This particular serving of interweb porridge is a blend of the usual adorableness to coo over mixed with a few freaky-deaky items. Halloween is in the air …

• Exhibit A: Veggie alien ponders its victim.
• Upping the creepiness—Newsweek offers further evidence that murderers often torture animals before moving on to human victims.
• More sad than frightening is my latest guilty pleasure: Beatles tunes remixed doggie-style. Goodness!
• Arachnophobes take heart! A jumping vegetarian spider was just discovered. Does "newly discovered" also indicate more highly evolved? Methinks yes.
• Rodeos are always an epic FAIL. At this one, a bull showed compassionless spectators how it feels to be humiliated—and it's HILARIOUS!
• Many zoos mistreat animals; others deceive visitors. With all its zebras dead of starvation after a siege earlier this year, somebody at the Marah Land Zoo in Gaza City has gotten a wee bit carried away with the hair dye …
• Chris Rock's comment "What the hell did Michael Vick do? Pitbulls ain't even real dogs!" has hurt my heart for weeks now. Thinking of all the abused pits we see on straw delivery and how his comment only stands to empower their abusers, I'm very happy that Richard Pryor's wife isn't letting him get away with it!
• P.S. For y'all who didn't know, Richard Pryor was an absolute angel to animals.
• Switching over to cooing, monkey mommies make googly eyes at their bambinos too!
• Always ending on a cute note, this little piggy thinks she's a doggie.

That's the haps, y'all. Catch ya next month!

Posted by Missy Lane

According to Science News magazine, researchers have discovered the first known vegetarian spider in Mexico. A jumping spider who dwells and dines in acacia trees, Bagheera kiplingi (Kip, to his friends) is a fly guy who passes on the usual bug buffet for leafy snacks snatched from neighboring ants. That's right—Kip is an itsy-bitsy pickpocket. Athletic, thanks no doubt to their healthy vegetarian diet, these covert little arachnids give patrolling ant guards the slip and then swoop down and steal their supply of protein and fat-packed nubbins sprouting from the tips of leaves.

An eight-legged vegetarian renegade taking on an army to nick some nubbins. Neat, huh? Actually, all spiders are pretty darn neat. They're also much more frightened of us than we are of them—and for good reason! Even on the rare occasions when spiders may try to bite to defend themselves, only a few can actually pierce human skin.

So what have we learned? Spiders are cool and deserve respect. Some vegetarians have eight legs. And when picnicking under an acacia tree in Mexico, never ever take your eyes off your salad. That said, here's Kip, my personal pick for the "Cutest Vegetarian Alive":

Posted by Amy Elizabeth

Just when we thought all the fur-clad skeletons had been pulled from Sharon Stone's closet, yet another story about animal abuse surfaces. In his new autobiography, actor Ernest Borgnine talks about working with Sharon Stone in her early, looking-less-like-a-scarecrow years. He writes that in Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing, Stone refused to do a scene with a spider unless the spider's pincers were ripped off—which the crew apparently did for her.

"It's not shocking to us that she displayed evil tendencies even when she was very young. It was her first starring role, and she chose to make a tiny insect an amputee. Perhaps she should change her name legally to Heart of Stone," says PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk.

I, for one, am appalled at the hypocrisy on Stone's part. She was willing to ask that this spider have his pincers ripped off his body, yet she exposed the surely terrified and disgusted crew on the set of Basic Instinct to bits of her that might give you the shivers. Shame on you, Heart of Stone.

And just for funsies, check out this fantastic picture that our friend Connie Talk created in response to Ingrid's letter asking Stone to get her brain scanned to see if Stone might be missing the empathy gene:

Posted by Sean Conner