Attempting to Humor the Humorless

There’s a long history of clowning for social justice. We need more of it. Thank you Felipe.


Send in the clowns: the new guard of activists combating the right, by Morgan Jerkins, The Guardian, September 16, 2026.

A growing cohort of performers ‘clown’ as a means to innovate traditional protest and create social change

On a humid morning on 15 July, Tillie the Clown, a Brooklyn-based drag performer whose real name is Taylor Horne, was waiting to be let inside a New York City council meeting. Horne had started getting into character at 5am, for a makeup and clown-costuming process that would take two hours. It would be another 10 hours before Horne was allowed to address the city council about the passing of Romanch’s Law, which would phase out and ultimately ban New York’s horse carriage industry.

Read whole article here.

Seek and Ye Shall Find…

Yes, if you’re only looking for what you want to see.


Fashion victim in fur suit sparks Bigfoot panic in small Maine town: ‘Very convincing’, by Zoe Hussain, New York Post, September 6, 2026.

The hairy truth finally came out.

Maine cops launched an investigation after a surge of 911 calls reported spotting Bigfoot roaming around town — only to discover it was actually just a fashion victim in a “very convincing” costume.

Damariscotta cops received an “unusually high number of calls” on Tuesday about a Sasquatch-like creature wandering around the tiny mid-coast tourist destination, including during morning drop-off on the first day of school, according to NBC News and the Damariscotta Police Department.

Read whole article here.

Trump Checks!

The Bank of Trump is pleased to announce a $5,000 gift to every American! Get yours on joeyskaggs.com.

Is it legal? Who’s going to stop him?
Will it raise the national debt? Who cares?

You can pay him back in November. Vote Republican! That’s the deal.


Print it, cut it out, and fill it in

A Spectacle to Miss On Your Next Trip to Italy

A self-described Italian archeologist “makes” history, literally.
h/t Uwe


‘A sucker born every minute’: The man who duped tourists with a fake Greek amphitheater, by Julia Buckley, CNN, August 24, 2026.

Of the eight TripAdvisor reviews of the amphitheater near Arcugnano, in Italy’s northern Veneto region, all give fulsome, five-star praise.

Read the whole article here.

It’s a Poll Measuring Contest!

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying poll?


Website behind widely shared fake election polls run by 21-year-old, by Sophie Sullivan, Anna Betts and Sam Levine, The Guardian, August 20, 2026.

Exclusive: Rahil Prakash tells the Guardian: ‘I wanted to see if fake polls could penetrate the ecosystem that easily’

A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.

The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

Read the whole article here.