If you've been waiting for the stupidest survey of this presidential election season, here it is. Astonishingly, it's from the National Geographic Channel. Well, on behalf of that channel's "Chasing UFOs" series, but why they would even have such a preposterous show is the question. If aliens (outer space ones, not across-the-border ones) ever landed here, what would Americans do?

Talk about a dilemma. When Jimmy Carter attacks Barack Obama, how in the world do I choose sides?

Former president Jimmy Carter has blasted the United States for anti-terror strategies such as targeting individuals for assassination and using unmanned drones to bomb suspected targets, saying they directly flout the basic tenets of universal human rights and foment anti-US sentiment.

We can but hope:

It's a pittance, really, considering the vast sums squandered by the federal government, but, hey, waste is waste:

The U.S. Justice Department is giving $1.3 million to six Indiana towns and cities to hire new police officers.

Seen this?

The big thing in the ongoing communications revolution for the near future will be related to mobile technology or the cloud or both. Everybody is trying to figure out what the next big thin will be, and some believe it might be the wearable computer Google is working on, the "Google Goggle" that would let you see a computer screen in the air in front of you.

This was the silliest story I saw while catching up on my news reading at the end of vacation:

You've dreamed of this day. Your life partner is there, your family and friends have gathered from far and wide, and all that's left to do before you share that first married kiss is say: I do(nate).

Wasn't hard to see this one coming, was it?

When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.

I see Indiana has gone and gotten famous again while I was on vacation, i.e., "Judge Upholds Ind. Facebook Ban for Sex Offenders." The decision, I'm sure, will engage us in our usual arguments about how far we can go in restricting people who might commit a crime and how carefully we should tread when enacting laws that affect only selected groups instead of everyone. But on my initial reading of the story, this observation of the judge's is what caught my attention:

Thank you for your help, Illinois; we surely do appreciate it: