This may be old news to some of you, but I just heard about it yesterday. The lengths people will go to these days... . Here's a brief excerpt from the article:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is now targeting the Boy Scouts of America because of a merit badge given to members who exhibit a mastery of fishing, an activity PETA claims "[teaches] young people that hooking, maiming, suffocating, and killing [fish] is acceptable." To spread its message, PETA has begun running television advertisements calling on the Boy Scouts to retire its "Fishing" and "Fish and Wildlife Management" merit badges. "We say fishing is a violent activity, [because] fish suffer when they are impaled in the mouth and yanked out of the water," [Dawn Carr] said. "Kids should be encouraged to participate in other activities that don't involve killing fish."

I think I have both of those merit badges from my Scouting days a decade ago... Does that make me a horribly vicious person?

"Stephen Foster really irritates me [...] He writes these smarmy, nasty, little tunes [...] But it is a good example of a two-phrase period, blast him!" - professor, in a diatribe on the audacity of Stephen Foster, and the use of Camptown Races as a politically incorrect example of periods