September 28, 1999 -

SERENDIPITOUS SAP:

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The Tree lives; W. is a Brand kind of guy; there's the organ program.

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Those stories, and more. Now, the details...

WASHINGTON -- Democratic party faithful buoyed the handlers of Algore's flagging presidential campaign with a rousing reception to an unusually animated speech by the First Tree. "This is the new Algore. Not shedding any leaves or losing any twigs, lumbering from one side of the stage like Oprah or Elizabeth Dole," said Oake Wilte, Algore's manager of pruning. The Algore campaign is looking for a Hemingway-styled writer to do a book on the new Algore. "We plan to unveil it when Algore addresses the National Association of Tree Surgeons," Wilte said. The working title: "The Sap Also Rises."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Washington insiders are highly incensed at the evil George W. Bush, who has stubbornly avoided giving big jobs to the people who helped his old daddy avoid a second term. Moguls from the George Herbert Walker Bush administration question W's loyalty. "We are the people who helped President Bush recover from a 90 percent approval rating to a point where he put up a steady, but pitiful, race against an Arkansas sex criminal and sociopath," said Leaguer Bush, a former presidential aide. Leaguer said W. is courting disaster by keeping the intelligent and capable team that helped him become a landslide winner for governor. "Read My Lips: This Ain't Texas," Leaguer said, adding that he likes the sound of that but can't remember why.

In more important news, the Washington Post and the Doonesbury comic strip revealed that George W. once took part in rituals where Yalies were branded on the backside with a heated coat hanger. Moving quickly to secure the Brand Identification vote, President Clinton announced his substantial backside will be branded with "I Did Not Have Sexual Relations With That Woman, Miss Lewinsky, and Those Puerto Ricans Aren't Terrorists, Either, And I Love My Wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Candidate for the United States Senate From the Empire State of New York" on each cheek. Hillary campaignistas said the branding will bring good exposure to their candidate. "Mr. Clinton still shows his ass quite regularly," said one Hillary aide.

WASHINGTON -- Reading his script carefully, Second Organ Algore announced a series of initiatives aimed at increasing organ donation. The Clinton administration organ project includes a $13 million "education" grant and President Clinton also signed the Organ Donor Leave Act, which increases to 30 days the paid leave federal employees can claim for serving as organ donors. Immediately after signing the act, Clinton announced he would take a month off to work on critical organ donorship issues involving the White House intern pool. The Clinton vacation took Algore by surprise. "I didn't realize these young people are so sickly," he said.

PHOENIX, Arizona -- There's another victim of the public schools. The latest is Dan Quayle, who dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Quayle "corrected" a student in a spelling bee and followed his school-supplied "script" out the window -- saying the student had misspelled "potato." Since then, Quayle has been the butt of thousands of jokes. Worse, he has been unable to raise money for his presidential race. "If spuds were the currency of politics, poor Dan would be starving in a potatoe fammin," a campaign news release said.

NEW YORK -- Brian Trochelmann pleaded guilty to moon-rock fraud in a Manhattan federal court. Trochelmann and his brother apparently tried to peddle a moon rock they said their father received from former National Hero John Glenn. Glenn reacted angrily to the scam. "I was a key part of the stonewall around President Clinton's Red Chinese fund-raising follies," Glenn said, adding: "If I had anything as solid as a moon rock I would have used it in the hearings." Trochelmann's brother is expected to come to trial on the fraud charges later. He will contend that he never represented the rock as lunar. "I still believe it represents art - - a natural sculpture of Algore, maybe, or John Glenn, thinking," he said.

LOS ANGELES -- It's difficult to pick a hero in this one. Federal Judge Terry Hatter gave the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area Transit Authority 30 days to come up with 248 more buses to improve service. The benighted MTA intended to take a $183 billion free ride, mostly on federal money, to build a public transit system. But the federal gummint began cutting back on bucks for the busing bonanza. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Bus People filed a lawsuit and Judge Hatter agreed that MTA had failed to live up to its promises. Potential Presidential Candidate Warren Beatty is considering offering his limousine fleet to the MTA -- provided that riders don't smoke cigarettes and promise not to spill any domestic wines.

NEW YORK -- A West African victim filed a $5 million lawsuit because doctors surgically removed heroin-filled balloons from his insides after he was arrested at Kennedy Airport for smuggling drugs. William Meequaye Kanyi, 40, of Ghana, contends the surgery was an illegal search and seizure. Kanyi's mouthpiece pledged to overturn the drug conviction that has Kanyi serving hard time. "The government never proved that these balloons weren't intended for the Macy's parade," she said, adding: "And there is no record that the surgeons ever read a Miranda warning to Mr. Kanyi's small intestine."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Oh, the things a body wouldn't know about Texas crime if a body didn't read the New Dork Times. Columnist Frank Rich produced the ritual Times column about gun control, then reached for something approaching an intelligent statement. Rich noted that the Fort Worth church shootings came on the same day the University of Texas reopened its tower -- closed after Charles Whitman murdered people in the 1960s with a wide span of deadly fire. Rich writes that no one has a clue as to what turned a nice engineering student into a mass murderer. Well, we have a flash for Mr. Rich. The autopsy on Whitman revealed a tumor on his brain. The tumor was about the size of a pecan -- only slightly larger than Mr. Rich's brain.

RALEIGH, North Carolina -- Harvey Lee Green Jr. became the first African American retroactively aborted since North Carolina reinstituted the death penalty in 1977. Mr. Green was the thirteenth person since reduced to ambient temperature by North Carolina. He pleaded guilty to beating two people to death while he was robbing a dry cleaning operation in 1983. His mother, a minister, said he should have been spared because he had become the spiritual leader of men on death row.

QUESTION FOR THE DAY: Am I the only one who watched most of the highlights of Saturday Night Live's 25 years, and found much of it only slightly funnier than the O.J. Simpson case?

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