Hornswaggler | The culture, the humor, a bit of the sports, not so much the politics, and the workplace distraction
Hornswaggle is an alternate spelling of
hornswoggle, an archaic word that means to bamboozle or hoodwink. I take my
pronunciation from the late Harvey Korman in "Blazing Saddles" --
"I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers,
bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits,
vipers, snipers, conmen, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers,
buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswagglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train
robbers, bank robbers, ass kickers, shit kickers and Methodists!"
I don't know what it is about Condaleeza Rice. Now I'm seeing her everywhere. There she was on TV at the U.S. Open today, being interviewed while watching the Marat Safin-Gustavo Kuerten match. And she was just chatting good-naturedly away, seeming very nice and down-to-earth for someone who's had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. Trying to make me feel bad for disliking her. But then she slipped and I saw through her ruse. She said she's a fan of both Safin and Kuerten. That's where she made her mistake! No one is a fan of Marat Safin: He's a charmless sociopath. She was so close to getting away with it, too.
Safin, the two seed, was in full meltdown mode today. This is how out-of-it he was during the last set of his straight-sets loss: He went up for one of those overhead volleys that Pete Sampras made famous -- where he leaps gracefully off his left foot and, with full extension, kabooms it into the opponent's court before landing on both feet, square to the net -- on a Kuerten lob and just plain whiffed on it, just completely missed it. The ball landed a foot inside the the baseline. Point, Kuerten.
