You might of just gave California to John McCain in the GE. Now this gets placed on the ballot come the fall and what do you do now, pull Obama from his "right wing stance" on gay marriage?

There was also a case of a dumbass mother who put peanut butter on her child's hand so a young black bear could lick it off. The bear bit off the child's hand.

I could keep going ad infinitum on this subject...but we live in a very wooded rural enclave of what used to be small farms. Our former neighbor who upon moving in next door arrived with at least a dozen freely roaming house cats, remarked that she'd noticed her personal feline pet population steadily falling as the months went by. I pointed out that letting cats and especially kittens roam outside in our wooded area probably wasn't a good idea, since in addition to a healthy population of venomous snakes and some residents who refuse to obey the leash law and let their large dogs run loose, we had both Red and Gray Foxes, coyotes, and Great-horned Owls in the immediate vicinity, the latter two of which were known to have developed a strong taste for kittens and young house cats.

The stricken and shocked look on her face told me she had probably never thought that our adjacent woodland could be anything except a pretty picture window background. They wasted little time in moving.

And we wonder why so many people ever voted for George Bush & the NeoCons, famous for living in some kind of ideological fantasy world.

Story rings true from these parts. In Louisiana's recorded history, which includes generations of commercial alligator hunting, both legal and illegal, there has never been a documented instance of a person killed by an alligator. Florida, by contrast, has had six (or is it now eight?) confirmed deaths-by-gator.

What's the difference, one might ask?

Well, there are many, but, one of the big differences the Louisianians still strongly rooted in French culture in my region often draw between themselves and "Americans" is their perception of the propensity of the latter to live in some kinda make-believe world.

According to many boat tour guides, "American" tourists will take their swamp boat tour, marvel over the great expanse of marsh and majestic cypress, ooh and ahh over endless flocks of pink and white wading birds, step off the boat back at the dock and if you don't warn them not to, they'll walk right up to an 8-foot mama gator sunning herself on the banks of the bayou, and try to pet her! It's like they see themselves as actors in a movie where everybody is doing pretend stuff all the time, and the blood is just ketchup and nobody really gets hurt because it's just a movie.

I dunno...what do you expect when the average American grows up essentially going from one indoor environment to another, and their only wilderness experience is watching the Discovery Channel?

Be sure to let your daughter feed the nice cougar.