One of my friends told me a story about her eight year old calling from camp one day with the horrifying realization that she had been stuck in a canoe with children.

This was me my first day of school. I made the school nurse call my mom to come get me because "The children were giving me a headache." So world weary at 4, was I.

OMG, this weekend was the first time I'd ever seen the Surreal Life. Cracked me up, even Mr. H, who hates that kind of thing, was getting into it. "Dude! You're going to get your ass kicked by a Brady!"

Stayed up past my bedtime last night watching C-SPAN. I have no words for what those people just did. Insanity.

My father just emailed me some comments from my hometown congressman:

Mr. Capuano (D. Mass). Mr. Speaker, you have heard all the legal arguments, all the moral arguments. We see these things differently, and I understand that. I am here to speak for myself.

I have a living will that I wrote years ago, and I will check it myself as many Americans will. The bottom line is, I do not want you interfering with my wife and me. Leave us alone. Let us make our own decisions. It is not up to you. That has always been the way it has been in this country, and that is the way it should be.

For 6 years I have been hearing how the nuclear family is all we care about. Now we do not. Stay out of my family. If you can do it here, you can do it to me. You can do it to every one of my constituents.

Leave us alone. Let my nuclear family make my decisions and my wife's decisions without your input.

Capuano is the Somervillains' Congresscritter, FWIW.

I can't believe over 40 Democrats voted for it. Hell, I can't believe anyone voted for it for anything but the most cynical of reasons.

The democrats voted for what? Please, do enlighten the less politically aware.

Uh oh. Lingering morning stupid now joining forces with lunch food coma. Total loss of brain function in T minus 5 seconds.

5, 4, 3, 2, t conk

The bill to scrap everything the lower courts did and to let a federal court decide whether or not there is any such thing as spousal rights anymore.

This would be the part where Schiff tells Jack McCoy he's not supposed to use the law to make new laws, right? He's old, he's fictional, but Adam Schiff, '08.

I t heart erika.

I've been relating to this whole issue almost entirely in L&O terms.

ION, the NYTimes is totally bogarting the on-line crossword puzzle. I need my fix, man.

A not-very-interesting article about people who investigate car fires: [link]

Except for these last two paragraphs:

As Mr. Newell tells it, cocaine traffickers transported drugs across the country in the fuel tank of a Ford Expedition. When they arrived at their destination in suburban Atlanta, the plastic bags that held the contraband, dripping with gasoline, were tossed into a clothes dryer.

"The explosion blew both of these geniuses out the front door," he said.