Yang reported that she was "still reeling" over some unspecified information Sampson had shared with her about Samoa and Tonga. We have no clue what it was, but Sampson, a Mormon bishop, responded with: "I'm sending some missionaries to your house."
"Could you make them single, good looking and articulate? Oh yeah, and skiiers [sic] too and willing to retire to Utah (too much to ask??)," Yang responded.
"Yes. What's your home address?" Sampson wrote back.
"Good luck getting past the guards," Yang replied.
Hatch's wine locker
When Sen. Orrin Hatch sits down to dinner at the Morton's steakhouse just outside Washington, you might see him flag over the server for a little help: "Waiter, bring me a bottle of my finest sparkling apple juice from my private reserve."
The Utah Republican and Mormon has a wine locker at the restaurant, according to The Washington Post, which said the steakhouse gave a few lockers to VIP patrons. Hatch, the paper says, does have bottles in the locker, but of Martinelli's nonalcoholic sparkling cider.
Error a favor
The Salt Lake Tribune recently printed an erroneous front-page tease to a story about how Utah Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson voted on a bill that set a 2008 date for withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. It said: "Matheson joins his GOP colleagues in House, votes against bill."
The conservative Matheson shrugged off the mistake, making clear he wasn't particularly interested in a correction. He stopped short of asking permission to use it in his next re-election campaign in his Republican-leaning district.
What's he hiding?
Orrin Hatch, one of a dozen senators outed as being from outer space by the tabloid Weekly World News in 1994, has refused to back hearings that could blow the lid off the government's alien conspiracy.
It goes back three years, when Hatch denied a request from a constituent to hold a hearing on the alien presence.
It received a passing reference in a story Saturday about convicted-then-exonerated-then-pardoned Arizona Gov. Fife Symington III, who has made a splash lately for his claims of having witnessed a UFO.
"As you, I find the possibility of intelligent life on other planets intriguing; however, there is not sufficient evidence to determine whether such life exists," Hatch wrote to Ephraim resident Sterling Allen in 2004.
"Because we have no information about the nature, culture, and technology of extraterrestrials, we have no information on what activities on Earth might attract their attention.
"I have reviewed the information you recommended to me, and I can assure you that your concerns are unnecessary. The federal government does not have any information about extraterrestrial life to conceal, and there are no secret projects for me to investigate."
The Tribune didn't report it at the time because we missed it, or maybe we were just part of the cover-up. The truth is out there.
Parting shots
Just because there's no partisan opposition to a bill doesn't mean one can't take a little partisan jab.
The House recently was giving a quick sign-off on a number of noncontroversial bills, including H.R. 759, "To Redesignate the Ellis Island Library on the Third Floor of the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Located on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, as the 'Bob Hope Memorial Library.' ''
Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, noted a Hope zinger from the 1940 movie "The Ghost Breakers," where Hope's character finds himself with a woman who has inherited her family's haunted ancestral home.
Encountered by a zombie, Hope's straight man says: "It's worse than horrible, because a zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring."
Hope responded: "Oh, you mean like Democrats?"
That said, Bishop praised his colleagues for recognizing the "wit and wisdom" of the late comic star.
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* BURR AND GEHRKE staff The Salt Lake Tribune's Washington bureau. They can be reached at tburr@sltrib.com
or gehrke@sltrib.com.
