Grass-Roots Survey: From the 1st Amendment to the Soil Amendment

Lawn and Order Platform: We can tell by that glazed look in your eyes that the presidential primary season has officially arrived.

According to the latest unreliable polls, 67% of Americans now agree with the statement, “There must be a better way to choose the candidates, such as holding the debates in a specially designed TV studio that gradually replaces the oxygen supply with helium so the candidates start talking like Munchkins.”

Another option is https://www.grasspoll.com, which allows voters to judge the candidates based on photos of their lawns.

“You can tell a lot about a man’s character by the kind of lawn he keeps,” said a spokeswoman for Briggs & Stratton, which is sponsoring the Web site.

This seems like a reasonable idea, but, unfortunately, the would-be presidents are already using it as fodder for more negative advertising.

For instance, Al Gore’s latest TV ad claims that Bill Bradley’s lawn-care program wastes billions of dollars. Bradley has retaliated with spots saying Gore’s lawn is covered with manure and that the vice president has flip-flopped on the issue of a person’s right to choose lawn ornaments, as outlined in Roe vs. the Pink Flamingos.

On the Republican side, Steve Forbes has lashed out at George W. Bush’s weed-cutting pledge (“Read my lips: No new weeds”), saying it doesn’t go far enough. And Alan Keyes has charged that Sen. John McCain’s long years as a Vietnam POW deprived him of valuable lawn-mowing experience.

Loser of the Week: We almost bestowed this week’s loser award on the wrong party. When we first heard that Polar Lights Co., a manufacturer of plastic model kits, had suddenly changed the name of its “Hunchback of Notre Dame” kit to “The Bellringer of Notre Dame,” we assumed it had bowed to pressure from some hunchback-rights group.

In reality, according to imdb.com, Polar Lights caved to the Walt Disney Co., which had threatened to sue for trademark infringement on the name of its 1996 movie “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” despite the fact that Polar’s Quasimodo is a reissue of a kit created several decades before Disney’s animated film.

Therefore, this week’s loser trophy (designed to look like a bent Oscar statuette) goes to Disney, which is probably also readying a lawsuit against the descendants of Victor Hugo, who clearly violated Disney’s trademark when he wrote the original “Hunchback” novel in 1831.

In another legal twist, Disney’s new “Fantasia 2000” movie features Donald Duck helping Noah load the ark, which means Disney can also sue God for infringing on the company’s trademark on the Bible.

Quotes Inc.: From Mary Stolzenbach, commenting on news reports about Pentecostal Christians who claim God has miraculously turned their silver tooth fillings to gold: “Seems to me that if God fixed my teeth, he would do it by replacing the fillings and crowns with solid, healthy enamel, same as he gave me at birth.”

Best Supermarket Tabloid Headline: “Does Too Much Sex Cause Memory Loss?” (Weekly World News)

Or did we already print this one?

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Unpaid Informants: Alex Wainer, https://us.imdb.com, Terry Mattingly, Ann Harrison. E-mail Off-Kilter at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com. Off-Kilter runs Mondays, Wednesdays and another day whose name we can’t mention because it would infringe on trademarks from the 1977 Disney film “Freaky Friday.”