You can be the class clown

Be a clown: If you're looking for something for the kids to do during the winter break, the Seattle Shakespeare Company and the ZinZanni Institute for Circus Arts offers a clown camp for kids ages 8 through 16. Kids can learn comic timing, slapstick and circus techniques.

A few program notes: Students should bring their own seltzer bottles. Sad hobo clown costumes are limited to the first three kids to sign up. And transportation is available, but it's a teeny little clown car that seats a dozen.

Six geese a-laying: Sunday was the Audubon Society's annual Christmas Bird Count, an on-the-wing census of the local bird population.

The bird count provides important information, but The Buzz has always found birds difficult to count because of their maddening refusal to sit still. We prefer our own annual tradition, the Great Spring Slug Count. Slugs are slow moving to begin with and even easier to count after Mrs. Buzz has flattened them with a garden trowel.

Rub-a-dub-dub: On this day in 1917, a New York newspaper published H.L. Mencken's satirical history of bathtubs in America. It was all a hoax, including the passage that President Millard Fillmore was first to install a tub in the White House.

It was an obvious fabrication; everyone knows that Al Gore invented the bathtub.

—Jon Bauer, Herald staff