Our Little Genious Cheats and other Saturday tidbits

On Saturday mornings I read the New York Times, and I'm always struck by the arcane, the absurd and the avoidable. Here are a few from this morning.

Our Little Genius cheats... Remember seeing the ads for this game show in which super smart kids are quizzed? Fox has scrapped the show over allegations that they coached the kids on answers. Far less scandalous than real life--see the story in which schools actually changed students' standardized test score answers so the school would fare better under No Child Left Behind.

Tim Pawlenty, speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference last week was quoted in two different articles, in the first saying: "God's in charge" and in the second "We should take a page out of her (Tiger Wood's wife) playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country." How someone could hold (or not) both of these beliefs is truly remarkable, and says everything we need to know about him as presidential material.

Sarah Palin started a row with an actress with Down syndrome who did a voice over on Family Guy. Palin's disingenuous blather was ignited over an episode in which Chris begins to date a girl with Down syndrome, and asks about her family. The girl replies "My dad's an accountant, and my mom is the former governor of Alaska." Palin claims it was a swipe at her son Trig. The actress, Andrea Fay Friedman, replied, "My mother did not carry me around like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes."

The latest threat in Haiti is the accumulation of human excrement. Haiti had no sewage treatment plants even before the earthquake; the lowliest workers cleaned latrines and the waste was transported to disposal sites. Now it just piles up. And worse, starving families rummage in it looking for food. Public health officials fear outbreaks of cholera, malaria and dengue. Cases of typhoid and shigellosis are already on the rise. "Haiti's pigs live better lives than we do," says a displaced mother of four.

Headline: "Fewer People Late Paying Mortgage." Details: The improvement was in the group that has only missed one payment. The percentage of homeowners missing two payments increased, from 6.25% in the 3rd quarter of 2009 to 6.89% in the fourth quarter , as did the percentage of those missing at least three payments, from 8.85% to 9.67%. And the number of loans in foreclosure rose from 4.47% to 4.58% --from 3.3% in the fourth quarter of 2008.

My weekend gift to you: No item on Tiger Woods.