Please join the staff of the Suburban Panic! Society For Precision Grammar Sciences as we welcome Camilla Carter to the faculty. Camilla is an old college friend, and a contributor to an earlier, less salubrious version of the site. Her hobbies are shut up, that’s what her hobbies are. Welcome back, Camilla.

• Six years after being pulled from the market by the FDA, Nicotine Water is back in stores. (The new line includes a homeopathic version, consisting of a bottle of water that was in the same room with a pack of cigarettes for about five minutes.)
• A Federal Court has ruled that, no matter how hard they believe it, Presidential aids don’t have blanket immunity from Congressional subpoenas. (Apparently it takes 93 pages to say IMMUNITY: NOT YOURS. Claims of blanket immunity from cooties are still unverified.)
• I’m going to use another bullet to point out that this ruling is three licks from the center of useless. It only addresses (and rejects) the assertion of across-the-board immunity for Presidential advisers. It avoids analysis of any specific claims of immunity that the defendants, Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten, might assert. 93 pages, to essentially tell the White House to try again with a different strategy.
• New “exercise pills” mimic the effects of genetically enhanced health in mice. (In the future, being stranded on a desert island and eating your friends to survive won’t go straight to your hips.)

I’ve been dating my boyfriend (we’ll call him Steve…because that’s his name) for five years, and people are quite confused — I’d go so far as to call it befuddled — when I tell them we do not yet have plans to get married.

The first time someone asked me about it was when we celebrated our one-year anniversary. I mentioned it to my former boss, and he said, “Wow, a year… so, are you thinking about getting married?” I remember being caught totally off-guard by the question, and thinking something like, “I’ve had pairs of socks longer than I’ve had this relationship. Are you insane?”

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