Ann Richards had balls

Glen Maxey remembers Ann Richards, the former Texas governor who died Wednesday at the age of 73. [Maxey link fixed.]

More tributes from grieving Texas Democrats here. [Link fixed.]

Comments

[aeroman]

Richards' 1988 convention speech should remind people what it was like when the Democratic party wasn't terrified to suggest that it supported feminists.

[mudkitty]

Balls and then some.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

I always liked her. Rest in Peace and good work.

[Dicky Neely]

I had the pleasure of meeting Ann Richards twice and I heard her speak several times.She was down to earth and friendly and did a great job as governor.
I also met G.W. Bush twice. He was very friendly once and a jerk the other time. He traveled with a huge retinue and security team. Richards traveled very unobtrusively. She was very classy and contrary to conventional wisdom; she didn't underestimate G.W. when he ran for governor, she was a victim of the national scale '94 conservative take over engineered by Newt Gingrich.
Without that I don't believe G.W. would have been elected as Texas guv.
RIP Ann.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

>He traveled with a huge retinue and security team.

This will sound sarcastic, but I swear it's the truth: I can't read sentences like this without thinking of him with a crown on his head, ermine on the shoulders, and a scepter and orb in his hands.

[cfrost]

Ann Richards was also coherent enough to tell a good joke, unlike the tongue-tied cockroach that followed her to Austin. Thank you Ann.

[Cass]

She didn't have balls, and courage, of which she displayed plenty, is not a specifically masculine trait. (An arguable exception may be the physical variety, but that's also the cheapest form.) Sorry, but this phrase always eats my lunch...

Its hard even to remember now that we Texans had a progressive governor like this elected within my lifetime... though much of that, of course, had to do with Clayton William's buffoonery. Maybe our children's children will live to see another.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Ovaries are balls, too. Just because our balls aren't dangling out of our abdomens doesn't mean we haven't got them!

[Alon Levy]

Are they even homologous to testes?

[Mandos]

Wikipedia claims that they are homologous:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovaries

But the BIG question is...what do reproductive organs in general have to do with courage?

[Cass]

The sixteenth-century German physician Philaxius famously identified the small intestine as the seat of all courage and fortitude. While his two-leeches-after-dinner cure for shyness has been widely discredited, his general theory has arguably never been improved upon.

[cfrost]

“Just because our balls aren't dangling out of our abdomens . . .”

This really has to be proof that either God does not exist or that God is female with a cruel sense of humor. Doesn’t have to be that way. Elephants, hyraxes, marine mammals, a few insectivores, and other mammals keep their nuts inside where they’re safer and less unaesthetic. Kangaroos have their balls external, but in front of the penis. Female spotted hyenas have a fake pair along with a clitoris shaped into a fake penis. The females are also big and are the ones who wear the pants in the family, to use another annoying phrase, so they really do have “balls”. More proof that testicles are just some sort of cosmic joke.

Pharyngula has a nice post on mammalian testicles up and down at:
http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/descent_of_the_testicle/

Human males sometimes have the abdominal wall push out –herniate- into the gaps through which the testicles descend. I’ve had a partial hernia all my life which has never bothered me except when the doctor does the “turn your head and cough” thing, it sometimes turns into rather more probing and pushing around than I want.

And going from the ridiculous to the truly stupid with this topic, I point out the existence of something called “neuticles”. They’re for your post-castrated dog. Don’t ask.

Lastly, there’s “bumpernuts” which is just begging for God’s wrath. www.bumpernuts.com/

Not to be disrespectful of Ann Richards’ memory, but then, as I commented above, she had a sense of humor, and compared to the draft-dodger, chicken-hawk that succeeded her as governor, she did have balls, real balls.

[Dabodius]

I like to praise with "ovaries." In Mexico, btw, men are said to have huevos, "eggs."

I liked Molly Ivins's story: "Instead of pointing out to a kid who was pouring charcoal lighter on a live fire that he was idiot, Ann said, 'Honey, if you keep doing that, the fire is going to climb right back up to that can in your hand and explode and give you horrible injuries, and it will just ruin my entire weekend.'"

That's the short of what someone should have said to our president before he done gone and ruined it.