In the past few centuries, our collective testicles have descended, shriveled from their lofty pre-Biblical status of being that object over which men once placed their hands when swearing an oath, to today's status of the stars of America's Funniest Home Videos and now, depending on your point of view, politician punching-bags or trailer-hitch ornaments.

For reasons unbeknown to me, people have begun to dangle tescticle replicas from the back of their cars and trucks. In response, Delegate LeRoy Myers has introduced legislation to ban this practice. Both events are equally funny, and equally ill-advised.

Governments love to ban things. In the past few years, I can't smoke in a bar, eat trans-fat in a restaurant, or use a consenting midget as a bowling ball. It may be the case soon that a government will require my daughter to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease before she can see plastic testicles. I can't imagine how James Madison would have incorporated this into the Federalist Papers.

Madison would at least be impressed that the testicles of the minority were not being subject to the tyranny of the testicles of the majority. The legislation is all-inclusive; the testicles of the white and the black, the Asian and Hispanic, the Republican and Democrat -- all our testicles are positioned directly under the stubborn erectness of this law.

It can no longer be doubted that individuals in today's society are in the midst of a legal scramble to wear the laurels of "Most Offended". Offense at testicle display is merely one instance of this. On the female side, there was recently an issue in Florida involving a theater that was showing a performance of The Vagina Monologues, an award-winning play focused on women's relationship with their own sexual apparatus. After a complaint to the theater, the owner changed the marquee to read "The Hoohaa Monologues". An agreement with the producers of the play made him change it back. In any event, the amount of mirth in the universe increased, with a corresponding decrease in dignity.

I tease my friends who are lawyers because none of them are practicing the law they thought they would; I tease my friends who are politicians (and I was one of them) because none of them are writing the legislation they thought they would. The lawyers, the politicians, and of course ourselves; at some point we have to be slapped awake and think "what is that I want to do"? If that can happen, there will be no scrotums flying from pick-ups, there will be no politicians writing legislation forbidding it, and there will be no lawyers willing to prosecute a testicle ordinance violation. Imagine.

Here are some shots from the backyard. Hope everybody else's day was filled with as much fun as we had.