Dept. of apologies

Many years ago, during my college years, Austin was still going through the post-hippie era. Among the wares that street vendors sold on the Drag were shirts that had been fashioned from Mexican flour sacks. I wore one when I went home for a visit, and my mother said suspiciously, "What does that say?"

I said, "I dunno -- it's just a flour sack."

"You don't know what it says?" she worried. "They could be mocking you! Maybe it reads 'My father is a fool!'"

So she fantasized an insult, not to me or to Americans, but to my mild-mannered father. This was typical of her paranoid relationship to modern culture.

I was reminded of this incident when I saw this story about a handbag company whose products had bilingual labels. But instead of a translation of the cleaning instructions, the French part of the label read: "We are sorry our President is an idiot. We didn't vote for him."

The best part of the story is that the head of the company isn't mad at the perpetrator; he wants to give whoever it was a raise. Because sales have taken off due to word of mouth.