MISSING PARTS: Although I’ve yet to respond to its pleas for contributions, I fairly regularly check truthout’s daily messages on my computer screen, and — kaboom! — its news story teaser a week ago was hard to ignore:

“A Pair of Testicles Fell Off the President After Election Day.”

(There are several coloquial ways to share that comment in Spanish, but I’ll leave the translation to Frank Gómez and his contacts at Real Academia Española.)

My instant reaction was the quote’s source was going to reveal something about immigration reform and unkept promises.

I was wrong. The line was attributed to a former Guantanamo chief prosecutor. So to make certain I was still functioning okay, I clicked forward to the obituary page. There I found two familiar names with personal histories that had their Hispanic moments.

DEAD EAVESDROPPERS? No hay que hablar mal de los muertos. Never speak ill of the dead. My mother’s occasional admonitions didn’t make any sense to me as a child. I was savvy enough to know that dead people couldn’t eavesdrop on my conversations. But I pretty much paid heed to my mother’s words.

My dilemma now is how to acknowledge the recent passings of Andy Rooney and Matthew Martínez.

My recollection about Rooney, who hung on till age 88, is that he offended a lot of people with his frequently witless wit. Andy was a smirking boor. (Sorry, Mamá.) His targets one particular day were Latin American baseball players. Andy dismissed their incredible contributions to the game with the comment, “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodríguez...They haven’t caught my interest.”

What can I say about Marty Martínez?

After nine terms in Congress in a heavily Hispanic district, he lost badly in the primary.That’s almost impossible to do. Hispanic Link editor Charlie Ericksen remembers having a normal relationship with Martínez until the Link surveyed Congress and reported that Martínez had just two Hispanics on his large staff, far fewer than any other rep in a Hispanic district.. After that,Marty interrupted a couple of news conferences when Ericksen asked a question, to volunteer,almost comically, that the Link just wrote a bunch of lies.

When Ericksen’s son Héctor, who takes after his Zapotec mother in height and complexion, first joined the Link staff, as is custom, he introduced himself by name at a news conference, Martínez jumped up to challenge him with “You are NOT! I know Ericksen!”

With an innocent smile, Héctor responded to the congressman with a question, “What am I going to tell my mother?”