I saw a commercial for Flood Insurance just now, calling floods, "America's Most Common Natural Disaster." That sounded like a sales pitch. Like one of those movie review blurbs. "A.O. Scott of the New York Times called Floods, 'America's Most Common Natural Disaster.' Check it out this Friday, at a low-lying beach near you." And is that even true? Do we have a master list of natural disasters such that we can call floods the most common? And how are they measuring? By frequency? By strength? I'm guessing there are more thunderstorms than floods. Almost by definition there might have to be. But is a thunderstorm not a disaster? What about all those low-level earthquakes there are all the time, they say... what's the "disaster" threshold on the Richter scale? Anyway, I quibble with the word choice.

I haven't been following the news as well as I could be the past few days, but it definitely seems like there's a problem over in France with these riots. I feel like the blame may be misplaced though. It's obviously not the fault of the rioters, it's the fault of the cars. What kind of cars burn so easily? France should be recalling these cars, for non-spontaneous combustion problems. It's dangerous, this non-spontaneous combustion. Anyone can be driving along, through a rainstorm of lighter fluid and past a propane torch and -- BAM! -- big fire, out of nowhere, with hardly any warning besides the existence of the lighter fluid and the propane torch. Non-spontaneous combustion is almost as bad as that defect so many American cars have with the seatbelts, where if you don't put yours on it DOESN'T WORK AT ALL. Dangerous. Dangerous dangerous.

Also, these riots make me think we've been re-naming the wrong fast food side dish. No more Freedom Fries, now we have Riot Rings.

And, finally, I'm waiting for the press release that announces that Riot Weekly is about to name the French Riots the Tastiest In The World. And, okay, this is going to be really forced here...the French riots earned 4 stars from Michelin, 3 for the food, and 1 for the exploding tires. Um... okay, that doesn't entirely make sense as I've worded it, but there's something there... there's some joke I haven't quite figured out yet buried in there. Maybe.