The Republican soap opera in SD17 takes an even more melodramatic turn.

Joan Huffman and Austen Furse, Republican rivals for state Senate whose surrogates have engaged in a bitter war of words previously documented on this blog, had a talk tonight on a street corner near her house in quiet Southside Place.

We're not making this up.

Furse called Huffman a few hours ago and asked her to meet him under the streetlight, according to Huffman. And there he apologized to her, she said, for the fact that he and his supporters have alleged quite sharply, by mail and the Internet, that she had averaged 78 days of vacation for each of the six years she served as a Harris County felony court judge. The allegations were accompanied by images implying that Huffman was a beach-loving slacker who had shirked her responsibility to the taxpayers.

OK, better now. What I want to know is if the apology itself was accompanied by anything else - flowers, a box of chocolates, suitable music. A little groveling never hurts, either. More details are definitely needed here.

Fort Furse can't reach everyone who viewed the misguided stuff electronically. But it does know who it sent the colorful mail to. Will Blakemore and his associates mail those voters a correction, as Huffman now says he should?

No. He said he will rely on the news media to get the word out.

Meanwhile, in other SD17 news, Clay Robison reports on the Democratic donors who (I certainly hope) learned their lesson with the Strayborn debacle of 2006 and have come home to support Chris Bell this time around. And it seems Huffman has remembered that she's actually running against Bell - or, at least, she wants to be. Texas Politics has her latest ad, which focuses on Bell, and Bell's response ad.

UPDATE: Well, so much for that apology. We are deep into popcorn time now.