Since I have a feeling a good majority of you don't follow my friend Ian on Facebook, I feel pretty safe just flat out stealing the following introductory text for this story from him, and none of you will be any the wiser. The perfect crime!

Anyway…

Hey, it just goes to show you, if you work hard and apply yourself, one day you can become king of Uganda…

For years, Charles Wesley Mumbere worked as a nurse's aide in Maryland and Pennsylvania, caring for the elderly and sick. No one there suspected that he had inherited a royal title in his African homeland when he was just 13.

On Monday, after years of political upheaval and financial struggle, Mumbere, 56, was finally crowned king of his people to the sound of drumbeats and thousands of cheering supporters wearing cloth printed with his portraits.

Now I just have to wait for Ian to inherit a royal title that I can lift, and I'm totally in there!

This is just disgusting. Just… I have no words…

Bob Dylan's description of Barack Obama makes a lot more sense if you imagine him blowing into a harmonica every three or so lines…

He's got an interesting background. He's like a fictional character, but he's real. First off, his mother was a Kansas girl. Never lived in Kansas though, but with deep roots. You know, like Kansas bloody Kansas. John Brown the insurrectionist. Jesse James and Quantrill. Bushwhackers, Guerillas. Wizard of Oz Kansas. I think Barack has Jefferson Davis back there in his ancestry someplace.

And then his father. An African intellectual. Bantu, Masai, Griot type heritage — cattle raiders, lion killers. I mean it's just so incongruous that these two people would meet and fall in love. You kind of get past that though. And then you're into his story. Like an odyssey except in reverse.

Not bad. But I still prefer his old character sketches from before he went electric.

Developing…

With the Obama offices just about to release something that resembles information about its alleged ties to Rod Blagojevich's office, soon-to-be Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is making a break for it…

Incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel left on Tuesday for a "long planned family vacation in Africa," a transition official confirmed to the Huffington Post…

Transition officials did not specify where in Africa he went, though another source said the family would be going on a safari. Nevertheless, it's an interesting choice for a holiday vacation.

At least Emanuel was smart enough to chose an actual other continent.

Barack Obama made the very common mistake of assuming he was leaving the country by going to Hawaii.

To hear Fox News's Carl Cameron tell it, Sarah Palin had John McCain's staffers pining for the cosmopolitan enlightenment and urbane wisdom of Dan Quayle.

According to Cameron, campaign insiders allege…

* Palin couldn't name the three countries in NAFTA.

* She refused preparation for the Katie Couric interview. (You don't say?)

* She threw temper tantrums when faced with bad press clippings.

* She had some very interesting beliefs about Africa…

According to Fox News Chief Political Correspondent Carl Cameron, there was great concern within the McCain campaign that Palin lacked "a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, a heartbeat away from the presidency," in part because she didn't know which countries were in NAFTA, and she "didn't understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series, a country just in itself."

That's right: A country, not a continent.

And yet still not as bad as her husband, Todd, who until 2002 seemed equally convinced that Alaska was a country, not a state.