Deluxe dog kennels now offer color cable TV with VCR, weight-reduction programs, speaker telephones for owners’ calls, and de-stressing doggie-massage. . . . Peppermint Pets of California offers dogs and their owners matching aromatherapy collars. . . . Recently, the Animal Liberation Front claimed credit for raiding two mink farms and firebombing a feed warehouse. They called the latter act “non-violent,” and vowed, “We will not stop or be stopped until every cage is opened and every oppressed creature is free.”    *    The Shopper Report, a grocery-industry newsletter, found buyers in supermarkets rate “organic foods” last in quality.  *  Numerous federal inmates now use phone calls from prison to arrange murder, drug trafficking, and other crimes, the Justice Department has discovered. Previously, inmate phone time was limited, but a class-action suit has brought largely unlimited access to phones. . . . Nicole Bass, a pro wrestler described by the Washington Post as “the world’s largest female bodybuilder” at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds, has sued the World Wrestling Federation for sexual harassment, demanding $120 million. . . . The latest rights group: The Campaign for Real Ale in Britain is fighting to make it illegal to pour beer with more than 5 percent froth.    *    Florida’s Lieutenant Governor Frank Brogan has testified that it takes six times as many people to administer a federal education dollar as a state dollar, the Wall Street Journal reports. . . . No widely used science textbook for middle schools was found satisfactory by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “Students are lugging home heavy texts full of disconnected facts that neither educate nor motivate them,” a spokesman complained.    *    Why do media “hacks” love presidential candidate John McCain? asks Slate’s Jacob Weisberg: “You could start with our admiration for a quality not many of us possess: physical courage.” . . . Novelist Kurt Vonnegut recently told Salon, “The permanent government now is the anchorpeople. They don’t get elected…. CNN now decides where we send our troops next.”    *    Reflecting on the upsurge of nostalgia for World War II veterans, author William McGurn notes that two-thirds of U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War volunteered—twice the percentage of volunteers in WWII.

AT&T reports it files at least 39,912 state and local tax returns for itself.    *    The American Civil Liberties Union is trying to force the University of Kansas to remove from its official seal the image of Moses kneeling before the burning bush.    *    Reviewing The Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History, compiled by feminist academics including Wilma Mankiller, Heterodoxy observed “one very short, very hostile entry on heterosexuality,” versus “14 different articles on lesbians.” . . . “In France, where you sleep is far more important than with whom,” reads an Inter-continental Hotel ad in the official guide Gay Friendly France: Liberté, Egalité, Diversité.    *    “If we continue to teach about tolerance and intolerance instead of teaching about good and evil, we will end up with tolerance of evil,” writes Jewish author and talk-show host Dennis Prager. . . . The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s controversial “Sensation” exhibit was accompanied by such gift shop items as “Squishy Skull” (a “goo-filled toy”), and artificial-turf coasters celebrating an artwork that consists of mutated-child mannequins on artificial turf. . . . New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman lauded the exhibit’s infamous portrait of the Virgin Mary covered with pornography and elephant dung, saying its creator “is playing with the ideas of blasphemy and worship, race and religion, toying in a gently ironic way with the space between public outrage and private expression to make his own spiritual statement.”    *    The Sacramento Bee reports child killer Brandon Wilson was so thrilled by media coverage of his crimes that his attorney admitted Wilson “would love to see his execution televised.” . . . Cary Stayner, murderer of four women, aspired to “a TV movie of the week made about his life.”    *    After the Gore 2000 campaign confessed to hiring “bad girl” feminist Naomi Wolf as a consultant, one wag asked, “Who else is on the payroll, Al—Richard Simmons?” . . . Proof Ms. Wolf was correct on the dangers of devices promising female beauty: Two women in London were killed when lightning hit their bras’ underwiring.    *    “Polls have become a substitute for thought for many Americans,” a “substitute for reporting for many people in the media,” and a “substitute for principles among many of our elected officials,” complains pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick.    *    In Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, James Gleick details studies showing Americans average nine minutes a day waiting for Web pages to appear on computer screens but only four minutes having sex.      —SW