The other day a friend came over to my house all in a tizzy. He said that he'd just been listening to NPR, and was fucking positive he heard them interview an Ohio McCain/Palin supporter named "Moose Doody."

MOOSE DOODY!

It turns out, after some careful Googling, that Moose Doody does exist. He's the head of the Lawrence County Republicans, and his name is actually Ray "Moose" Dutey. Well, sorry for the misunderstanding, dude(y). But if you don't like being called Moose Doody (especially during an election in which actual moose doody has become strangely relevant), maybe stay off the radio. Because on the radio, no one can see you spell. On the radio, you are Moose Doody.

And click here.

You're welcome!

From the BBC:

A passenger on a French train had to be rescued by firemen after having his arm sucked down the on-board toilet.

The 26-year-old victim was trapped when he tried to fish out his mobile phone, which had fallen into the toilet bowl, and fell foul of the suction system.

The man was carried away by emergency services, with the toilet still attached to his arm.

"He came out on a stretcher, with his hand still jammed in the toilet bowl, which they had to saw clean off," said Benoit Gigou, a witness to the man's plight.

_{So close to the crown and sash, yet forever so far away.}

Five Thirty Eight says that the McCain campaign's allegations that "the real Virginia" is Republican has pissed off Miss Virginia:

"What offended me and made me sad about those comments," said Glakas, a resident for many years in northern Virginia, "is that I've been to every county, every part of this state. What's best about Virginia is its diversity. The people, the geography. We have every class, every race, an amazing immigrant population... Virginia is the birthplace of America. To say that part of Virginia is not part of the real America is just offensive."

In sadder Miss news, Miss Teen Louisiana was arrested for dining and dashing with a pocketful purse full of weed. She has been stripped of her crown.

I always knew those crunchy florets were packed with something.

(This latest round of Things About Advertising That Can't Possibly Be True brought to you by Bread & Honey blog.)

Thanks ExiledOnline.

He's a kid. Can't be more than 20. He seems to be from Boone, North Carolina:

^{Population 14,000, named for Daniel Boone, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.}

Here's a video of Gregory and friends singing about Jimmy Smith Park in Boone (Boone also has a Jimmy Smith Wastewater Treatment Plant):

Here's a song about space people from the future:

According to his MySpace page, he now lives in Brooklyn. He's equal parts Chris Crocker and Tracy + the Plastics.

His videos aren't all brilliant (his third prez debate video isn't nearly as good as the previous ones), but he's generative, gutsy, and a little screwy in the head.

(He is a new media hero. Forget art in the age of mechanical reproduction. This is art in the age of infinite extension—there are no copies of these artworks, each one is the original. Benjamin's aura is everywhere. Not only is God "a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere." So are artworks in the age of YouTube. So is the character known as Michael Hussein Gregory.)

And, one more time, his video of the second prez debate—his finest work so far:

Slog tipper Matthew said it best: "Kind of retarded, kind of brilliant, I kind of love him and CAN'T WAIT for what he releases tomorrow."

Is this brilliant, freaky, funky honky from Seattle?

Can we give him next year's Genius Award for film?

...that's exactly what it is says it is: La Pequeña Sarah Palin.

Thank you, World of Wonder.

There's so much wrong with this story:

ELIZABETHTON, Tenn. (AP) - A new father has secretly named his baby girl Sarah McCain Palin after the Republican ticket for president and vice president.

Mark Ciptak of Elizabethton put that name on the documents for the girl’s birth certificate, ignoring the name Ava Grace, which he and his wife had picked earlier.

“I don’t think she believes me yet,” he told the Kingsport Times-News for a story to be published Tuesday. “It’s going to take some more convincing.”

I'm sure it's entirely above board for an ominous, black bundle of electrical wiring to swoop down from above and just kick it there on the sidewalk, inches from the feet of passersby and the noses of dogs. I'm sure that one lonely, brave orange cone is the standard safety precaution for this type of—what?—maintenance? And I'm sure there's absolutely no way I could possibly get zapped by this big rubber sidewalk snake.

