Sunday Evening Funnies

"Discussted"

I was a big fan of Rich Hall's Sniglets in the '80s. Lately, in both the e-mail I receive and the various blogs and online fora I visit, I regularly find myself laughing out loud at misspelled words with brand new meanings, such as the one in the title of this posting.

How many times have you found yourself in a conversation meeting the description above, after all?

Judging by this article in Texas Monthly, and this article and the reader comments in the Chron, it must happen to everyone within audio range of the Commissioner of the General Land Office of Texas inside of 15 seconds:

Jerry Patterson is a concealed-weapon-carrying, tobacco-dipping, canvas-death-trap-flying maverick whose management of the Christmas Mountains has ticked off everyone from Rick Perry to the Sierra Club. Not that he cares.

"Proving once again that I grew up weird, when I was a kid I enjoyed it when we were driving behind a Houston bus — loved the smell of diesel fumes," Patterson recently confessed in an e-mail to supporters of a program that helps governmental entities switch their fleets to clean-burning natural gas. "That might explain my thought processes as an adult." ...

"Many would describe me as kooky, but I don't really care," he said. "If the voters disagree with what I'm doing, there's the next election, or there's impeachment. I do what I think is right, and I don't concern myself with public opinion."

Jerry Patterson has been both dipshit and embarrassment for too long now. Let's find someone and send him some public opinion he can't ignore in 2010.

Former GOP White House counsel chokes on sheep balls

Maybe it was just one. Surely he wasn't trying to swallow more than one ...

Former senator Paul Laxalt's all male, annual lamb fry dinner at the Georgetown Club tends not to be an especially raucous affair. The 28th dinner the other night, prepared as always in Basque style in honor of Laxalt's heritage, featured the usual delicacy of the night, lamb's testicles, which are said to have unusual medicinal qualities.

And while some of the tuxedoed and slightly aging pols and pals -- including Vice President Cheney, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), former House Republican leader Bob Michel, retired Marine Gen. P.X. Kelley, former GOP chairman and now lobbyist Frank Fahrenkopf, former Veterans Affairs secretary and former ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, and legendary lobbyist Bill Timmons -- don't move as fast as they used to, they can still hop to it in an emergency.

And they did when White House counsel Fred Fielding appeared to be choking -- not on the featured delicacy, we are assured. Ron Kaufman of Dutko Worldwide (and a volunteer for Mitt Romney's campaign) and then Ed Rollins (who played a lead role in Mike Huckabee's bid for the White House) took turns trying the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge it. Rollins brought over a chair to stand on for extra leverage, one guest said.

There's some disagreement about what happened next. One attendee said Rollins popped the obstruction out, another said Fielding eventually swallowed it. Well, either way ...

Oh I see now the article says he wasn't gagging on a lamb's testicle. Perhaps it was his conscience, then...