The 2008 Texas Monthly Bum Steer Awards

This captures a few items I missed over the year. Here is a small selection.

In the Texas House directory for the Eightieth Legislature, the listing for Representative Richard J. “Rick” Noriega, of Houston, added the letter p to the beginning of his nickname.

Two rongs don’t make a write A caption accompanying a picture of Anna Nicole Smith in the Houston Chronicle noted, “The model could barely right a sentence.”

Kristen Syvette Wimberly sued Lara Madden, a former classmate at Kingwood High School, in Kingwood, after learning that Madden had been performing in pornographic movies under the name Syvette Wimberly.

I Like Me! I Really Like Me! The Press Club of Dallas, which hands out the Katie Awards for outstanding journalism in the Southwest, charged that its former president Elizabeth Albanese never submitted entries for the 2006 competition to an independent panel of judges but rather made up the results, awarding herself four Katies.

The Lorena Independent School District canceled a student trip to Disney World, in Orlando, Florida, when district officials learned the trip was scheduled for the city’s Gay Pride Week.

A chip off the old blockhead Arguing against an expansion of the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program, Representative Robert Talton, of Pasadena, said, “When I was raised, I didn’t have insurance, and my family did just fine.”

He got credit for the sac Allen Michael Beckett, of Oklahoma City, was charged with aggravated assault and battery after he grabbed the crotch of a man wearing a University of Texas shirt, tearing his scrotum.

Georgetown car dealership Mac Haik Ford Lincoln Mercury sent an e-mail advertising air-conditioned seats with the headline “Tired of the Wet Backs????” to several members of the Greater Austin Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.