But STILL. This has been alarming me for like a week now. ZZZAP!!!

Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president who has done a lot of international conflict resolution work, has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Many expected the Prize to go to Chinese dissidents as a little slap to China after this year's Olympics.

But another group was snubbed, maybe even robbed, and the mainstream media, predictably, isn't paying any attention:

Dr. David Ray Griffin and everyone involved in the 9/11 truth movement have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The recipient of the Peace Prize will be announced this Friday, October 10.

Let the conspiracy theories begin. I hope they involve evil Finns.

That line appeared as a targeted ad in my [heterosexual female] friend's gmail yesterday. It links to this Bostonian booze cruise, whose website offers a pic of the following lovely gal—presumably one of the innumerable things that (unlike the boat) will be going down over Boston Harbor:

Haaaayyyyy!!!

That's quite the slogan, Boatonian: A whole boatful of people who will blow you! Also, you probably will not drown!

Look at this tiny, fake orange!

Wouldn't you like to know how to make this tiny, fake orange?

Well you're in luck! There's a step-by-step photo tutorial on how to make this tiny, fake orange right here at the "Weird and Funny Stuff Around the World" blog. I'm sure it's not, but the process looks really easy. If you can roll dough in to a ball and use and X-Xcto knife, then you can make a tiny, fake orange. Why you would want to, I'm not sure, but I have the sudden urge to get some Sculpey after SLOG HAPPY tonight and make a whole bowl full of these things.

....but actually slightly more incomprehensible:

(Via My Liblog.)

Because 17-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears is (supposedly) pregnant AGAIN. Eight weeks pregnant, actually. She just gave birth to her first child in June.

Apparently Jamie didn't know it was possible to get pregnant while still breast-feeding.

(Update: TMZ is saying it's not true.)

He's won the Kansas State lottery—for the second time this year.

If there's a weirder story in 2008, I'll eat my hat, poop it out, and eat it again.

Thank you, Slog tipper Tuck.

Evidently this has been all over the ladyblogs for the past few days, so if you've seen it already, please kindly ignore.

But at a rally this past weekend, the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women announced her support for Sarah Palin.

A few choice segments:

Shelly Mandell, the president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women introduced Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin over the weekend in California, speaking not on behalf of NOW but "as an individual, as a woman's rights activist for 30 years who has worked for all those years to see this day."

"I know Sarah Palin cares about women’s rights, she cares about equality, she cares about equal pay, and as Vice President she will fight for it. She cares about our children and she cares about women's lives. She's an athlete and she knows what Title Nine did for girls like her."

“America," Mandell said, "this is what a feminist looks like."

This, naturally, has caused an outbreak of glee on conservative blogs, where comments like "Finally, an intellectually honest feminist!" abound.

Does Mandell have a brain tumor? No—I'm sorry to demean anyone with a brain tumor. What I mean is, would Mandell care to elaborate?

I wonder which policy of Palin's Mandell is applauding.

The one where, in order to cut the budget in Wasilla, Palin charged rape victims for their own evidence-gathering exams?

The one where, earlier this year, Palin slashed funding to a program that helps give teenage mothers and their babies a place to live?

The one where Palin forces victims of rape and incest to have the resulting babies?

The one where Palin restricts a woman's ability to sue her employer for equal pay?

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. No. It's the fact that Palin is an athlete. Oh, got it. Sorry. Phew. Because I thought Mandell's support might have been groundless.

Hey, what about an athlete ticket?!! I see... Simpson-Palin! That's the ticket!

(More on Palin's policies from ECB here.)

I wonder where this kid will be in 15 years...

Via BBC News:

The attack happened on Wednesday morning after the boy entered the zoo by jumping over the security fence and evading sensor alarms.

