Caregiver sentenced to 31 months in jail: Effie Tutor, a former caregiver at the Houghton Lakeview home in Kirkland, was convicted of a felony for neglecting an elderly patient so badly she developed bedsores down to the bone and ultimately died. Elder abuse just makes me sad.

Local food in local schools: The state created a Farm-to-School program in 2008 "to get more local food into school cafeterias." The program is running into difficulties: the growing season peaks during summer vacation, prices are higher, and processing saves on labor costs.

State starts earmarking lottery revenues for college scholarships: This development would sound infinitely nobler if it was not a self-conscious rip-off of the Georgia state lottery, where revenues help pay for scholarships and people buy oodles of tickets. Encouraging discretionary spending on frivolities is such a responsible thing to do in a recession.

Seattle will have its own version of the Jon Stewart rally: The guy behind it is Jim Baum, a Maple Valley farmer who was once profiled on The Daily Show. Watching a bunch of his land get reclassified as wetlands, in part to protect Bigfoot, convinced him of the futility of anger.

Some segments of Gas Works Park shut down: The state is running sediment tests for the next seven weeks. Nothing to worry about here, just potentially carcinogenic muck.

The Gulf's first smut shop: It's in Bahrain. Veiled women don't have to worry about eye contact. The most-sold items are "penis enlargement creams and edible underwear in a variety of flavors."

Union actors told to steer clear of Hobbit films: Not because it might get you typecast, but because Peter Jackson and the gang prefer non-union contracts.

Another aid ship sails for Gaza: It's only a ten-person ship and it's sponsored by Jewish organizations, so this could be an interesting test of the blockade.

The Blue Collar Jeans Tour: Levi's bases their new ad campaign around the Pennsylvania town so depressed and decayed it was chosen as the shooting location for The Road. The campaign "evokes the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange and the handmade aesthetic of the Works Progress Administration."

Defense budget now includes book-burning: The Pentagon makes good on their pledge to buy up all copies of a new Afghanistan memoir and destroy them. If you're worried your first novel might suck, just throw in a bunch of classified info. First printing sold out? Check. All evidence of your juvenile prose gone? Check.