As Congress moves to aid distressed US homeowners, the prospect of a new rescue is drawing fire from a diverse array of activists, economists and consumers opposing what they call a bailout.

Recently the Department of Homeland Security came out with a report on the proper verbal etiquette federal agencies should use in talking about the murderous scum who are trying to kill us all. The report found its way to the Associated Press and a good thing, too, because the rest of us need to know this stuff.

With Mother's Day coming on Sunday, I'm again missing my own mom (who died in 1995), but I'm also asking, and more fervently with each passing year, "what kind of a 'mom legacy' am I giving my own kids?"

An old commercial for an airline we can't remember depicted first class as the place of champagne and revelry while business class passengers brought picnic baskets, chickens and their clothes wrapped in bundles. If we're not mistaken, first class might even have been shown in color while business class was in drab and depressing black and white.

The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously observed that "90 percent of everything is crap." His aphorism was intended to defend science fiction from the charge that most of it is bad. Sturgeon's point -- since formalized as Sturgeon's Law -- is that such criticism is empty, since it applies with equal force to every form of writing.

If you, as I, cannot get that horrific image of Eight Belles being put to death at Churchill Downs last weekend out of your head, you can take action to help quell the horror.

Among the many "thou shall nots" of the Ten Commandments, the Almighty in his wisdom threw in a couple of positive ones to keep folks from becoming too depressed.

It so happens that my favorite one of these is "Honor thy father and thy mother."

Here's one way of looking at our solar system and our place in it: If the vast span of time between the two events that bookend the lifecycle of our solar system -- that is, from its coalescence in a cosmic cloud to its destruction in the sun's final flameout -- were telescoped into a single year, all of recorded history would be represented by less than a minute in early June.

Lenore Skenazy, a columnist for the New York Sun, caused quite a stir earlier this month when she wrote about letting her nine-year-old son take a subway and bus by himself across Manhattan. The boy had been begging her to allow him to test his big city commuting skills on his own, and she finally agreed, handing him a map, a subway token, some quarters, and a $20 bill.

I saw my old pal Context the other day. He seemed very low. He hasn't been the same since our mutual friend Irony died.

"Hey, Connie," I said, "Why the long face? You look like a horse -- or maybe John Kerry."