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The Baden Food Pantry at St. Paul's Episcopal Church Hall in Brandywine. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)Well, this isn’t good news:

The number of Maryland families who need government help to make ends meet has reached record levels.

More than 700,000 people receive food assistance, the most in state history. A record 70,000 people depend on emergency cash assistance. And the demand for the state’s child care subsidy program has caused officials to impose an indefinite freeze on new applicants.

Yet state and federal officials are budgeting less money for the safety net in the coming fiscal year. The move reflects the government’s confidence in the economic recovery, based in part on the fact that demand has plateaued for most state-administered assistance programs.

Others question whether it is overly optimistic to cut back at a time when state assistance programs are still swollen with unprecedented numbers.

Those scary figures came via a report from the Capital News Service and were published this morning on MarylandReporter.com. CNS sifted through piles of data to paint a gloomy picture for many Marylanders, even though the state’s unemployment rate remains relatively low at 6.6 percent.

Agencies and organizations providing aid to those in emergency situations are seeing off-the-charts need.

Not too much wrong with this Maryland license plate — unless you're a Nationals fan.

According to some funny and etymological reporting by the Baltimore Sun, the following are words you will never see on a Maryland license plate, as specified by the state’s Objectionable Plate List:

HEROIN

TOILET

FBI

CIA

KILLALL

SAFESEX

PIMP

CHUMP

BUNS

The paper notes that it could not print a list of all the banned words for a reason that seems rather obvious: Many of the words are really, really bad.

How does a word get banned from the plates? Explainer: “State law allows the MVA to deny tags that have a scatological or sexual meaning; use curse words, epithets or obscenities; carry a ‘fraudulent or deceptive purpose’ (FBI and CIA are banned); refer to illegal acts (sorry, no HEROIN or KILLALL) or convey messages about a group’s race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disability,” the paper says.

Vanity plate censorship is apparently not a precise art. The Sun notes that the following words are allowed, and several, as you will see, have relationships to the banned words that may or may not be noted by Oxford English Dictionary:

THEPUKE

FATPIMP

FATAL

BUTTS

SUX2BU

PHATAZZ

BAD AZZ

WTF

What would your vanity plate read in a perfect world? Leave them in the comments or tweet them to me at @PostRosenwaldMD. Mine would say TUMS.

Jeremy Weyl, one of the speakers at the Occupy G-8 People's Summit, addresses a few dozen people in the audience. (Michael Rosenwald - The Washington Post)

What I’ve seen so far of the protests surrounding the G-8 Summit at Camp David:

About three dozen people and one dog occupied a community room at the Frederick County Public Library early Friday morning for a daylong series of talks entitled the “People’s Summit.” Nearly a dozen reporters and photographers joined them, either staying or quickly leaving.

“People all over the planet are waking up and joining a global movement,” Margot Flowers, one of the organizers of the summit and the co-leader of the group It’s Our Economy, told the group. The world, she said, was waking up to the notion that “human needs are more important than corporate greed.”

I got to Frederick early this morning to park myself in town before the alleged G-8 protests begin. Picked up a copy of the Frederick News-Post: “County gears up for G-8 deluge,” a front page headline blared. Another: “Tension in the air as summit convenes.”

(Lisa Bolton)

Could be an interesting day. I didn’t pack my gas mask.

But buried down in the bottom righthand corner of the front page I found news of another protest, this one not exactly connected to the ire aimed at 1 percenters: “Brunswick seniors to stage Prom 2.0,” the headline said.

Kathryn Manion accepts the Sophie Kerr Prize. (Kelly Neal-Washington College)Let’s take a deep breath.

Let’s pause from the hullabaloo over social networking, the big Facebook IPO tomorrow, the big news (in some circles) that Aaron Sorkin (he of “The Social Network” fame) will write the definitive movie about Steve Jobs. Let’s pause from obsessive checking of our Facebook pages. Let’s pause from posting pictures. Let’s pause from tweeting. Let’s look up from our smartphones.

Let us celebrate something innocent and classic: a young writer coming into her own.

Her name is Kathryn Manion. She grew up in Clarksville, in Howard County. She is a senior at Washington College, and when she steps on stage this weekend to graduate she will also be handed a check for $58,274. Kathryn is this year’s winner of the Sophie Kerr Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the country, endowed with $500,000 by the prize’s namesake when she died in 1965.

Earlier this week in New York City, when Kathryn stepped on stage to accept the prize, the writer was almost lost for words. Watch for a minute to see what I mean:

How sweet is this young woman? How poised?