Instead of wasting their time blaming all of society's ills on the fact that, if you purchase a piece of cheat hardware that can modify game code and then enter a random string of characters obtained from the internet, there are simulated non-graphic sex acts in a video game, perhaps Congress should focus on the single biggest sign of the downfall of American society: Back to School shopping season.

There is one appropriate time for Back to School sales: August. If I walk into Target on July 11th, I should not be subjected to giant cardboard standees of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed children holding unnecessary school supplies (did anyone ever use the glue stick? How about the French curve set?). If I'm a kid, I just got out of school a month and a half ago. I'm only halfway through swimming, playing wiffle ball until 9:30 at night, and sleeping late. If I'm going to Target, it's to buy a pack of whatever the latest card game/cartoon show fad is. The last thing I want to think about is going back to school.

The Holiday Creep is bad enough when it applies to other holidays: Thanksgiving bleeding into Halloween, Easter intruding upon St. Patrick's Day, and the like. But there's always been an unspoken agreement between children and the faceless, multinational corporations whose main goal is to convince them that all of their friends want whatever is in surplus at the factory that Back to School season stays in August.

The stores have broken this promise in a shameless, desperate attempt to fill the store during the 4 weeks between "4th of July Decorative Plate and Napkin Fest" and "Back to School, Does Anyone Want a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper?", and it's time for kids to write their Congresspeople and demand answers. Don't take this sitting down, kids, take back the summer.

Greetings from the surface of the sun, a.k.a. KC, MO, where the temperature is a balmy 98 degrees. A couple of weeks ago I had the fortune of journeying home to visit my parents in North Carolina. I took them on all sorts of adventures like tubing down a river, playing disc golf in the middle of nowhere (and that's compared to Waynesville, which is already close to the middle of nowhere), and taking a Segway tour of the North Carolina Arboretum.

The best part, though, was that it was mostly bearable outside. Here, walking from one building to another at work feels like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia (although blissfully shorter and with slightly more women). It's not looking so good for the anti-global-warming crowd, since people often confuse global climate trends with the current weather outside. The good news is, Waynesville is nestled in the mountains, a few thousand feet above the new sea level when Antarctica melts. The bad news is, there's no Best Buy.