What Kind of Year Was 2003?
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An Oklahoma man who was driving while intoxicated used his cell phone to dial 911 and ask that Oak Ridge police officers stop chasing him.
LOOK AT THE BRIGHT SIDE: IT SAVED THEM FROM THE PINE BARK BEETLE
Houston logger George Crow, hired by a private landowner to fell some one hundred acres of trees infested by the pine bark beetle, got lost in adjacent Brock Park and accidentally clear-cut one thousand of the city’s loblolly pines.
GOOD THING IT WASN’T THE WAGON
When President George W. Bush first attempted to ride his new Segway scooter at his family’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, last June, he fell off.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE NEXT GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
Hollywood producers discovered that Dallas attorney Rob Campos had been dismissed from the Marine Corps’ Judge Advocate General training program for drunkenly groping a female officer’s breasts but had failed to reveal that information before they picked him to star in the NBC reality show For Love or Money.
HAVE THEY NO SENSE OF DOCENCY?
The Austin Public Library dismissed two elderly volunteers because they had tried to take home damaged materials that were destined to be thrown away.
HOW ABOUT “RUBIN CARTER”?
U.S. representative Sheila Jackson Lee, of Houston, complained that not enough of the names given to hurricanes sounded black.
BRAS AND PANTIES, 1/2 OFF
The Abercrombie and Fitch corporation and two former employees of its Midland store were sued by a twenty-year-old woman who accused the men of cutting a hole in the ceiling of a dressing room to take photos of female customers trying on clothes.
NO WONDER THE KIDS WERE FAILING MATH
The Houston Independent School District, which received extensive favorable publicity for its reported 1.5 percent dropout rate, learned that, according to outside auditors, fifteen secondary schools were understating dropout rates by 55 percent.
IT’S ABOUT TIME
In the upcoming film Cheer Up, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Rick Perry plays the Texas governor.
TOO LATE
After a reporter called to ask Rick Perry about his yoga class—which he had quit after only three lessons—he became irritated because he was still worried about what the folks back home in Haskell would think.
THE MONEYLENDERS OUT OF THE TEMPLE
To promote the virtues of fuel- e(infinity)cient cars, the Reverend Jim Ball and his wife, Kara, drove a Toyota Prius from Austin to Washington, D.C., in an environmental campaign titled “What Would Jesus Drive?”
THEN THEY CHARGED HIM WITH BREAKING AND ENTERING
Law officers arrested Kris Leija, of Abilene, on an outstanding warrant for failure to meet with his probation officer after a sheriff’s deputy recognized him when he appeared live on ABC’s Good Morning America to discuss his heroic rescue of four children from a burning apartment complex.
HE THOUGHT SHE WAS FROM OUTSIDE EDITION
During a visit to KTVT, a CBS affiliate in Dallas, Deborah Norville, of Inside Edition, became angry when she arrived late for a taping and found the door to the studio locked. The security guard did not open the door promptly enough to suit Norville, who created a ruckus that led to his getting fired.
THE COURT APPLIED THE DOCTRINE OF EX POSTERIOR
In its May issue, Texas Lawyer ran a story about a decision by the Court of Criminal Appeals that affirmed the legality of a Houston cop’s visual search between a drug suspect’s buttocks, which revealed crack cocaine. The magazine titled the story “Texas Court Upholds Butt Search for Crack.”
BEST SELLERS ARE EXPECTED TO BE THE PEANUTS NOIR AND THE CHAWDONNAY
Dallas-based 7-Eleven Inc. announced that it would develop and market its own brand of wine.
CHILI CARNE CON
Don Eastep, of Springfield, Illinois, illegally entered the original Terlingua chili cookoff by posing as his brother, who was properly registered but couldn’t attend, and then passed off as his own creation a batch of chili he made by gathering samples from other cooks in the competition and mixing them together in one pot.
SUSPICIONS CONFIRMED
Before they discovered his fraud, the veteran judges awarded Eastep first prize.
