It’s not often that “Swede” and “hissy fit” appear in the same headline.

“When the house is on fire, it’s better to have a psychotic fireman than no fireman at all.”

Clinton advisor Howard Wolfson

1. If all the members of the Chinese women’s gymnastics team are 16 (the minimum required age for Olympic competition), then so am I.

2. I so want to believe  it’s the stretching and the training that are helping Dara Torres win races at 41. But I don’t, quite.

3. The Olympics/Special Olympics ads are absolutely worth the gazillions of dollars Coke probably spent. The United Airlines Sumo Wrestler ads (and, come to think of it, the McCain snarky ads)? Not so much.

4. This is painful–that Krzyzewski guy apparently can coach. Members of the Redeem Team played defense. They passed to team members who had a better shot. They looked impressive.

Seinfeld famously had the Soup Nazi. Me, I have turned in to the Soup Nutsy.

At my not-so-tender age, the dentist discovered a wisdom tooth. I certainly THOUGHT I had all four wisdom teeth out — but hey, it was 35 years ago and I was on heavy pain medication at the time. What do I remember?

Anyway, the tooth had to come out, which it did. And now I can’t eat anything but soup. For a month.

The oral surgeon also offered up mashed potatoes, which I don’t like. I’ve added yogurt and pudding. And tonight, I may live large and eat a crab cake. Still, the menu choice at Chez Amundson is mostly soup or, well, soup.

The soup Nazi’s threat was always, “No soup for you!”

Sigh. I wish.

Garrison Keillor, on the “elitist” charge in Salon:

And it’s an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.

“Don’t put on the hat.” If there is one piece of political advice about which my daughter is resolute, it is that.

In our line of work, people give us hats. And I look terrible in hats.

Not, perhaps, career-threatening, Dukakis-in-the-tank terrible.

But pretty dorky.

So you aren’t likely to see me wearing a West Potomac Wolverines, Mt. Vernon Majors, Obama for President, or any other hat.

Now we see this picture of Gov. Rendell. Sara’s wisdom is confirmed.

The bad news is, the headline on the article reads: “Sleazy Campaign Tactic of the Day.”

The same week the New York Times tries to scare the bejeebers out of us about granite countertops, they give us ten things we shouldn’t worry about.

According to the New York Times, they may contain uranium:

“‘It’s not that all granite is dangerous,’ said Stanley Liebert, the quality assurance director at CMT Laboratories in Clifton Park, N.Y., who took radiation measurements at Dr. Sugarman’s house. ‘But I’ve seen a few that might heat up your Cheerios a little.’”

From this morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch:

” . . . Warner’s donors include singer and actress Barbra Streisand, movie director Steven Spielberg, television producer Norman Lear, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley of Coeburn, singer and actress Bette Midler, musician Bruce Hornsby of Williamsburg, writer John Grisham of Albemarle County and Walt Disney President Robert Iger. Warner also received a donation from Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of state in President Bill Clinton’s second term.”