"You must chop down the largest tree in the forest wiiiith... a herring!"

Proposed changes to passport regulations are raising a bit of a stir. Apparently certain applicants will need to provide a personal history far more detailed and rigorous than needed to get a security clearance (or a job in the Oval Office, for that matter.) Like, listing every address you've ever had and every employer and the name of your supervisor there.

Now, I understand that to a GS-whatever, who didn’t have a job until they interned with a congressman while they were at Yale and then were hired straight from there to their current gig at State, and had only the two addresses growing up, plus their college dorm, plus their first apartment in DC and now their condo in Georgetown, this is a no-brainer.

What they don't seem to understand is that there are people out there (myself among them) who couldn't even tell you to the nearest ten how many employers or addresses they've had. I was pretty rootless in my twenties, living la vie bohème, and I can understand if that precludes me from getting, oh, say, the nuclear launch codes, but I'll be damned if I'll let it stop me from going to see Pompeii.

These stricter regulations are apparently only supposed to apply to people who weren't born in hospitals or got a birth certificate issued more than a year after they were born, but you know how the government is: you hand 'em a hammer and you never know when they're going to stop pounding nails and turn around and whack you in the head with it.