Over the next half hour, he bludgeoned some of the animals to death with stones and hurled others over the two fences surrounding the crocodile enclosure.

At one point, he tried scaling the outer enclosure himself to get to "Terry", the 11ft (3.3m) saltwater crocodile.

A turtle, four Western blue-tongued lizards, two bearded dragons, two thorny devil lizards and the zoo's 20-year-old goanna were among those killed.

The zoo is considering suing the parents, since the boy is "too young to be prosecuted." Read the full story here.

From Cincinnati's WKRC-TV:

A Middletown woman was arrested after chasing children, urinating on a porch, and blocking traffic—all while wearing a cow suit.

Full story here, thank you, Slog Tipper Bradley Steinbacher.

If you need an LED processor and you are a person anywhere in the world, I am sorry.

The world is out of LED processors right now.

This I heard from a man who needs them to finish an artwork at Harborview Medical Center, where the new building at Ninth and Jefferson is having an art opening next Thursday.

...but that doesn't make it any less upsetting: The 2009 Naked Clown Calendar (SFW).

Thank you, Fleshbot (NSFW).

News or product placement?

SOUTH BEND – A 20-year-old man told police he was stabbed by his younger brother Sunday night after a fight broke out over a Hot Pocket.

Yes, Hot Pockets™. So good, you'll stab your brother.

Every once in a while on the great big internets, you just come upon something that reminds you Japanese culture is completely fucking nuts:

Fluffy Milk-chan" is a world of affable characters that live a cute and slightly mischievous lifestyle. The heroine is the laid back Fluffy Milk-chan, who has friends such as the fashionable Pink Milk-chan and the trendy Tanned Milk-chan.

They're adorable stuffed breasts. You know, for kids. I especially like the comic strips. And does Miss Can Milk have a vestigial nipple?

Elijah Brubaker just put this up on his blog. It's video of a largish man being suspended from hooks pierced into his back at a tattoo convention in Miami. Things go terribly wrong—not for the weak of heart or stomach. Skip to 2:18 if you're impatient.

In late 2006, the Anthropologie store in downtown Seattle had this great wall design. The soaring, two-story wall at the back of the store was covered in layers—layers upon layers upon layers—of brown paper, folded and crumpled like the elaborately draped fabrics of the store's expensive dresses. When you looked at the wall, you thought: Looks like earth. Like the sedimentary layers of a geological cross-section. Like Anthropologie is in the grip of a force of nature.

The design wasn't in any of Anthropologie's other stores, the manager told me in a phone interview yesterday: "Everybody gets their unique twist. Nobody had a wall like us."

But in 2005, two East Coast artists named Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen Nguyen did have a wall like that. They created it.

They say Anthropologie stole it.

The visual documentation is damning. In May 2005 at the Portland, Maine nonprofit art space The Map Room, Kavanaugh and Nguyen covered the walls with brown paper and called their installation Striped Canary on the Subterranean Horizon. The Map Room is embedded in a hillside, and the artists wanted to "reveal" the earth behind the walls.

"Armed with nothing but brown Kraft paper and staples, Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen transformed the [gallery] into a space both familiar and foreign," Sculpture magazine touted in its April 2006 issue. The magazine featured two full-color photographs with the story.

Months later, that very design appeared in the clothing retail store. When the artists heard about it, in October 2006, they contacted a prominent copyright attorney, John Koegel (Jeff Koons's lawyer), who made no headway with Anthropologie and had to tell the artists that, unfortunately, they had no further recourse, artist Kavanaugh said yesterday in an interview at Suyama Space in Seattle, where he currently has a solo show.

"We had no rights because the piece that we did was in a nonprofit context," he said—but if Striped Canary on the Subterranean Horizon had worn a pricetag and shown in a commercial gallery (or if the artists had applied formally through the copyright office for their nonprofit temporary installation), the artists could sue for copyright infringement.

