So touching, so plaintive, so desperate is the Doc's plea (Post on what strikes us? A rash offer.) that I am moved to respond.

Want to know what's hot with the cognoscenti in DC? Not that this is the last week of Congress before August recess and they are marking up bills like mad marking things, not the recent screening of Mel Gibson's movie The Passion, and not the fact that Dianne Feinstein has apparently been taken over by an alien and is supporting school vouchers in DC. (The money line from her piece: "I do not believe that money alone is going to solve the problem." At the risk of destroying her street cred, kudos to Dianne for applying thought to a senatorial opinion.) No, what's all the rage is the blooming of Titan arum, the Corpse Flower to those of us favoring the vernacular and Bunga Bangkai to those of us up on the semantics of Sumatra. Small droves of people head to the Botanical Gardens to catch a whiff of the plant that may best symbolize the essence of DC: It's big; it stinks; the stink attracts the entities that keep it going; and it looks good for only 48 hours.

When Titan arum bloomed at The Huntingdon one visitor remarked, "Never before have so many people waited so eagerly to smell something so foul." Clearly, this visitor has never seen lobbyists during a markup.