In The Bag: The youngest member of...

In The Bag: The youngest member of the House is getting lots of fan mail these days after wearing a bag over his head to protest check writing by some of his insufficiently funded colleagues. Jim Nussle, the 31-year-old boy-congressman from Iowa, says paper bags are arriving with messages like: “Go get ‘em.” So he is, although his plan isn’t wowing veteran lawmakers. Among the remaining perks he is hoping to, er, bag: free parking at Washington National Airport; $100-a-year memberships to a House-members-only health club, and $5 haircuts at the House barber shop. Says Nussle: “I used it my first week in here. It was the worst haircut I ever had.”

Scarfing I: Wasn’t it a shame that they had to cancel the lutefisk-eating contest in tiny Madison, Minn., last weekend because no one dared go fin-to-fin with Jerry Osteraas? In one sitting, the champ can consume more than 8 pounds of the fish, which is cod soaked in lye. “I’ve always said it tastes like lobster when you put a little butter on it,” says Osteraas, 45. The words of a future food critic, right? Naaaah. Next up, he’s going to take his taste buds over to nearby Benson, where there’s an all-you-can-eat potato dumpling contest.

Scarfing II: Lookie, here: If you receive a Christmas gift from Barbara Bush and it looks familiar, it’s very possible that you’ve seen it before. Barbara, it seems, is a member of the Nancy Reagan Gifts Recycling Club. “I mean, what am I going to do with 400 scarves? So I just rewrap them,” Bush says in the December Ladies’ Home Journal.

Scarfing 103: Tulsa algebra teacher Tonya Slagle has a new way to make reading, writing and ‘rithmetic easier to swallow. On Wednesday and Thursday nights, she tutors about 30 students at McDonald’s. The sessions started last year by accident when students frequently would ask her math questions when she stopped at the restaurant for breakfast. The rest, as they say, is mathematics.