruise.  (A cruise! Have we really learned nothing from David Foster Wallace?)

Other surprises this week: A helicopter crashed into the East River (bad surprise), but there were survivors (good surprise). Hank Williams Jr., a country singer not especially known for his intelligence and erudition, compared the President to Hitler (bad surprise), which prompted ESPN to drop his magnum opus “All My Rowdy Friends” as its theme song for Monday Night Football thereby ensuring that no one ever has to hear that godawful song again (good surprise). Andy Rooney finally decided to retire (bad sur…good surprise?)

Sigh… It’s all just so unexpected. Next thing you know, Amanda Knox’ll be on a jetliner back to Seattle, Blake Lively and Leonardo di Caprio will break up and people will be taking Occupy Wall Street seriously.  Wait. What’s that you say? Really?  Huh. We didn’t see that coming.

Maybe we’ll just imagine what it would be like if everything had turned out differently.

Michelle Bachmann with her husband, Marcus, and her daughter, Elisa, in 2008.

Michele Bachmann's husband, Marcus, knows how to put on a pair of heels. How did we learn this fascinating tidbit about the spouse of the Minnesota Congresswoman and Republican Presidential candidate? We found it on Facebook courtesy of Bachmann's daughter.

Bachmann's staff clearly has some lessons left to learn about the internet. This apparent lack of social media savvy is especially interesting given the recent signs her campaign may be in disarray. We're here to help -- and we don't charge billable hours. You're welcome Michelle Bachmann.

Even though the media has already scrutinized the Facebook profile of Bachmann's eldest son, he and two of her other five biological children have searchable pages on the social networking site. In March, The Daily Beast published details gleaned from the Facebook profile of Lucas Bachmann, who it described as one of Bachmann's "closest advisers." The Beast noted two of Lucas' three selected interests on Facebook; "India" and conservative thinker "William F. Buckley" to make the point that Lucas' "political hero" is "decidedly un-Bachmann-like."

Bachmann shouldn't have been blindsided by a media outlet using her son's Facebook to write an unflattering article about her. In this day and age, campaign advisers should be schooled in the damage that can be done from an uncalculated quote or, worse yet, an indiscreet photo posted on a social media site.

Everyone should be free enjoy the unique pleasures of poking, stalking and playing mindless games of Farmville that come with unrestricted membership on a social media site, but we live in an unfair world. For better or worse, the families of presidential candidates should be coached to expect this level of scrutiny during a White House run and taught how to avoid it. Despite their modern media lesson from the Daily Beast, her children still haven't been taught to maintain their privacy online. Someone on Bachmann's staff dropped the ball here.

Michelle Bachmann's advisor and son Lucas Bachmann, guns blazing.

The pictures and details visible on the Facebook pages of the Bachmann children are relatively harmless. They're certainly not a social media faux pas along the lines of Anthony Weiner's infamous naked Twitter pictures, Willow Palin's homophobic tirade or Oregon Rep. David Wu's crazypants emails, but these glimpses into Bachmann's home life are unseemly cracks in the managed public facade that all politicians should seek to project on the campaign trail.

Lucas Bachmann's Facebook profile is still searchable. Along with his interest in Buckley and India there's a picture of him standing in front of a poster of Andy Warhol's "Triple Elvis" print wearing what appears to be a Johnny Cash t-shirt. Curious onlookers can contact him or view his "basic information," where he describes himself as "Trying to figure out my life after two years of being on pause!" That's hardly the kind of image a top advisor to a presidential candidate should be conveying a little over a year before the election.

Marcus Bachmann helps his daughter get ready for the prom in 2008.

Visitors to Lucas' Facebook profile can also see his list of friends, which includes the pages of his brother, Harrison, and his sister, Elisa. Those pages can be used to contact Elisa and Harrison, and also be used to view private Bachmann family photos. Elisa's page includes a publicly visible photo album of her senior prom in 2008 with a rather awkward picture of Marcus Bachmann and her sister kneeling at her feet to help her put on her heels.

"How many Bachmanns does it take to put a shoe on?" asks Elisa's caption for the prom picture. A fascinating question indeed!

Perry.

The riots in London seem finally to have subsided, but strange things are afoot stateside this week, so much so that we’re starting to wonder if Mercury, which went retrograde Aug. 3, is currently doing to the entire planet what it once did so publicly to Jeremy Piven. (Also, when does the statute of limitations on that joke run out?)

It all started last weekend, even before the city was deluged with cloudbursts of biblical proportions, when Texas governor Rick Perry threw his 10-gallon hat into the G.O.P. ring just as votes were being counted in the Iowa Straw Poll—an event that sounds like it involves blue ribbons for accurate jelly bean counting but that is actually a significant temperature-taking exercise for 2012 Republican voters. On Saturday night, the poll handed a slim but decisive victory to Michelle Bachmann, the woman Tina Brown recently dubbed “The Queen of Rage” on the cover of Newsweek (alongside a wide-eyed photo that would give Steve Buscemi nightmares), and on Sunday, milquetoasty Minnesota governor and “Obamneycare” coiner Tim Pawlenty dropped out of the race. Meanwhile, everyone pretty much ignored Ron Paul.

