Wa-aay behind in the polls, the Republican who's trying to unseat Democrat Sen. Barbara Mikulski has resorted to a most unusual Hail Mary pass.

Dr. Eric Wargotz has posted a video of his three kids — Jacob, 13; Samuel, 11; and Leila, 9 — singing a campaign rap song. (See it on YouTube under "Wargotz-Mikulski Rap.")

Here's a snippet:

"Yo, what's up now, my brothers and sisters / Let me tell you 'bout a very smart mister / His name is Eric Wargotz and he's running for Senate / U.S., that is. And he's in it to win it."

Maybe this is part of that hip-hop makeover RNC chief and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele vowed to bring the GOP.

It is certainly, as Steele promised, "off the hook."

Wargotz told me his kids thought up the song themselves.

"They wanted to do something to help, and like most kids these days, they like rap, they like hip-hop," he said. "I was flattered. They surprised me with it."

Goodbye, Cousin Dupree

DJ Mark Bishop will play Steely Dan's "Cousin Dupree" next Wednesday night at Castaways, as he has pretty much every Wednesday since 1995, when Circuit Judge John Prevas got hooked on karaoke at a law clerk's going-away party.

And then, nevermore.

"We're going to get up one last time at Castaways and sing 'Cousin Dupree,'" Bishop told me. "We are going to officially retire the song. That song will never be played again in Castaways karaoke, or in my show, period, no matter where I go. Just like baseball when you retire a number. We're going to retire that number."

Bishop is planning a memorial for Prevas, who died Monday of a heart attack at the age of 63. It will take place at 9 p.m. Wednesday at the Canton bar where the judge was known for singing and to his favorites. (The performances live on, on YouTube, under "Castaways karaoke.")

With a sober day job and a form of arthritis that prevented him from turning his head, Prevas was an unlikely karaoke devotee. And his theme song, about a guy making an incestuous play for his cousin, was an unlikely theme song for a judge.

But Anton J.S. Keating, the former Baltimore state's attorney candidate who sometimes joined Prevas at the mike, intends to send flowers and sign the card "Cousin Dupree."

Do we really want this?

Credit Bob Ehrlich for one of the best zingers of the nearly (finally!) done governor's race, uttered in a debate after Martin O'Malley referred to illegal immigrants for the umpteenth time as "new Americans."

"If somebody breaks into my house," Ehrlich said, "is that a new member of my family that night?"

I laughed out loud when Ehrlich took on O'Malley's ridiculous euphemism, but winced moments later when Ehrlich referred to "illegals." I winced again Wednesday, when an Ehrlich campaign flier about illegal immigrants came my way.

"O'Malley used taxpayer dollars to help build an illegal alien job center just blocks from this elementary school," reads the flier, which shows the offices of Casa de Maryland and New Hampshire Estates Elementary School in Rockville. "Do we really want Illegal Aliens by our schools? Martin O'Malley: Wrong for Maryland. Too Risky for Our Kids."

No doubt the nation's immigration policies are messed up, but I have two questions for the Ehrlich campaign, which didn't return my calls Wednesday before deadline. When did illegal immigrants become presumed pedophiles, drug dealers or kidnappers? And when did "illegal" become a noun?

But we used to be #10

Baltimore came in 20th in The Daily Beast's list of the nation's smartest cities. In the same survey last year, Baltimore ranked 10th.

It's hard to imagine our collective IQ, based on things like graduate degrees and book sales, could really drop that much in a year. Maybe the Beast figured in some new evidence of civic stupidity, like that plan to hack down beautiful trees in Mount Vernon.

Let's hope Baltimore can manage to move up in another ranking, the Men's Health magazine survey that recently found the city has the nation's fourth-worst teeth.

How is that possible in a city with an entire museum devoted to dentistry? No one at the National Museum of Dentistry was willing to hazard a guess, so I bounced that off Men's Health deputy editor Matt Marion.

Marion wasn't familiar with the museum, but he had a suggestion: "Maybe more people should visit it."

Guess Bumbler didn't make it

The University of Baltimore is polling students, faculty, staff and alumni to determine a name for its new bee mascot. The three names in the running are Buzzby, Eubie and Sting. Voting takes place over the Internet through Oct. 29. The new name will be unveiled Nov. 4. Among the other names that were nominated, but did not make the top three: Lord Baltimore, Hon and Francis Scott Bee.