Bumvertising! That is, giving dedicated beggars money to attach a sign for your business, to the signs they are holding anyway (you know, the ones that say variations on "give me money"). Actually, I think it's a great idea.

Advocates for the homeless are appalled. Some have called Rogovy a "poverty pimp." Others say Bumvertising is craven exploitation. Nicole Macri, co-chairwoman of the Seattle/King County Coalition for the Homeless, objects most of all to the sensationalism of using a name that "capitalizes on negative stereotypes."

Sometimes I don't know what's wrong with people. I mean -- how is anybody who is already standing there all day long with a sign going to be WORSE OFF if some guy gives him five bucks to hold an additional sign? Can you explain that to me? Oh, well. With all that's going wrong in the world today, I suppose it's reassuring that some people out there are still getting outraged over...whatever.

And guess what? Frogs apparently do NOT stay in pots until they boil to death, according to snopes. Unless they can't jump out of the pot. So maybe this whole legend is explained by people 1. trying to put a frog into a full pot of boiling water and having the frog jump out, then 2. putting a frog into a pot of cold and gradually warming water, which, by the time it reaches boiling, has lost enough volume through steam so that the frog is too far below the lip of the pot and can no longer jump out.

On the other hand, Laura Bush did kill a classmate in a car accident when she was a teenager.

In May 2000, a two-page police report pertaining to a fatal accident that had taken place near Midland, Texas, in 1963 was made public. It contained the information that 17-year-old Laura Welch had run a stop sign, causing the death of the sole occupant of the vehicle hers had struck. According to that report, the future First Lady had been driving her Chevrolet sedan on a clear night shortly after 8 p.m. on 6 November 1963 when she entered an intersection without heeding the stop sign and there collided with the Corvair sedan driven by 17-year-old Michael Douglas. Also in the car with Laura Welch was a passenger, 17-year-old Judy Dykes.<..>According to the police report neither driver had been drinking, but no tests were performed. No charges were filed as a result of the accident. News accounts from 1963 reported the young man as having been thrown from his car and dying of a broken neck; he was pronounced dead on arrival at Midland Memorial Hospital.<..>The two teen girls were taken to the same hospital and treated for minor injuries that amounted to bumps and bruises.

The thing that struck me about this was, simply -- can you imagine how nuts the right wing media would have gone with the story if Hillary Clinton had a similar incident in her past? And yet, I'm guessing that many of you have never heard about this before.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it was on CNN for weeks and weeks in 2000 before the Greatest Disaster in American History (aka. the Bush presidency) caused me to start obsessing over current events.

And...this right wing obsession with bestiality is pretty weird.

O'REILLY: The secular progressive movement would like to have marriage abolished, in my opinion. They don't want it, because it is not diverse enough. You know, that's what this gay marriage thing is all about. But now, you know, the poly-amorphous marriage, whatever they call it, you can marry 18 people, you can marry a duck, I mean --
LIS WIEHL (co-host): A duck? Quack, quack.
O'REILLY: Well, why, you know, if you're in love with the duck, who is the society to tell you you can't do that?

Why are they so obsessed with human/animal relations? Well...going out on a limb here...when people actually get BUSTED for this sort of thing, where are they? In cities, or out in the boonies? (Enumclaw, for instance.) And how do people tend to vote out in the boonies? For Democrats? Or...for Republicans?
Think about it.

The 11 children removed from a house where officials say some of them slept in homemade cages are polite, well-behaved, well-dressed and appear to have been well-fed, neighbors and authorities said Tuesday (13 September 2005). Their adoptive parents, Michael Gravelle, 56, and Sharen Gravelle, 57, denied in a custody hearing Monday that they abused or neglected the children, ages 1 to 14, who have conditions including autism and fetal alcohol syndrome. The Gravelles have said a psychiatrist recommended they make the children sleep in the cages, Huron County Prosecutor Russell Leffler told the Norwalk Reflector. They said the children, including some with mental disorders, needed to be protected from one another, a search warrant at Norwalk Municipal Court said. At night, authorities say, eight of the children were confined in 31/2-foot-tall wooden cages stacked in bedrooms. The cages were painted in bright colors, with some rigged with alarms to send a signal when a cage door was opened.

It's sort of appalling, maybe. But at the same time, every time I see the words "caged children" I want to giggle.