The manager at Anthropologie this week told me I'd have to talk to corporate (the "visual merchandising team" at "our home office") in order to find out more. In response to my query, public relations director Sarah Goodstein sent me an email that avoided specifics even though I'd asked about the wall in downtown Seattle in 2006. "Although [our designers] look to the outside world for inspiration, including other artists, their display installations are original," Goodstein wrote. "If an artist approached Anthropologie, however, regarding perceived use of their work we would be sensitive to their concerns."

So, Anthropologie: Where's your sensitivity now?

Here are the images, first Striped Canary on the Subterranean Horizon and then the wall in Anthropologie:

Here's an interview with artist Wade Kavanaugh about the issue:

This summer, when Tall Ships (a touring fleet of lovely, and sometimes very old seafaring vessels) visited Tacoma, the ad campaign by the people in charge of talking up Tacoma was, "Tall Ships Is Coming! ARE YOU?"

Yesterday on the plane back from Boston I was flipping through the airline magazine when I saw an ad for a Tacoma hotel whose shtick is that its halls are lined with glass art. The ad has a picture of a glass bustier by Susan Taylor Glasglow (very much like this one) next to the text "The work may just inspire you. To get a room."

It can't be a good sign when a hotel is advertising sex.

And finally this morning a lovely and talented colleague of mine stopped by my desk speaking of a wedding he'd attended this weekend at this same Tacoma hotel.

He was holding the hotel's version of a "Do Not Disturb" sign. This one says "TIED UP."

Dan: Why are you not on your way to Tacoma right this second??

R.I.P.

Yesterday, like any other morning, I woke up and opened my eyes. But unlike any other morning, I was confronted with the TERRIFYING DEMON FACE OF A BABY GHOST staring back at me out of the wall:

Clearly there's some sort of restless spirit trapped within the bricks. My question for you, Slog, is WHO THE FUCK IS IT? I can't figure out who it looks like.

Is it Beaker from the Muppets?

Little Karl Pilkington and his baldy roundy head?

Baby Ronald McDonald?

Thoughts? Ideas? Exorcists? All I know is that it's there, PEEKIN' at me while I sleep, and I want it to stop.

The other day, I found myself--for the first time in years--inside a community center, a place where babies gather to engage in art projects and table tennis and psychological warfare. In the main hallway, I noticed that some enterprising and earnest babies had constructed a large wire dome, on which they had pinned an army of colorful felt homunculi and a bunch of note cards. Each note card bore one baby's vision for the future of earth.

I know you guys think that Sarah Palin and John McCain are scary, but check out what these fuckin' babies have in store for us:

Baby #1:

"I wish the animals were not scared of anything."

Oh, great! Great idea, dumbass. Personally, I feel a lot safer knowing that sharks are scared of my outboard motor, and bears are afraid of me waving my arms and yelling "Don't eat me, fucker!", and snakes couldn't be more terrified of my fucking foot and just want to hide in a hole all year instead of, you know, CHOMPING MY TOE WITH THEIR VENOMOUS FANGS.

Baby #2:

"I wish spider weren't feared."

Ohhhh, fantastic. You know that's just what they want, right? You're playing right into their eight tiny hands! Spiders cannot wait for us to let our guard down and stop squishing them so that, under cover of night, they can carry out their ultimate scheme: to eat every single one of our eyeballs. Do you like having eyeballs? Me too. But you can kiss your eyeballs goodbye (well, not physically--that's impossible) if these babies get their way.

Baby #3:

"I wish there were more animals."

Whoa whoa whoa. Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK? You babies are even crazier than I thought. So once you've established your armies of fearless, bloodthirsty beasts, and we humans are hobbling around blind and toeless, what you're wishing for is more animals?! Fuck!

Baby #4:

"I wish seals could say their feelings."

I have no criticism here. This actually is my fondest wish.

Baby #5:

"I wish all animals could celebrate holidays."

Haven't the animals taken enough from us already? I mean, really. My god.

