Dentana

No, it isn't a merperson. It's just a fish with human-like teeth.

Scientology Watch

MINUS: Under suspicious circumstances, the great director Paul Thomas Anderson has indefinitely postponed his plans to make The Master, a film loosely based on the life of L. Ron Hubbard, in which master thespian Philip Seymour Hoffman would have played the titular nutball.

PLUS: Mad Men actress Elizabeth Moss has filed for divorce from her husband of eleven months, Saturday Night Live's Fed Armisen. Possibly baseless rumor mongering has it that Moss' devotion to Scientology may have played a role in the divorce. In any case, she's on the market, fellas.

TOTAL: A wash, though it's probably more likely that I would have watched and enjoyed The Master than that I will marry Elizabeth Moss as part of my larger scheme to get closer to a Hamm sandwich with Don Draper and Christina Hendricks.

When Gay Sex is Outlawed...

For several years, many U.S. states had laws against sodomy, the illicit use of human genitals for anything other than creating a child who will one day Google the word "blowjob". But in 2003, the Supreme Court struck down Texas' anti-sodomy law, thereby rendering similar laws in all other states moot.

But despite all that, the official platform adopted by the Republican Party of Montana in June still includes a stance in favor of outlawing "homosexual acts". Granted, homosexual acts are a grave danger to the Montana economy. It's a state full of wide open spaces just begging to be turned into hot man-on-man orgy grounds. Plus, with such a low population, it's rare for members of the opposite sex to even meet, let alone procreate.

But not all Montana Republicans are in favor of the platform. At least one state legislator says that it has no place in the modern GOP and that anyone wanting to arrest gays should join another political party. Plus, there's no legal means for the state to re-outlaw buttsex, mouthfucking, and mutual masturbation after the state supreme court struck down its sodomy laws in 1997.

However, it's good to know some Montana Republicans are still thinking long and hard about sodomy. It's all over their minds like semen on an upper lip.

The Mouse Problem

Christine O'Donnell, the newly minted Republican senatorial candidate from the great tax haven of Delaware is forging ahead with her plans to become this news cycle's Sarah Palin. She's a political outsider, she's pissed off about the D.C. status quo, and she's willing to say any crazy thing it takes to rile up the rabid right-wingers. It's a brave stance to take, especially since with each passing day, it's looking more and more likely that O'Donnell accidentally lobotomized herself sometime in the early '90s.

Weirdly, it's not so much what O'Donnell's saying now that makes her seem like a glue sniffer. It's the seemingly bottomless well of ridiculous quotes from all of her TV appearances in the last fifteen years. First, she took to MTV to decry masturbation. Then she was on Politically Incorrect discussing her dabbling with witchcraft. On C-SPAN, she lamented the taxpayer money spent on trying to help self-destructive AIDS patients. And now, we've learned that during a 2007 appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, O'Donnell warned the nation of a monstrous horror lurking in our laboratories.

"American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully-functioning human brains," she said, sniffing suspiciously.

Here's the thing: This is bullshit. It never happened, and it's a little mind boggling how someone could possibly think it did.

However, the inverse may, in fact, be true. While no human-brained mice are intelligently dropping their turds in the box of Christmas ornaments we keep in our attics, there is evidence that some fully-functioning humans may demonstrate mouse-like behavior:

Book Learnin'

Members of the Texas State Board of Education are pushing a resolution that would warn textbook publishers against downplaying Christianity while glorifying Islam in history books adopted by state schools. According to the resolution's conservative backers, several history books are known to devote more space to discussing Islam than Christianity, to teach about Christian massacres of Muslims during the crusades while ignoring Muslim massacres of Christians, and to devote several chapters to the fact that Mohamed's camera shyness is far sexier than Jesus' downright slutty need to pose for every Renaissance painter who ever lived.

Critics say that these board members are placing politics above education. Also, that the textbooks they cite as offensively pro-Islam aren't even used in Texas classrooms. But proponents have responded by claiming "Middle-Easterners" are buying into textbook publishing companies in order to push their terrorist agenda. As evidence, they refuse to provide any evidence.

This is pretty much par for the course when it comes to the Texas school board. These are the same people who tried to insert creationist textbooks into the state's biology classrooms, and several board members are the types of people who wear lots of denim dresses decorated with wooden buttons they bought at an arts and crafts show in a church parking lot.

I'm a little bored by this news, to tell you the truth. Not so much because it's more of the same, but because I'm fairly certain that the entire Texas State Board of Education is composed of characters played via split-screen technology by a very much alive Andy Kaufman.

Twilight

LiveScience.com recently reported on a conference held in Cambridge earlier this month to discuss the role popular teen fiction like the Twilight series might have in shaping young brains.

Actually, the conference covered several areas of research relating to neuroscience and the arts in young people, but LiveScience.com knows what any good web outlet knows: Twilight equals page views.

Twilight The only real scientific Twilight takeaway from this conference Twilight is that teenagers have mushier brains than real humans Twilight, and are therefore more susceptible to influence Twilight from books, movies, peers, Twilight, and their own personal experiences. Twilight.

This isn't new, Twilight but it's interesting to study whether Twilight the subtextual values included in teen entertainment Twilight might take advantage of a young person's underdeveloped brain Twilight to make a bigger impact Twilight than they otherwise might.

Twilight, for example, Twilight may have certain anti-feminist, conservative Twilight messages that could be Twilight unwittingly embraced by its target Twilight audience. Which is a scary thought, Twilight since no one wants an entire Twilight generation of girls yearning to be stalked Twilight by a semi-pedophilic Twilight vampire Twilight. Well, except for Twilight semi-pedophilic vampires, I Twilight suppose.

Twilight Twilight Twilight.

Twilight.

4th Dimensional Bigfeet Going Out

Cryptomundo has published a very intriguing email from a person known only as "silvereagle" who claims to know of a Bigfoot research project conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in the '60s. According to silvereagle, the labs had several Bigfeet in captivity and were able to determine that the creatures are intelligent extradimensional beings with the power to turn invisible and walk through walls. Unfortunately, one was also a bit of a sexist prankster.

"Apparently, it liked to sneak up on the secretaries from behind, when they came in for coffee. So there were a few dropped coffee pots and burnt toes. [The secretaries] drove [a Bigfoot] out of the building by opening up a pathway by propping doors open and presumably banging on pots and pans. Apparently, one scientist was retired early because it was believed that the bigfoot hypnotised him to go insane."

There's much more at Cryptomundo. The takeaway? Our secretaries are never safe from invisible Bigfeet.