Pork Chop
Some people look forward to daylight savings time. Others await baseball's opening pitch. Loop Fans, of course, look forward to the annual presentation of the "Congressional Pig Book," with its listing of the most egregious pork-barrel projects from this year's appropriations bills.</br></br>The 12th annual rollout on Tuesday, complete with hogs of the four-legged variety and a list of the "Dirty Dozen" -- 12 states that have received the most pork per capita from 1995 to 2002 -- promises to be the best ever. That's because we're hailing record- breaking amounts of pork, 8,341 projects, and a record total of $20.1 billion in chops, ham, roasts and bacon, according to the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste.</br></br>$14 million for the appropriately named Hollings Marine Laboratory in South Carolina -- as in Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D- S.C.).</br></br>The small but wonderful $350,000 for the University of Mississippi National Library of the Accounting Profession.</br></br>$420,000 for Hawthorne Elementary and Junior High School and $249,000 for Schurz Elementary School, both in Nevada, to buy each student a laptop computer.