Jeers: to wafer-gate. If you've been following the week-long mini-furor over the saga of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the communion host, you can be forgiven for rolling your eyes at a media that clearly has too much time on its hands. The debate? Over whether Harper ate the communion wafer at Romeo LeBlanc's funeral, or slipped it into his pocket. Everyone agrees now that he ate it, even if, as a non-Catholic, he probably should not have taken Catholic communion in the first place. So, the week has been a tempest over nothing. Has there ever been a better demonstration of the benefits of the separation of church and state?

Jeers: to adelgids. The balsam woolly adelgid, to be precise. Haven't heard that one before, have you? Well, just like the moose, the adelgid is an imported species in this province, but not one that's likely to kill you in a collision. Believe it or not, the critter is one of the reasons why the province was set to burn a section of forest at Mitchell's Pond this past weekend. The little sap-sucker was accidentally introduced from Europe at the beginning of the century, and even though the wingless beast can't get around very well, it can wreak havoc in fir stands. Issuing more hunting licences for the pinhead-sized insects and putting up highway fences are unlikely to decrease the threat.

Cheers: to humour. One Internet commenter had an interesting question after Paul Oram was named the new provincial minister of health Thursday: who's going to be appointed to replace Oram in regularly phoning VOCM's "Open Line" to stridently defend the premier and government policies? We'll just have wait and see. At least one person should be really happy with the change: Ross Wiseman, former hotseat health minister. He's now the minister of business (also known as the provincial minister responsible for junkets). What's that old saying? Out of the frying pan, into the frequent-flier?

Jeers: to being the environmental bad boys. The G8 countries agree to a broader greenhouse gas emissions reduction, except of course, for Russia. Oh, and Canada, too, which has refused to adjust its already lax do-something-somehow-by-2050 standards. "This is a realistic target," federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice said. Now, is that industrial-realistic, or environmental-realistic?

Jeers: to water, water, nowhere. And while we're on the topic of the environment, isn't the latest city water ban a bit of a head-scratcher? Fly over the Avalon, and you'd swear that there's more fresh water than there is ground. Yet, here it is barely mid-July, and the users of Windsor Lake and Bay Bulls Big Pond are being told there's another water shortage. Maybe it's time we had a good hard look at how we all use water, and whether we can't find a way to reduce that usage full-time.