Princess Margaret died, and the nation went into a deep state of indifference. One letter to the paper asked "May I be the first to forget where I was when I heard the news. "

Favorite headline: Dinosaur Hunters Find Vomit. Evidently it’s the oldest fossilized vomit ever found, and they’re a little bit more excited by that than they probably should be.

A man in Ohio who called a cop a “pig” was ordered by a judge to stand in a public place with a sow for two hours while people jeered at him.

Heinz is going to bring out chocolate flavored french fries, which they describe as being for the kid with a sweet tooth who’s going to have his first coronary at 29. All right, they thought better about the 2nd half of that, just as they thought better of the idea of Froot Loops-flavored french fries.

Bush put his gubernatorial records in his father’s presidential library, and has since pretended that Texas’s surprisingly good Public Records Act no longer applies to them. I assume this story came out because reporters were looking for Enron connections and found that they’d get their info not in 10 days as the law requires, but whenever the library feels like it.

The county in which Dayton, Tennessee, the town of the Scopes Monkey Trial, has been ordered to stop holding bible classes in elementary schools, which they’ve evidently been doing for 52 years.

I keep reading that Charles Pickering testified against KKK leader Samuel Bowers in the 1960s, but the reporters are all too lazy to look up what he testified to. Does anyone know? A Google search didn’t help.

Speaking of lazy reporters, a story just broke--except in the sense of having been broadcast on radio 3 months ago--that Attorney Gen Ashcroft said that the difference between Islam and Christianity is that in the former fathers send their sons to their death while in the latter God sent his son to his death, or something like that.

Incidentally, when did George Bush start fund-raising again?

Speaking of hateful statements, I was flipping channels yesterday and watched some tv evangelist I’d never seen before. He said that California schools now require students to take 3 weeks of Islamic studies, or some such, in which they must pick a Muslim name and design their own jihad (the televangelist pronounced it jahid). Did you know that? He also commented on limitations of women in Islamic countries, and then made a 1950s type joke about how banning women drivers might not be that bad.

TV Guide description of a program next week: Glutton Bowl: The World’s Greatest Eating Competition. Qualifying rounds in speed and quantity include bowls of mayonaise, beef tongue and sticks of butter, with a surprise “delicacy” in the finals. 2 hours. Fox, if you needed to ask.