Throw in some seasoned stewing, and the odds for anything tasty are longer than a Ming Dynasty miniseries.

Except, of course, if the baking, flaking and stewing are part of the Half-Baked, Flaky and Stewed Stakes, a periodic assessment of our looniest behavior, a counting of coconuts and other craziness loosed on the general population.

The Baker Stakes, more commonly known as the Bakers, honor those ideas and individuals who, when you add it all up, don't add up.

The Bakers owe a debt of gratitude not only to the goofs who heat its ovens but also to role models like Esquire Magazine's Dubious Achievement Awards, a yearly accounting of wing-nuttiness, or Newsweek's Dignity Index, a weekly mathematical rating of bad behavior among public figures.

The Bakers are interactive, too. Our crack staff will take your nominations and give you credit in print if your example of inexplicability appears in a Baker column.

(Note: While considerable latitude will be given, any nominations of this column for a Half-Baked, Flaky and Stewed Stakes award will be automatically rejected. We have feelings here at the Bakers, too.)

Let's go to our latest winners.

A What Troop Movement? Baker goes to Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, who outed Prince Harry while the royal was in Afghanistan with his British military unit trading bullets and mortars with the Taliban. Drudge broke a British Defence Ministry embargo (in concert with some of the nation's media) on the prince's whereabouts.

Harry was whisked home when the story broke, as British military leaders were concerned that the Taliban would consider Harry a high-value target, further endangering him and his unit in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods.

A Baker Assist Award goes to an Australian magazine called New Idea, which apparently ran with the story first but does not have the global reach of Drudge. New Idea said it had no knowledge of the embargo.

How much knowledge does it take not to reveal troop movements for a scoop on a story of very little real value to the information-consuming public? Journalists may argue that keeping Harry's location a secret for several months was inappropriate for the UK media in on the embargo, but on balance I don't see the merits here.

New media have made a new set of rules to fit a new set of technological circumstances. But sometimes playing by the old rules and ethics is the perfect fit.

Congratulations to Nisreen Swedberg and Sarah Williams, for being named Fabulous Beautiful Baker Girls.

Their accomplishment? Southwest Airlines had Los Angeles police officers escort the 18-year-olds off a Valentine's Day flight from Tampa to L.A.

Southwest said the girls were unruly and aggressive, not a good combination at 30,000 feet.

The girls said they were rousted for being too pretty. "I think they were just discriminating against us because we were young, decent-looking girls. I mean, nobody else on the plane looked like us except us," Williams said. "(The flight attendants) were like older ladies. We were younger. Who knows, they could have been just jealous of us because we were younger."

The logic was well fabulous, beautiful.

A prestigious Green Baker goes to Beijing, China, where the Summer Olympics will begin on Aug. 8. On Monday, the world record holder in the marathon, Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie, an asthmatic, said he would not run in the race because he fears Beijing's pollution would damage his health. He will run the 10,000 meters, about a fourth the distance of a marathon.

Finally, we're handing out a Baker in Waiting to New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer, who told his aides Monday afternoon that he was involved with a prostitution ring. If you remember, then Attorney General Spitzer was named by Time magazine as its Crusader of the Year for cleaning up corruption on Wall Street and in New York state government.

Spitzer said he was going to spend time with his family as opponents started calling for his resignation, which, if it happens, would make him eligible for another award: the well-known Been There, Done That, Got Caught Baker.