Llama on the llam

Published 9:18 pm Sunday, June 2, 2013

Don’t tase me, bro: Police in Tallahassee, Fla., say they had to use a taser to subdue an escaped llama. After lassoing the animal around the neck, it took six deputies to wrestle the 300-pound llama named Scooter into a trailer. The taser, deputies said, was necessary because llamas don’t respond to voice commands.

Actually, they will respond to voice commands, but you have to insert a second “l” into: “Hallt, llama or I will have to llet you feell an ellectric jollt.”

Does that qualify as a business expense? Already under scrutiny, the Internal Revenue Service is criticized in a new report that says that the IRS spent some $50 million on conferences, including lodging, meals and entertainment for IRS employees between 2010 and 2012, including stays in presidential suites that normally cost $1,500 to $3,500 per night.

Unless federal bureaucrats heed voice commands to stop wasting money, members of Congress said they might be forced to break out the tasers.

Don’t know much about history: On this day in 1888, Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” was first published in the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

To mark the poem’s 125th anniversary, the Seattle Mariners in tonight’s game against the Chicago White Sox will reenact the poem’s epic strikeout during each at-bat.