When I was a child, my heroes came from books. My mother took us to the library every Saturday morning. My favourite Saturday afternoons were spent sprawled on my bed after coming home loaded with books. I would provision myself with a pitcher of Tang, a box of soda crackers and slabs of Velveeta. Belly down, I’d read until I had the pattern of my chenille bedspread embossed onto my arms, and it was suppertime.

Jean-Jacques Champollion and Douglas Bader were my childhood book heroes.

Champollion was a strange choice.

It's good that newspapers and Internet sites are showing the photographs of Uday and Qusay Hussein in death. Their mutilated faces are in great contrast to most images we see of people, often with impossibly white teeth, lithe bodies and conditioned hair. Death is that part of life we don't want to think about, that we fear; the more we have reason to witness it, to think on it, the more we can come to some semblance of serenity about it and allow our fear to dissipate.

The decision by the United States to make the photographs widely available to news outlets is not so good.

I was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1954. My mother was Miss Kansas, 1953. She made her way through 4H beauty contests and county competitions to gain the state title. It was wonderful for her.

She got to open livestock fairs and new shopping plazas. She cut the ribbon at the very first car wash in the state. She loved her sash and tiara.

During the year of her reign, she so much enjoyed being called Miss Kansas that she changed her name from Heiferstein to Kansas, so she could be called Miss Kansas the rest of her life.

In Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum has changed the way it marks calendar years on the information tags attached to items on display. It used to mark years with AD and BC, the Anno Domini and Before Christ most of us grew up with. They feel familiar like Fahrenheit feels familiar.

BC has become BCE, short for Before the Common Era, and AD has become CE, Common Era.

Elsie Wayne said that her goal was to reiterate her support for the historic definition of marriage.

Come autumn, the children’s television show “Sesame Street” will introduce its first HIV-positive Muppet character to children of South Africa, where one in nine people have the virus that can lead to AIDS.

The character doesn’t have a name yet, or even final colour or a form. The Muppet will be an orphan girl.

In one script being developed, she is sad because she misses her mother.

In further American lunacy, a Republican succeeded in renaming French Fries “freedom fries” and French toast “freedom toast” in House of Representatives restaurants in Washington. Other restaurants in America are following suit. Ohio Congressman Bob Ney ordered the menu change. The move is to symbolize the anger that some lawmakers feel over French opposition to a U.S.-led war on Iraq. Ney says French fries will return when the French government comes around. Sacre Maroon.

Too bad French fries aren’t French. They’re from Belgium. Americans better be careful.

I can&#0146t begin to tell you how many times I have dreamt, in length and great detail, of being under house arrest. Well, OK. Let me make a guess. Maybe 147 times, for a total elapsed time of just under seventeen hours.

My idea of house arrest is quite a bit more harsh than the sentences imposed on Sean Nelson Goodwin, who got one year of home time for abusing a four-month-old child, or the eighteen months given to William Michael Christie for masturbating three young boys.

Political correctness is a leash we snap on to each other’s collars in places where we won’t behave if allowed to run free. I believe in political correctness, especially when it is applied to others and stops people from using words like fag, nigger and paki; stops people from paying women less than they pay men; stops people from telling racist or homophobic jokes; or stops them from throwing away puppies in boxes.

Political correctness can be used with even better results when we use it on ourselves; it’s easier to gauge when our own tie is too tight.

Where’s the beef? Not as much any more on most of our plates.

Many of us have cut back on eating red meat for health or philosophical reasons. This week, the first mad cow in Canada in ten years caused the stock market and the Canadian dollar to hiccup.