After all, that beats any alternative I can come up with.

Sanity and the Joe Paterno Scandal: Most of the airwaves lately have been saturated with the newest World's Most Important Story, the football scandal that led to the firing of Joe Paterno, who had coached Penn State since about 1791. 

According to a grand jury report, back in 2002 a graduate assistant saw Jerry Sandusky, a then-retired coach emeritus, raping a little boy in the shower. The graduate assistant supposedly told Paterno, who told his superiors, and then evidently forgot about it.

And nothing ever happened. Well, not quite; they took Sandusky's keys to the locker room away, and told him not to bring any more little boys on campus. After all, who would want to turn against a retired assistant coach for occasionally tearing a kid's anus apart? 

The children all seem to have been from poor and disadvantaged families anyway. Eventually the whistle was blown, and there was enough sanity on the Penn State board to realize Paterno and the faceless school president needed to be fired on the spot. I've read about as much analysis of all this as I can stand, but the most sensible thing I've heard about it came from one of my students, a young Mexican-American woman.

Liliana Medina, who has three little girls of her own, said, "Why didn't whoever saw this guy just kill him? I mean, maybe not kill him but attack him, beat him up, do anything to save that little boy?"

"And why didn't Paterno call the police?" Legitimate question, if you assume sports types are decent human beings. But poor Lily is too naïve to realize that "amateur" college sports is, in fact, big business, and to understand the nature of good American values.

I wish she were old enough to be president instead.

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