Tag Archives: dog

Because things aren’t strange enough

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Bernann McKinney (r) with Booger clone

Okay, so if criminal kink and Kafka don’t cut your cake-hole, how about cloning? In case you haven’t heard, some woman apparently paid £25,000 to have her dead pit-bull cloned. Of course, that’s just for starters. There is some criminal kink—although not exactly kafkaesque—involved in this one, too.

The face was familiar, albeit older and heavier. The surname was the same.

So was the alleged American, ex-beauty queen background and the unusual devotion to pitbull dogs.

Surely it wasn’t? Could the new owner of the world’s first commercially cloned pups be the same woman who had gone on the run from British justice 30 years ago, having been the star of one of the most bizarre, entertaining and downright saucy court cases in living memory?

In 1978, Joyce McKinney jumped bail and disappeared after being charged with kidnapping a 17-stone male Mormon missionary, whom she had chained to a Devon cottage bed with mink handcuffs and forced to have sex ….

…. Were these two blonde, American, dog-loving and, yes, quite possibly barking mad, Miss McKinneys one and the same person?

Last night, when we spoke to ‘Bernann’ on the telephone, having tracked her down to a Seoul hotel room, her hostile reaction hardly quashed the intrigue.

Asked: ‘Are you really Joyce McKinney?’ she snapped: “Are you going to ask me about my dogs, or not? Because that’s all I’m prepared to talk to you about.”

Not exactly a flat-out denial, then.

The infamous Joyce McKinney

Perhaps the Daily Mail is jumping the gun a bit here—they’re convinced the two McKinneys are, in fact, one and the same—but it makes for a hell of a headline, doesn’t it?

Of course, how long before you can clone your Mormon sex slave?

But, seriously: What ever happened to normal weird news? I mean, really. Cloning your damn dog is even creepier than having the taxidermist make it into a lamp. And raping a missionary allegedly wearing “some sort of Mormon chastity belt”? I mean, come on.

At any rate, a couple of punch lines from the article:

  • Joyce McKinney was a beauty queen in the 1970s and was a former Miss Wyoming before going to Brigham Young University, in Utah, to study drama.
  • McKinney met the similarly bailed May and the pair fled to Canada, using false passports and disguised as deaf-mute mime artistes.

Mitt Romney: No freakin’ way!

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No.

Really?

Oh, come on. Seriously?

Every once in a while, you come across something that you don’t want to believe is true. Neil Swidey and Stephanie Ebbert, from their Boston Globe profile of GOP presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney:

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He’d built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog ….

…. As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. “Dad!” he yelled. “Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

What? What punch line can I write here? Wonkette’s Ken Layne came up with the obvious. In fact, two obvious ones.

• • •

And while I’m still on the subject of Wonkette and Ken Layne, I really do want to stress that I have nothing against him (so far); sometimes jokes miss.

But the folks over at Wonkette are more diligent than I, so I owe them at least that acknowledgment. I mean, really, I wouldn’t have noticed the “vanilla steamer” bit.

Someone needs to be obsessed with Mitt Romney’s homoerotic correlations. Thanks, Ken.