MORE TO BLAME? THERE’S MISTER LAY/WHO I’M GONNA TELL, “MAKE MY DAY”
NRun, a Houston hip-hop performer who, under his real name of David Tunsall, was a former employee of the toppled energy giant Enron, recorded a hip-hop CD called Corporate America in which he slams the company and its disgraced bigwigs, such as Jeffrey Skilling, in many of his lyrics: “America, NRun has a story to tell/How the judiciary system slowed down like a snail/Gave those corporate crooks time to plan their escape/So when I see you, Jeffrey, I won’t hesitate …”
HENRY NEEDS IT WORSE
After former U.S. Housing Secretary and former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros criticized two sculptures of fiberglass cows clad in Mexican-style clothing, the City of San Antonio moved the artwork from its original location near the airport to a warehouse because, a spokesman claimed, the sculptures needed refurbishing.
WHERE’S AL QAEDA WHEN YOU REALLY NEED THEM?
Midland’s David Foster, a cousin of General Tommy Franks’s, designed and marketed a comic pro-war T-shirt called Texas Yeehad.
WE HAVE ANSWERED THEIR DEMANDS WITH A SHOT OF RAID
Thousands of termites besieged the Alamo and ate part of the mission’s cedar and cypress window frames.
TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE
After being pulled over for speeding, Margaret Kidd Duncan, a member of the Seabrook City Council, cursed at the police officer who stopped her, referred to the dispatcher as a “hillbilly,” and called the mayor and other members of the council “white trash.”
THE ON-THE-AIR POLLUTION GETS WORSE EVERY YEAR
The morning-show host at KLOL-101, a Houston radio station owned by San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications, encouraged drivers who were calling in with complaints about cyclists to honk, throw bottles, hit them with open car doors, and cut in front of them and then slam on the brakes.
SALARY REQUIREMENT: TENS AND TWENTIES ONLY
Frederick McDowell was arrested for robbing a Fort Worth bank because the note he handed the teller had been written on the back of his résumé.
NO WAY, SAN JOSE
In the March-April issue of the Medallion, its official magazine, the Texas Historical Commission mislabeled photographs of four of San Antonio’s five Spanish missions, identifying only the Alamo and its interior correctly.
SHE COULDN’T BEAT THE RAP, BUT, OH, WHAT A RIDE!
In January Kathy Grubbs, of Hallsville, pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated but had her felony-obscenity charges dropped after she agreed to give up the seventeen sex toys police had found in her car.
AND THIS IS WHY THE TRICKLE-DOWN THEORY DOESN’T WORK
The City of Austin announced, then canceled, plans to sell its tap water for $6 a case, which represented a net loss of $2.90.
BUT THINK OF ALL HE’LL SAVE ON VIAGRA
Two Wichita Falls doctors and their medical group paid a large out-of-court settlement to a 67-year-old man after they mistakenly amputated his penis.
THOSE WHO CAN’T, TEACH
A group of high school teachers in Calallen performed a skit at a pep rally in which they portrayed female students from the rival towns of Robstown and Alice as, respectively, a pregnant, barefoot homecoming queen and a gang member with hickeys on her neck.
HOW MUCH FOR “YANKEES SUCK”?
In September the State of Texas began selling, for a $30 annual fee, “Native Texan” license plates, which anyone can buy.
THE TERROR ALERT IS UP FROM ORANGE (ROUGHY) TO RED (SNAPPER)
For more than a year five Austin police officers who were supposed to be patrolling Decker Creek Power Plant as an anti-terrorism measure were in fact fishing on a nearby lake.
LA CUCARACHA
Becky Whetstone, the ex-wife of Democratic congressman Charlie Gonzalez, of San Antonio, started a Web site called congressmanswife.com to air her marital story of being “squashed like a bug.”
COMICS: $100.00
DAIRY QUEEN: $500.00
BONFIRE AX: $14.00
BEER: $1,000.00
TEXTBOOKS: $1.50
Nick Howard, of Dallas, started a Web site called SendNick2College.com to garner contributions for his educational expenses at Texas A&M.
MAYBE THE PROBLEM IS THAT HE BREEDS CONTEMPT
An out-of-work Fort Worth resident, Frank Familiari, launched getfrankajob.com.
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