Cory had just woken up from a nap, and since the weather has been so nice, I decided to take him for a walk. I put on jeans and shoes and took the stroller downstairs and set it up. Cory loves walks now, so when I returned it was no surprise that he was waiting with open arms for me to pick him up.

I first detected something amiss when I picked him up and put my hand in it. Strangely enough the smell had not had time to travel. This is extraordinary considering how bad the smell turned out to be. Still not realizing the scale of the problem, I started to put him on the floor to change his diaper, at which point I realized that the slightest contact Cory made with anything whatsoever covered it in poo. Myself included. So I took him to the bathtub instead.

I stood him up in the big tub while I filled his little tub. He stood there more or less on one foot, the one that didn’t squish when he put it down, holding onto the side of the tub and looking very upset and alarmed, although he never did cry. You probably didn’t know Cory could stand on one leg at his age. I didn’t. Meanwhile I took off both our clothes. He continued to give me the alarmed squicked-out look until I put him in the tub. After I washed him, I drained the water and did it again. At this point he was having fun, since he likes baths as much as he likes walks.

After I got him out I ran around cleaning stuff up, and on my trip back to the bathroom to clean up there, I found some cat barf to clean up as well. You might be sympathetic to the cats – maybe you feel like barfing too – but if you have cats you know they barf for no reason anyway.

Then I figured I should still go for a walk, since Cory likes them and I didn’t want to be a liar about going. We had a nice walk, although I kept wondering, Lady Macbeth-style, if people would still be able to see some poop on me that I had missed.

Naturally, all of this happened while Thud was at work, blissfully unaware of the poopstravaganza at home. Figures. Although when he gets home the place will probably still smell vaguely of poop – unbelievably smelly poop – and bleach.

I think I should get two beers tonight.

The funniest thing about this particular call was that as I was hanging up, I heard the caller raise his voice angrily and say “WE AREN’T TELEMARKETERS!” Hmm… you called me up and asked for money… let’s both get out our dictionaries, shall we? Presumably he would have followed that up with a claim that he was an ex-officer, or family member, or something along those lines. Sadly, it probably works on a lot of people who are just in the midst of their impulse to hang up, or they wouldn’t do it. Me, though, I just hung up. It was that line that made me certain it was a scammer, and although I then was kind of morbidly curious about how he would play it out, it wasn’t enough for me to waste any more time with these idiots.

For the most part what charity scam artists are doing is not illegal. They can get in trouble if they run afoul of laws governing phone harassment or outright fraud – IF someone catches them AND can prove it AND bothers suing – but it’s not illegal simply to run an inefficient charity. And in the eyes of the IRS, that is all they are. They get repeatedly exposed and talked about on the news, and people seem to assume that they’re gone after that, but nothing really happens to them. They might start using a different name (scam organizations almost always use a large number of different names), or reshuffle their organization, or move to a different state… or not. And actually, those tricks can work even if they are successfully sued.

As long as they report everything correctly to the IRS, up to and including their abysmal fundraising-expense-to-program ratio, they are fine. Right now, the onus is on the prospective donor to look up the organization’s financial records.

What, you don’t think there ought to be more government regulation on this, do you, you Commie?

I kid, Pinko. You may be in luck. When I was attending seminars in the nonprofit field, I was repeatedly told to expect increased regulation from Congress in the next 5 or 10 years. People are sick enough of hearing about the abuses of nonprofit status that the demand for increased regulation has been growing.

In the meantime, for looking up records on charities, I like Give.org (the BBB’s nonprofit-watching arm). The American Institute of Philanthropy is another very good one, although you have to subscribe to get their detailed reports. It would be worth it if you had a lot of dough to dispense, though. Charity Navigator is ok, but be careful – unlike the BBB and AIP, which both use guidelines and analysis when evaluating charities, Charity Navigator only gives you the public information from the organization’s IRS 990 form, without any additional human interpretation. I did encounter a charity that manipulated their 990 to show one of their fundraising expenses – their staff salaries – as a program expense. Their argument was that they were employing people in need who would be unemployed otherwise, and therefore the salaries were a charitable program. I didn’t buy that argument, and neither did the AIP, who gave them an “F.” But the same organization looked great in Charity Navigator since they told the IRS their salaries were a program expense. And that’s only one way to cheat. Another one is to, for example, report donations of worthless goods.

Avoid GuideStar, which charges a hefty premium subscription fee to offer you what is primarily public information from the 990 along with mission statements and whatnot that the organization submits to the site themselves. If you can get their site to work, which I usually couldn’t.

