DO NOT EAT!Something truly terrifying is happening over at Sadly, No! In a move that is being described by some as deeply courageous and by others as “totally the kind of thing that dorkwad Gavin would do”, blogger Gavin M is girding his loins for battle with a fearsome wingnut troll. He has done what so many of us in Lefty Blogistan would assuredly balk at. He has decided that in this circumstance, the only way to fight monsters is…to become one himself!

We had decided that in order to beat the execrable PJ, we would need to make his powers our own. I volunteered to become as thoughtless, as single-minded as he, as lacking in self-reflection and personal honor, as feckless and as immune to shame. I would howl mindlessly, fungally in the frigid vastness of space, chanting noisome hymns to my mad, deaf idiot-king, and gibbering streams of imprecations unto the planet called Earth.

I volunteered to eat of their lotus and become a wingnut.

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!

Following in the footsteps of Steve of the blog The Sneeze in his series, Steve, Don’t Eat It! (a hilarious, if stomach-turning series of adventures starring Steve and several utterly disgusting foodstuffs including “potted meat”, chocolate breast milk, and canned insect larvae), Gavin has procured two separate kinds of Cheetos and several liters of Mountain Dew “Game Fuel”, enlisted the aid of a doctor, and plunged headlong into the abyss.

From Part Two of this ground-breaking, courageous three-part series:

In the first installment, we explained why we had to risk this experiment.

A wingnut has formidable powers. Equal to any intellectual or moral challenge, he prevails through wrongness and bwaa-haaing. Attacks on him are turned magically against the attacker, or against a hapless bystander. He doesn’t get embarrassed or feel shame, or have to exercise or change his clothes like regular people. If a woman, he is protected from ridicule by hordes of angry male wingnuts; if a man, protected from sexual interest by an aroma of feet and hot dogs. The male’s characteristic face mullet isolates the mouth from the rest of the visage, giving the effect of a ventriloquist’s dummy where the ventriloquist is any of several AM talk-radio personalities or Daws Butler characters. While physical attacks are -3, spells such as Befuddle and Whine at Unfairness are 9 and above to hit, 5d4 damage…

Clearly the toxic cocktail of Wingnut foodstuffs had already begun to take hold because that last sentence is completely unintelligible to normal men. What does the doctor say?

Subject is displaying increased agitation and a propensity to pore over news sources, questioning the veracity of every photograph and news item. Subject’s clothing has been soiled with orange residue, and is emitting the odor of perspiration mingled with Axe body spray. Scores on the Treviño Integrity Inventory are beginning to decline, and intelligence as measured by the Noonan Aptitude Test is suffering as well. A Horowitz Assessment of blame transference was planned, but given the current condition of the subject, this may be unadvisable due to the risk to others. Subject will be closely monitored for further degeneration.

And degenerate he assuredly will. Before we know it, he’s going to look like this:

the fly (Fig 1-B: Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly”)

Courage, Gavin! We’ll all be waiting on pins and needles for Part Three.

God, I hope the process is reversible. Otherwise, we might have to take the poor sumbitch out behind the barn and put a bullet in him like Old Yeller. The world already has one Steven Den Beste, and frankly, that’s one too many.

Some cynics would argue that this whole thing is a stunt engineered to put Sadly, No! over the top as “Funniest Blog” in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Oh, ye of little faith. Why would anyone undergo such a hideous transformation just for the sake of winning some silly award?

Just in case, though, you know what to do.