Yesterday I made that joke about National Secretary's Day before seeing a NY Times story that said that not only are Easter & Good Friday this week, but also anniversary of the Bay of Pigs (39 today!), the Branch Davidian massacre, Ruby Ridge if I'm not mistaken, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Columbine.

The Bush campaign boasted that his wonderful job on education in Texas was praised by none other than "Al Gore's Secretary of Education, Dr. Bill Riley." This is evidently one of those "see how many mistakes you can spot" tests. Um, three.

Al Gore revealed that as a child he learned how to hypnotize a chicken. This would explain a lot.

Just in case you thought the Russians were hiding some of the soldiers killed in the Chechen war, they buried 101 today. I don't think I mentioned it last week, but the Times ran the most disgusting story of the week, which said... oh, before I forget this little detail, the 101 were killed in the 1994-6 Chechen war, not the current one. Which said that there were hundreds of these bodies kept in railway cars, some on military bases, some evidently in Chechnya, from the earlier war. Refrigerated cars, but the refrigeration cut out a couple of years ago. They're supposed to do DNA tests or do something to identify the bodies, but of course haven't. I'll stop here cause I just had dinner and I'm beginning to disgust myself.

Thabo Mbeki, who if you've forgotten is the president of South Africa, has declared that he is looking for an African approach to solving AIDS. This after last year's scandal when the government refused to pay for a fairly cheap drug that would have prevented or at least made less likely the transmission of HIV from pregnant mothers to feti. Now he's throwing in his lot with the idiots who insist HIV has nothing to do with AIDS. If you're thinking he got this off the Internet, you're right.

Israel wants legislation to legalize hostage-taking. I don't understand those people.

Not to suggest that racism ever went away, but it really does look like racism has become the new ideology. And unlike free-market capitalism, democracy and communism, it never goes out of style. The Italian government just fell on an upsurge of anti-immigrant sentiment. William Hauge, in a speech the Telegraph claims is the most important of his leadership, says that asylum-seekers should be interned. Mugabe says that whites are the enemies of the nation, and he says it after two are murdered. Even Mbeki's speech on Western medicine and AIDS comes across pretty racist, and South Africa is considering adopting the sort of land distribution that's doing Mugabe's popularity so much good over the border. And Belgium is about to deport 1,500 Slovak gypsies (I knew I had another example).