So what are you looking for? Well, the BBB and AIP give you a rating based on their own established guidelines, if they have enough information. The BBB also publishes the charity’s response to the rating, if they send one, so you can decide for yourself whether or not they’re actually operating in good faith. If you’re looking at financials, a nonprofit really should be able to hit about 80% or more of their funds going to programs. You might be a little more forgiving of this if they are just getting established or suffered some kind of setback beyond their control, but that’s up to you. By contrast, I’ve seen some of the scams report program expenditures in the neighborhood of just 10-20%.

Finally, none of this applies to religious organizations since they are not required to report anything to anyone. Occasionally you see one get nailed for fraud, but for the most part they can do whatever they want and tell you whatever they want about what they’re doing. They can, however, voluntarily submit documentation to the watchdog groups. I would not even consider donating to a large operation that did not do this. Otherwise, it’s simply the safest scam around.

Here goes.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS COLORED OBSIDIAN!!

If you are still thinking, “yes, but there’s the rare blue obsidian,” READ THE ABOVE AGAIN.

Obsidian is always, always, always black. Sometimes it’s plain black, and sometimes it has inclusions. Black obsidian with a few or a lot of red-brown wisps or patches is mahogany obsidian. Black obsidian with a few or a lot of white spots is snowflake obsidian. Black obsidian with a silver, gold or rainbow sheen is also natural obsidian. However, there is no place on God’s green Earth where anyone has found blue, yellow, green, pink or aqua obsidian in the ground. Anyone who tells you otherwise is making a fine living selling you plain old glass.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with glass jewelry or skulls or other knick-knacks, as long as you are aware that it is man-made glass. DO NOT pay high prices for it as if it were some rare mineral find. It is not.

Thank you.

Hillary! It’s not about you, so hang up your hat (The Age, Australia)

Senator ignores circling vultures (Sydney Morning Herald, Australia)

Obama, obviously (Edmonton Sun, Canada)

One merchant that I opted for all e-mail with was for my Citibank credit card. All went fine for a while, but then, insidiously, sometime in the last couple of years they began mailing me a letter every month to inform me that they had e-mailed my card statement notice.

It reminds me a bit of bosses who call you to ask if you’ve gotten the e-mail they just sent.

Oh, and the best part of this reminder notice is that, in order to ensure there is absolutely no confusion about which card they’re referring to, they also print my account number on each one. Which… yup… necessitates use of the shredder.

Thud suggested there was probably a second option on their website to opt-out of the reminder notice. There isn’t. But they do cheerfully remind me that I have already enrolled in their “All-Electronic Program”!

Still thinking I must be imagining things and that the sawdust may have been incense ash (the two look remarkably similar), I sealed the box in a freezer bag and set it aside. Later I checked again, and not only was there more sawdust in the bag, there was a hole in it. Yes: one of the bastards had decided to eat his way right out. I also found a body, though. I guess the world outside the bag proved too inhospitable.

It’s funny how surprised you can be by the presence of termites in something that is, to be fair, quite obviously made of wood. (For example, Thud’s reaction was “OMFG! Gross!!”) Anyway, the moral is, I guess, to inspect your newly-acquired wooden knick-knacks for termites.

The place I bought it from has already shipped a replacement, and yes, they said they checked it first.

He is also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, extremely silly. I can’t describe it, only emphasize it. Silly is silly. You’ll just have to trust me.

But what made me really feel like a mom was yesterday, while I was playing the Wii. He climbed up on the couch and sat down next to me. Considering that he usually only climbs the couch with the intent of crawling around, and had never sat on it properly before without being placed there by one of us, it was really something. Suddenly he was a little person who was sitting on the couch to watch the TV.

If not, fire up the Wayback Machine and read this old Time article.

Stories about her pettiness are legion: the time in Boston she telephoned the management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to complain that the Ritz-Carlton’s room service had put peas in her pasta; the time when, feeling chilly while riding in a limo in Southern California, she used the cellular phone to call her management company in New York, which phoned the limo service, which phoned the driver, who turned the air conditioning down; the time in New York when she and Luciano Pavarotti competed to see which could arrive later for a dress rehearsal. Battle has a penchant for changing hotel suites in the middle of a stay just to vary the color of her surroundings. After her appearances at the San Francisco Opera this season, the backstage crew sported T shirts that read: I SURVIVED THE BATTLE.