Nicolas Cage Has Spent Millions (To Rehabilitate Child Soldiers)

You could fill a whole article with all the very weird things Nicolas Cage has spent money on. We've done just that, actually. More than once in fact. He's bought some really silly stuff.

Not all his vanished money has gone to arcane relics, however. He's also known for giving a bunch to charity, which is a nice thing for any celeb to do but especially stands out in Cage's case because at various times following the donations, he definitely no longer had millions to spare. He donated $1 million for disaster relief after Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans, by the way, is the setting for his post-Katrina movie Bad Lieutenant, as well as the city where he bought a mansion before having to sell it and currently still has his own pyramid tomb.

He's contributed to a few other charities too, but the big donation we want to highlight was to Amnesty International, for $2 million. His 2005 movie Lord of War, about the arms trade, earned Amnesty's official endorsement and drew Cage's attention to the hundreds of thousands of children currently working as soldiers for warlords. The donation went toward medical and rehab services for these child soldiers.

"Think about the nine months it took for your child to be born," he said in a video address. "Think about all the care you put into teaching him how to cross the street and look both ways or to read a book or to simply have good manners. Then imagine a warlord dropping a gun into his hand and forcing him to kill someone. He's eight years old. He hasn't kissed a girl yet or fallen in love, but he's killed a man. What does that do to a child's mind? Sounds like a nightmare? It's reality for some families.”

Wow, that's a very serious message and a serious issue. Certainly, there's nothing for us to make fun of here.

Until, that is, we reach the bottom of the Amnesty International press release that announced this donation. This is the press release's very last sentence: "Cage also supported AI's Women's rights's rights's rightss rights's rights's rights's rights campaign."

Listen, we've seen a few editing mistakes in our time. The very article you're now reading contains no fewer than three typos. But this sentence is one for the ages, and we can only assume that no one read this press release to the end, either for proofreading or in the many years since publication. In fact, the apparent inattention this press release received was our primary motivation in deciding that this move of Cage's deserves more publicity than it got at the time.

Between the repetition of the word rights—one repeated word could be a mistake, but you can't type seven in a row without meaning to—the fact that "rights's" isn't a word at all (let alone one that you should type repeatedly), and the sudden appearance of rightss one time in the sentence without an apostrophe, we were briefly convinced that this wasn't an error at all but was an actual campaign, one with a very strange name. We can find no info on such a campaign, but if one does exist, please contact us.