In other public slights, Steve Jobs earned an enemy in Marty Markowitz when the ailing tech mogul failed to respond to the borough president’s whimsical iPad video pleading for an Apple store in Brooklyn. Mr. Markowitz announced that Mr. Jobs and his company won’t “reach the big-time” until they land in the city’s most Safran-Foer-rich district, but seeing as Apple survived last week’s stock market free-fall with barely a dent, we think Marty needs to fuggedaboudit (at this point he’d have better luck buying a black market baby, and even then there’s no guarantee they’d get a spot at the new Grace Church high school). George Soros is being sued by his ex-girlfriend Adriana Ferreyr after reportedly making her eat dinner at the kids’ table. And Arianna Huffington may finally be hitting a paywall after solicitations for free HuffPo graphic design submissions from readers prompted widespread outrage.

More evidence of universal chaos: Lady Gaga will design the seasonal window displays at Barneys (flank steak will make a perfect coat for Santa!), someone paid $70,000 for a tour of Facebook’s headquarters—an honor we suspect any U.P.S. delivery man bearing Mark Zuckerberg’s new Adidas sandals from Zappos gets for free—and a “flash mob” looted a Maryland 7-11 without even throwing in any hastily conceived choreography for good measure. In addition, New Yorkers despondent over the crashing economy flocked to city landmarks to take their own lives (two suicide attempts—one at Rockefeller Center and one on a Statue of Liberty-bound ferry—were, happily, thwarted by first responders), an unidentified body was discovered floating in Niagara Falls, and on Thursday in Tulsa, Okla., a man climbed a 300-foot tower and, while showing no signs of jumping, he has refused to come down for five days (he did, however, order a cappuccino).

With all signs pointing to an astrological system gone horribly awry, maybe it’s a good thing that New York police spent last weekend practicing riot drills on Randall’s Island. Like the state lotto constantly reminds us, hey—you never know.

It only took the removal of an errant letter A for a private committee of “about a half-dozen largely unknown people” (as The New York Times described them) to put the “poor” back in Standard & Poor’s on Friday, sending the market spiraling downward into the increasingly all-too-familiar abyss—which we’re trying to think of as a sort of subterranean vacation spot. Sure, it’s dark and fills us with a palpable sense of foreboding, but so do the Hamptons. What’s the diff? St. Louis native Lucy Nobbe, a vice president at Wedbush Securities, was so infuriated by the turmoil that she hired a plane to buzz Wall Street carrying a banner that read “THANKS FOR THE DOWNGRADE. YOU SHOULD ALL BE FIRED.” We don’t entirely disagree with the sentiment, but our flair for the dramatic isn’t quite so pronounced. We’d have probably Tweeted it out with 53 characters to spare.

And really, we’re staying calm because we know there are hedging options. Maybe not bitcoin, which the Atlantic declared dead on Monday. And probably not gold, which broke $1700, which means we should probably be paying for our plane ticket to the Caymans in cold, hard... mineral? Okay, forget hedging. We’ll stick with denial, like everyone responsible for Treasuries rallying early this week.

To be fair, it might have been the worst downgrade, but it wasn’t the only one. Alec Baldwin is downgrading to Central Park West, abandoning his $9.5 million pad for Soho, according to the New York Post, who attribute the move to his yoga instructing girlfriend’s preferences that he be a little more, well, flexible in his choice of neighborhood. The Internet has downgraded its favored meme of photoshopping Steve Buscemi’s eyes onto men, women, children and inanimate objects, opting instead for photoshopping Michelle Bachmann’s eyes onto the same. (One site went a step further and photoshopped Michelle Bachmann’s eyes onto Steve Buscemi, providing closure for those who were lamenting the death of the meme.) And Jay Walden, having downgraded the MTA for the Hong Kong, left a vacancy for Andrew Cuomo to fill with no clear candidates for the position waiting in the wings. So we’re nominating one of our own: senior editor Tom Acitelli. (See page 12. We’re told no one else wants the job anyway.) Senior editor to MTA CEO: upgrade!

Or maybe not, now that we think about it.

Earlier this year, Michelle Bachmann asked an audience in Iowa if they had ever watched the film series "How Should We Then Live?" We sure have.

The New Yorker’s profile of presidential contender Michelle Bachmann has no shortage of choice revelations. She sometimes lies about her biography, we learn. She helped found a charter school in Minnesota that flouted the separation of church and state. She calls her private plane the "Barbie jet."

However, what really caught The Observer's attention was the fact that, in 1977, Ms. Bachmann and her husband Marcus watched a ten-part film series by the late theologian Francis Schaeffer--called "How Should We Then Live?"--that provides an evangelical-inflected view of Western art and philosophy, along with some healthy speculation that the U.S. government may be brainwashing people with mind-controlling drugs.

Watching the films was a "life-altering event" for the young couple, according to New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza, who shares:

"The iconic image from the early episodes is Schaeffer standing on a raised platform next to Michelangelo’s 'David' and explaining why, for all its beauty, Renaissance art represented a dangerous turn away from a God-centered world and toward a blasphemous, human-centered world."

Happily, the video is available on YouTube. To see "David," fast forward to 0:47, and imagine that Michelle and Marcus Bachmann are watching along with you.

Intrigued, The Observer decided to a bit more of the series and can now also recommend episode eight, titled "The Age of Fragmentation," in which the theologian shares his thoughts on modern art and music (he's generally not a fan, though there's some nuance to his ideas), as he wanders around the Museum of Modern Art, visiting works by Cezanne, Picasso and Duchamp.

"The universe is not what [Jackson] Pollock in his paintings and [John] Cage in his music said it was," he explains, as we watch him (sort of) replicate Pollock's painting technique with paint cans hanging on strings. Here is the first part of episode eight:

The National Endowment for the Arts is going to thrive during a Bachmann presidency.