[...] Perhaps Galloway's being framed. But if the Dark Forces of War really wanted to discredit the anti-war movement, they'd have pasted Dixie Chicks posters in Odai's workout room. They'd have hung a gold-plated baseball bat inscribed by Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon in a prison interrogation room known to locals as the Kneecap Clinic.

If true, this bombshell will leave a very small crater. The anti-war movement is curiously impervious to the sort of scandal that could sink, say, the career of a popular evangelist. Find a preacher in a fleabag motel with a hooker, and his empire sags, groans and collapses. Prove that the outfit orchestrating all the big anti-war rallies has more communists on board than a 1930s Works Progress Administration documentary called "Paul Robeson Visits a Soviet Grain Co-Op" and the world yawns. Shrugs. Moves on.

Doesn't matter, you see. It was a war for oil! Oil! Oil, I tells ya! But then we learn that the son of the biggest shareholder of the TotalFinaElf French oil concern is married to the daughter of Canada's premier. You'd think that might put Jean Chretien's obstructionism in perspective, eh? Perhaps the fact of being Canadian insulates one from questions of corruption and self-enrichment. But the halos don't seem to show when we see these luminous beings on American TV. [...]

[...] From Paul, down in Kentucky:

Do you recall the cereal from the '70s, "Freakies"? They used to include in the cereal plastic figurines of the Freakies. They were troll/animal things that hung around a "freaky tree." Of course, they sang a song:

"We are the Freakies, we are the Freakies, we have a Freaky Tree . . . "

Something was seriously wrong with both the inventors and the marketing folks who thought this was a good idea.

They sound like drug-addled Manson family rejects. Having blocked all recollection of the Freakies, I turned to the Internet, resigned to spending an hour on eBay, poking around until I found the proper category (Things >: Stuff >: Plastic Crap >: Cereal >: Seventies >: Proof you have no life or taste >: Collectibles) but to my surprise, a google search steered me to http://www.freakies.com. Someone's devotion to a long-dead cereal is so strong that he has paid actual American money for the freakies.com domain name so he could set himself up as the curator of all things Freakie.

The Freakies were: BossMoss, Hamhose, Snorkledorf, Grumble Goody-Goody, Gargle and Cowmumble. Their copious adventures were detailed on the back of the box, and the site notes that they were popular with college students as well as kids. I'm always amused when someone brings up "college students" as proof that some infantile hobby has crossover appeal. Of course college students love them. They're hopped up on goofballs, for heaven's sake. They'll giggle for six hours over Richie Rich cartoons and think they're subversive anticapitalist morality plays. [...]