There are these things called the Katie Awards. They are awarded annually by this thing called the Press Club of Dallas for supposed journalistic and other media excellence in a six-state region, though it appears only Texans and the occasional Oklahoman and Arkansawyer ever enter. The Dem-Gaz, when I was there, was always having cake and calling a staff assembly to brag on their victories. It always seems to mean something special in Arkansas to compete with Texans. A few years ago I availed myself of the fact that our Fort Smith paper, the Times-Record, regularly entered the competition, at an entry price, for medium-market papers and nominated the splendid cartoonist of ours next door to me, Vic Harville, who won rather routinely. Long story short: I've been a finalist four years running and a winner two years running in the second-biggest-newspaper category, in general column for '05 and in humor/satire for '06. You get this thing looking like a poor man's Oscar, a bronze statue about a foot tall called the Katie. So now the Texas media world is abuzz with the fact that it appears the Press Club was headed last year by a mentally ill woman with a criminal history who seems to have taken the couple thousand entries home and picked winners herself, bestowing on herself a record four for her work as regional correspondent for the New York-based Bond Buyer. It seems other journalists beheld her four and the work on which they were based and said, "What the hell?" She was asked to name the judges to whom she shipped the entries boxed by the Press Club staff, and all she came up with were strange names and a phone number for St. Jude's Hospital in Memphis. I cannot imagine why she wouldn't merely give herself one or two Katies. Why four? Well, perhaps that's the illness. Anyway, that I won and Wally Hall did, too, should have been a dead giveaway. That must have been the illness again, picking us, I mean. Her cry for help, perhaps. Can Texas do nothing right? First, George W., and now this. I've got these two large, tacky bookends if anyone wants them. You can probably remove the little plate on the base with my name. I'd send them back, but why should I go to the trouble? By the way, great story Sunday in Dallas Morning News about this mentally ill woman, who now has moved to corporate PR somewhere. Ought to win a Katie.