Sure it happens to everyone at some time or another. And I for one am glad that I do not have cameras aimed at my slightest movements, both day and night. Nonetheless, I get a big kick out of W getting caught asking Condoleeza Rice if he could pee at a UN summit.

A recent survey by Harris Interactive commissioned by Verizon found that 87 percent of respondents didn’t know what VoIP was. Twenty percent thought it was a European hybrid motorcar and 10 percent said it was a low-carb vodka.

But that only sounds ridiculous to somebody as tech-savvy as you and me. The more disappointing figures come from CNET (via Logical Extremes). A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 38% percent of Americans said creationism should replace evolution in public-school curricula. At least most of those wouldn’t confuse VoIP with a low-carb vodka, nor might they know what a hybrid car is. “You mean like corn?” But that 20% might overlap with the 20% who think the Sun revolves around the Earth.

D'oh! Every truck for every blue collar trade for 1000 miles around Chicago sports a JULIE bumper sticker. That’s the Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators, whose motto, “Call before you dig” isn’t particularly catchy or interesting, but that motto has nonetheless averted any number of disasters that would otherwise have been caused by moronic, tired, distracted, or overzealous guys who need to dig trenches or pits for something or another. Had those couple of guys slapping their foreheads in L.A. this afternoon taken the time to go through the steps

4 STEPS TO SAFE DIGGING

• CALL before you dig.
• WAIT the required amount of time (2 workings days).
• RESPECT the marks.
• DIG with care.

then most of L.A. wouldn’t have been without power for a chunk of this afternoon, and you, gentle reader, wouldn’t have been without this website, which is hosted by L.A.’s Dreamhost.com, who, aside from city-wide power outages, provide excellent webhosting services for ridiculously cheap prices. Sorry if you were jonesing.

First it was the activist judges and mayors. Now it’s the activist bipartisan legistlative majority! Will this madness ever end? Pretty soon it will be the activist majority of citizens! We need to keep our values safe!

“I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot.”

                                      —Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parish, LA

Myself, I would like a better idiot also. Yesterday’s list of recent quotes and photo op faux pas from the Washington Post makes me think that W has decided to try his hand at a Will Ferrell impression (he’s not bad!).

Bush had raised eyebrows on his first trip by, among other things, picking Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.—instead of the thousands of mostly poor and black storm victims—as an example of loss. “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house—he’s lost his entire house—there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch,” Bush said with a laugh from an airplane hangar in Mobile, Ala.

Later in Biloxi, Miss., Bush tried to comfort two stunned women wandering their neighborhood clutching Hefty bags, looking in vain for something to salvage from the rubble of their home. He kept insisting they could find help at a Salvation Army center down the street, even after another bystander had informed him it had been destroyed.

And at his last stop that day, at the airport outside of New Orleans, Bush lauded the increasingly desperate city as a great town because he used go there and “enjoy myself—occasionally too much.”

Unlike his galvanizing appearance in the rubble of the World Trade Center just days after the 2001 attacks, Bush has stayed far from the epicenter of New Orleans’ suffering. His only foray into the city was to its edges to watch crews plugging one of the breached levees on Friday.

On Monday, he skipped the hardest-hit coastal areas entirely, choosing instead to visit Baton Rouge, the state capital about 80 miles northwest of New Orleans, which sustained no damage. He also went to Poplarville, Miss., to walk the streets of a middle-class neighborhood that seemed to suffer little more than snapped trees, a couple off-kilter carport roofs and a downed power line or two.

Apparently it’s difficult to fill a photo-op with homeless, fed-up black people to act as smiley-faced cheerleaders for the right. Do they not look all-American enough? Are they not telegenic with their garbage bags and milk crates? Maybe, if the spirit of human compassion still truly lives, a few hundred of the displaced will get together and build Trent Lott a new house. Call Habitat for Humanity.

There have been muffled criticisms, here and there, that I don’t write anymore. I just “make fancy links,” as one fan put it. Perhaps he or she was correct. I don’t write much these days. I'm very busy. I’ve got this job they make me go to, every day. When I’m not at work, I’m studying hard for the GRE, which is coming up for me here pretty soon. I’m confident enough about the math part, being one of those ‘mathy’ kinds of people, but my knowledge of obscure and/or archaic English vocabulary is apparently woefully lacking. I don’t even know what ‘insouciant’ means, let alone ‘perspicacious’ or ‘meretricious’. But, statistically speaking, my knowledge of these words—or more specifically, their antonyms—is an excellect predictor of my chances of successfully completing graduate school. So I’ve got these flash cards, and I spend some time every day memorizing them. Or, rather, I spend some time every day looking at them in sequence while my mind wanders off into the more remote corners of itself to listen to virtual birds chirping in the trees or stare at its feet and count the hairs on their toes.

Then there's the puppy hunt. We’ve decided to get one, even though our landylady has technically refused to allow it. She’s over 140 years old, so we’re thinking we’ll be able to convince her it’s my nephew visiting from Detroit. We’ve already bought the crate and the food and water bowls, the chew toy, the rope toy, and the leash. Now we just need the dog. The adopt-a-stray business has been revolutionized by the internet. You can just surf over to sites like www.petfinder.com and put in your zip code and some basic puppy criteria, and out spits a list of adoptable puppies in your area—complete with adorable enlargeable photographs—and the humane societies and/or foster homes where they currently reside, awaiting their ‘forever homes’, as it goes in the lingo. The part I didn’t expect when trying to adopt a stray or unwanted pet was the multipage applications and strict adoptive parent screening. Certainly a shelter wants to ensure that they are not giving a pet to an irresponsible owner, a dog fighter, a junkyard in need of a guard, or an Asian bistro. But to reject a potential adoptive dog parent because Beatrice can only go to a home with a fenced-in yard and another canine friend? I’ve never been made to feel so unworthy by people for whom I was at least in part trying to do a favor. Some of the questions on the most recent two-page application I received are clearly no-brainers designed to weed out the ones who didn’t bother to think ahead about what pet ownership entails:

• Do you understand that some of the dogs may not be housebroken and that changing the environment of the dog may cause the dog to have accident and or destroy accessible household items?
• Are you willing to take the time to housebreak and train the dog? ____yes ____no

But some are a little more invasive:

• Are you employed? If employed, where and for how long?
• Have you ever been convicted of a felony or criminal charge or been put on probation?
• Please list references that are familiar with your life style (one that is a relative, one that is an employer (if employed) and one other)

I suspect that some of the foster parents have become slightly too close to their wards, guarding them as jealously as the father of his only daughter from potential suitors. So instead of applying to these ‘rescues’ and other premium pet shelters, we’ve been going a little further out of our way to find sources of unwanted animals that are more amenable to actually finding homes for the them. And that takes some time.

Then there’s the whole getting married thing. My upcoming wedding does not rank third behind the GRE and getting a puppy in terms of importance, so don’t go jumping to conclusions. But it’s far enough off that the daily time commitment to planning the thing, these days anyway, is fairly low. Ask me again in April and I might have another story to tell.

In the in-between hours, therefore, there’s just not a lot of time to write, and furthermore, since the nasty hot nastiness of the nasty hot summer has dwindled into purty darn nice weather, I’ve been out enjoying that, taking weekend trips to exciting places such as the beach and whatnot, entertaining out-of-town guests, spending time with my lady friend, etc. And I don’t see many of the complainers maintaining websites and posting creative, well-written essays regularly distilled from the raw material of their lives. “Fancy links,” indeed. Harumph.