When in doubt, grin idiotically. That’s the mantra in American politics, and that’s why we were completely unsurprised when Texas governor Rick Perry’s mugshot showed him smiling like he’d just learned a dirty secret. For the most part, we think that if a person under arrest were guilty he’d be distressed he got caught, thus not smiling, and if he were innocent he’d be even more distressed to have been railroaded, thus doubly not smiling. But Perry certainly wasn’t the first politician to pull the I’m-smiling-because-I’ve-got-nothing-to-worry-about routine, which is why his photo inspired us to locate more examples. Below we have a small rogues gallery of cheerful mugshots. Charges cover a range—campaign finance violations, criminal trespass, drunk driving, drug charges, and nobody here has served prison time. Hmm, do you think they knew all along they never would? Maybe that’s the dirty secret. 

The British National Archives today released a stack of Ministry of Defence documents detailing more than 800 UFO sightings in Britain between 1993 and 1996, including one incident in which floating lights were seen by 70 police and military witnesses. We said it before: technologically advanced aliens would be undetectable. If any have visited our planet, we wouldn’t know about it. Our primitive human-made satellites can read license plates from space, so we tend to think aliens would have devices so sensitive they wouldn't need to come anywhere near Earth to observe us. Moreover, even if they physically visited the planet for purposes of, say, abducting and anally probing us real hard, we wouldn’t necessarily recognize an alien craft as such. But one thing we do have a clue about is the aliens’ intent. If they exist, they’re hostile. We know because if they were benevolent they’d abduct Rush Limbaugh. Doubtless his sheer bulk poses technological challenges in terms of levitating him to the mothership, but we’d be willing to push from this end if it helped.