Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

Anni Sheriffius said she was trying to wash off what she thought was dirt on her dog Jasmine’s ear when the ear fell off.

Sheriffius rushed her dog to the veterinarian to learn that the dog’s ear had been cut off by a dog groomer and super-glued back on.

“And I saw the ear float away, and it freaked me out,” Sheriffius said.

Bonus coverage in the "there are minions and then there are minions" file: Debra Pickett resigned from the Sun-Times Monday afternoon, minutes after being asked to do a story she thought was preposterous.

“I laughed,” says Pickett, recalling her response when features editor Christine Ledbetter called with the assignment to breast-feed her infant son in public places and write about it. "I have to say I didn't take it terribly seriously." She'd seen other Sun-Times stories begin with an "outrageous premise" then get negotiated into something not beneath the dignity of adults. Some other day, she and Ledbetter might have begun negotiating. But not this time.

With all deference to Dave Barry and the exploding whale, I would now offer that this is indeed "the most wonderful event in the history of the universe." And it's the lead story on CNN.

Ad campaign triggers bomb scare in Boston - CNN.com

BOSTON, Massachusetts (CNN) -- Electronic light boards featuring an adult-cartoon character triggered bomb scares around Boston on Wednesday, spurring authorities to close two bridges and a stretch of the Charles River before determining the devices were harmless.

Turner Broadcasting Co., the parent company of CNN, said the devices contained harmless magnetic lights aimed at promoting the Adult Swim network's late-night cartoon "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." Law enforcement sources said the devices displayed one of the Mooninites, outer-space delinquents who appear frequently on the show, greeting visitors with a raised middle finger.

And Molly Ivins has died -- I knew from one of the attendees of the conference in November that she was exceptionally unwell, but still, sad to see.

File this under: creepy and dangerous customer. At one point, Kyle Eugene Copeland, 20, was buying 10 or more cups of coffee a day so he could see the 17-year-old barista at a West Seattle Starbucks. He then asked the girl to marry him and have his babies. After the barista reported his odd behavior, the man tried to buy a gun. He didn't pull that off, but he threatened the girl.

In his defense, though, this doesn't seem like atypical behavior for someone having 10+ cups of coffee a day.

Wow. No, really, wow. Insane turns of events, incredible momentum shifts, more bizarre plays than you usually see in a team's entire regular season. And the end -- I was torn, wanting the kick to fail, but not wanting it to be Gramatica's fault (yay for a 50-yarder!).

(Don't bother looking for video; you will see it at some point. That play will be replayed until it's burned into every CRT left on the planet.)

Congrats to my Seattle-area friends, and serious kudos to the Cowboys (even T.O.) for reacting with class after a simply astonishing ending. (And yes, the Chefs lost to the Colts. Surprise.)

Holy Christ. They killed one of my players.

The Caribou Vikings and Manhattan Pretty Birds had five players in common: LaDainain Tomlinson, Laveranues Coles, Tamba Hali, Ladell Betts and Darrent Williams, who I drafted as a rookie. NUFFLE lists Williams as "Not Available" for next week, because he's fucking dead.

DENVER (AP) -- Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting early Monday, his limousine sprayed with bullets in downtown Denver.

Team spokesman Jim Saccomano said police called him about 3 a.m. from the scene and told him three people had been shot, and the 24-year-old Williams, a former Oklahoma State star, had been killed. His death came hours after the Denver Broncos were eliminated from the playoff race.

A little after 2 a.m., a white Hummer limousine was fired on from a vehicle that pulled up along its side, police spokesman Sonny Jackson said. As many as a dozen bullet holes were visible on the driver's side of the vehicle. One window was blown out and four others had bullet holes.

Link goes to CNN/SI, as ESPN puts bowl games and Bobby "In any other profession would've been jailed by now" Knight as higher stories. Oh, to hell with you, ESPN. (They also list his fantasy status as "probable.")

Time's Person of the Year is you. Not me, you. Reading the headline on CNN.com was surreal -- it read like a piece straight out of the Onion. I'm ambivalent -- in one way, it does seem like a terrific cop-out, but in another sense, there was no one person driving 2006 (I did enjoy the idea being bandied about in meetings to name Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush as an Axis of [something undetermined] for the year; they were certainly quite influential as a troika). It's not as much of a cop-out as naming YouTube the Person of the Year, which they toyed with, but the idea behind it fed into the result for 2006.

Reading the story, though, it's obvious they wanted to name "Web 2.0" the Person of the Year, and God, what an awful idea for an overused, annoyingly hollow catchphrase.

It is, I guess, the least sucky idea from a sucky list. And yet I'm curious by the distinction: "you." Not "we," not "us," "you." Hrm. I guess if they'd said "we are," they were afraid Time's employees were Persons of the Year, and I don't think anybody's buying that.

A South Carolina Gamecocks fan fatally shot a friend over a $20 bet on a weekend football game, authorities said....

...Metts said Johnson's wife and several friends told police that Johnson then said: "You can't shoot me, I'm invisible."

And Quick replied, "No you're not."

Bonus: reporter on the scene is old amiga Dánica Coto, one of the saner members of the fin de siècle Collegian.

I'm sorry, but this sentence strikes me as possibly the greatest sentence in American journalism so far this year. Just please, don't attack the messenger. ( Cut for clinical potty talk )

Okay. I tried to tolerate the Christmas ads before November. The occasional Christmas carol on the radio. The inevitable influx of Christmas merchandise before the Halloween candy's cleaned from the shelves.

But sweet Cylon Baby Jesus (™ norabombay), what is How the Grinch Stole Christmas doing on TV on TBS on November 12? Is it any wonder how a holiday spirit can be so diluted and inconsequential when it's celebrated for 1/6th of the entire year? With Thanksgiving so close to Christmas, it serves as a perfect buffer and milepost from which the actual festivity could start -- if anything, you could argue that a month of pre-holiday mirth is still erring on the side of overkill.

And if it's this distressing to me, I can hardly imagine how pleasant it is for my friends either from or now in non-Christian households. I feel yuir pain. Christmas and I have never really been on talking terms, but right now, if I see Christmas in a crosswalk in front of me, I won't even brake.

Britney files for divorce from K-Fed.



Clever timing. Perfect news cycle in which to bury this little nugget of inevitability.

Bonus: A man who reportedly believed Republicans were conspiring to steal today's election entered an Allentown polling site, signed in and proceeded to smash the screen of one of the electronic voting machines with a metal cat paperweight, poll volunteers said.

Michael Young, 43, of 375 Auburn St., will be charged with felony criminal mischief and tampering with voting machines, according to Ronald Manescu, chief of investigations for Allentown police.

This is shaping up to be one hell of a news cycle.