Dear Oracle:

Me and my frat bro's think Condi Rice is HOT!  I hear she went to Stanford, so I bet my bro's a keg of Bud Light she made Playboy's "Girls of the Pac 10" way back when.

Then my bro' Dwayne says she looks a little like George Bush (and both of them look like the "What, Me Worry?" guy), so he bet us a keg of Coors they're related.

Then my bro' Washington bet us a keg of Olde English that George Jefferson – he's the president who had the black girlfriend, right? – is their great-great grand-daddy.

I can barely keep track of all the bets, and we already started drinking the kegs, and… can you settle the bets, dude?  I think I'm gonna hurl…

- Bifford "The Biffer" Squalls, Jr., Lincoln, Nebraska

Dear Biffer:

First, let me state that I do NOT referee drunken trivia contests (especially when I'm not invited to the party), so you should direct your George Jefferson scholar-Playmate questions elsewhere.

As for your second question, though it may seem tasteless – an insult to both President Bush and Secretary of State Rice – it is anything but: America was built on the backs of slaves, and we owe their memory a frank and open discussion of the facts, not some whitewashed, virgin-Birth of a Nation fantasy.

And the sickening fact is that white slave masters did take carnal advantage of their black human "property," producing children of mixed race who were taken in by black kinfolk and shunned by white relations.

Anyway, as far as I know, Bush and Rice are not related.  While there are a lot of black people with the last name Bush, and Texas does grow a lot of cotton, and both George W. and his brother Jeb do seem unusually comfortable in the swampy climes of the unrepentant South, I have no idea if the Bush clan made its fortune from slavery.

Freed slaves – robbed of their real names and ancestry – could name themselves after someone they admired, or more likely in the case of "Bush," the lonely little tree they saw after escaping the plantation just before dawn, set aflame by the rising sun and still crowned by the North Star, lighting the way to Canada.

Where, after traveling hundreds of miles underground – dodging upstanding citizens ready to ship them back to hell – the fugitives might emerge into the light and rejoice in their right, as free human beings, to freeze their ass off like anyone else!

- A .O.