Since when do bees make honey in various shades of blue and green?

Beekeepers in northeastern France were posing that most reasonable question lately, until they suspected their bees were eating the sugary waste from M&Ms -- those brightly colored, candy-shelled chocolates.

A biogas plant in Alsace is thought to be the culprit.  It deals with waste from a Mars chocolate factory.  Combine a harsh winter with a rainy summer, and the bees have had less time than usual for foraging, forcing beekeepers to set out sugar syrup for the bees.

The bees instead made a beeline for the waste chocolate shop.  A spokesperson for the British Beekeeper's Association said, "Bees are clever enough to know where the best sources of sugar are, if they are no others available."

Just when you think you've got the hang of things, the solar system or universe will show you something you've never seen before.

Case in point:  What are those little black things on Mars -- where do they come from each spring, and where do they go when winter approaches?

Now, I know I've been running a fever -- it's early-voting-and-flu season here -- and been having trouble with gravity thanks to inner-ear plumbing, but black, spidery things on Mars?

Apparently so, and they've been showing up for their meager sunbathing rites for about a decade that we know about, at least.

More of that big government interference with your doctor and hospital is now taking effect. Medicare will start levying fine on hospitals that have excessive re-admissions within 30 days for certain complications from treatment (or lack of, or shoddy care). It will be based on statistical analysis of patient records, and to begin with it will only apply to heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia.

This will be expanded to other ailments that hospitals are notorious for cutting corners on. The numbers will be available online so that you can see what sort of death trap your local care facility really is.

Even Chris Wallace of Fox News has taken to challenging Paul Ryan for specifics on Romney's policies. Ryan had a lot of specifics in his budget that the Republican House passed two years in a row. Romney has disavowed everything in the budget he had previously called "marvelous". Ryan claims to have details but it would "take too long to explain", so you'll just have to take his word for it.

The constant refrain from the right is that there is a clear choice between Obama and Romney, something that Ryan says in every other sentence. A complete lack of detail is not how you characterize the word "clear", it would be more like "fuzzy", "indistinct" and "misleading".

Satirical website The Onion has completely owned an Iran news agency.

The Iran news outlet published as true a story from The Onion saying rural white Americans would rather vote for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than Barack Obama.

Just because it's satire doesn't mean it isn't true.

You probably remember the steady stream of various hangings of effigies around the nation since Obama took office, many of them done on or near Christian churches.

It's probably still fresh in your mind, too, all the boos and catcalls the Obamas receive wherever they go, even if it's to do charity work somewhere.

I thought it was an Onion story that Mitt Romney thinks airplanes should have roll down windows in the passenger cabin. Screen doors in the submarine, moon landings were faked and that sort of thing, but it's true. His remarks were prompted by the dancing horse lady's scary experience on a campaign flight last week when the cabin filled with smoke briefly.

Here's Mitt, "When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem. So it’s very dangerous. And she was choking and rubbing her eyes. Fortunately, there was enough oxygen for the pilot and copilot to make a safe landing in Denver. But she’s safe and sound."