I think the lesson here is clear: DO NOT ELECT BABIES TO PUBLIC OFFICE. Or animals, for that matter. I think they may have formed some sort of alliance. We're fucked.

"Burglar Wakes Men with Spice Rub, Sausage Attack"

The victims told deputies they awoke Saturday morning to the stranger applying spices to one of them and striking the other with an 8-inch sausage.

Burrimond said money allegedly stolen in the burglary was recovered. The sausage was tossed away by the fleeing suspect and eaten by a dog.

More details in tomorrow's Last Days.

Elephant beats heroin habit with detox.

BEIJING (Reuters) - A once drug-addled elephant fed heroin-laced bananas by illegal traders will return home after emerging clean from a three-year detox programme on China's tropical island province of Hainan.

"Amazing Body Art from the 2008 World Bodypainting Festival in Daegu, South Korea."

(Thank you Scott!)

Uh, has this already been all over the web? I haven't seen it, a Google image search isn't giving me any matches to it, and the letter-to-the-editor writer (the email they sent is in a thread that mentions http://whatreallyhappened.com and alaskacafe.blogspot.com, though I can't find it on either site) hasn't gotten back to me. It's gotta be fake, right?

Did anyone else just put on Hall & Oates' "Sara Smile"?

Some folks in Milwaukee went for a world record number of people on a beer bong. They succeeded, with 144 people simultaneously taking hits from a single beer bong. The previous record was 100 people at once. That record was also held by Milwaukee.

I'm sure you've probably seen some version of this before (there have been more than one)...

...but I figure, hey, any distraction from Republicans and their conventioneering at this juncture is a damn healthy distraction--the less attention paid to Republicans the better is my policy--and this is the least Republican seeming thing I could find on teh entire internets. I'm not precisely sure what it is, but it sure as hell ain't Republican seeming. Word.

Enjoy! I think...

This just in from Slog tipper Melody:

I am a UW employee currently sitting at my desk, hard at work in my office in the old Safeco building. Not fifteen minutes ago I was eating my pho and reading the Slog on my lunch break when I received the following call on my UW phone:

Me: This is Melody
Caller (deep, older man’s voice with a heavy southern drawl): Yeah, I’m looking for the shameless hussy who made a fool of herself on national television last night.
Me: Excuse me?
Caller: I’m looking Anne Rice Mills, or whatever, that cried and went on and on about Hillary Clinton last night. I want to talk to her.
Me: What?
Caller then hung up.

As a volunteer for the 43rd District Democrats, my contact information is “out there” but this is just odd. I was wondering if any of your readers have reported similar calls, be they "prank" or from some bona fide angry Democrat…

Anyone? In the meantime, enjoy the "shameless hussy"'s call-inspiring DNC performance here.

Cindy Sheehan is claiming that she happened upon somebody bugging her phone at the DNC this past weekend:

I immediately said; "What the hell are you doing? Are you putting a bug on my phone?" He looked like he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and stammered out: "N--no, we are having problems with the phone." I told him to get out of my room because my phone was fine and I called the front desk and the person at the front desk stammered something out about "problems" with some of the phones...I am confident that that's what was happening when I walked in on the "maintenance" man and I am becoming more shocked every day with what the ruling class are capable of....

I'm not sure why anyone would bug Cindy Sheehan's phone, or why everyone in Cindy Sheehan's hotel has a bad stammer. Or why Cindy Sheehan doesn't have a cell phone. Answers may never be clear.

Seattle's We Are Change blog, the big blog for Seattle 9/11 Truthers, has just bravely come out against the worldwide conspiracy to cover up the real truth about...

...global warming.

Many Truthers now believe that the climate crisis doesn't exist. The We Are Change post in question quotes liberally from a report by "Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher." Oh. My. God. Here are some "facts":

CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;

It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;

and

In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.

The right-wing migration of Truth Groups is complete.