This video, from the CD 9 race in Maricopa County, is one of the weirdest campaign ads I've ever seen; it's second only to the wacky "Demon Sheep" from Californian Carly Fiorina's failed 2010 US Senate campaign in abject strangeness.

CD 9 candidate Republican Vernon Parker's campaign went to a strange, LSD-tinged place with this ad, photoshopping his opponent, Kyrsten Sinema, as a dirty, paganistic, anti-American hippie. Check it out below.

The Phoenix New Times has a few things to say about it, of course:

From this ad, we can conclude that his Democratic opponent, Kyrsten Sinema, is running on flower power, she doesn't like war, and toward the end of the ad, it's said that Sinema has "promoted hatred" toward the U.S. of A.

"And perhaps the weirdest of all, Sinema participated in Pagan rituals, singing and spiraling during an anti-war protest," the non-hippie narrator says in the ad.

If you watch cable television in the area, you've probably seen the similar ad from a pro-Parker political-action committee, which is set in outer space.

Like that ad, and most political ads, really, there are a few misleading things about the hippie ad.

When it says Sinema described herself as a "socialist," she actually described herself as a "Prada socialist," which she explained has to do with clothes and accessories, or something like that. Also, it'd be OK if she's "too extreme for central Phoenix," because that's not where her district is.

Arizona politics are great, right?

[NOTE: The headline and story were edited to fix a misspelled name.]

This is why booze and rare birds don't mix.

Two University of California-Berkley law students were arrested in Las Vegas last Friday for allegedly decapitating an exotic bird inside the wildlife refuge at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino.

Eric Cuellar, 24, and Justin Teixeira, 24, have been charged with — I didn't know there was such a specific charge, but then again, it is Vegas — the willful, malicious torture or killing of wildlife, according to the Las Vegas Sun. That's a felony, boys and girls.

The two self-professed law students were seen chasing a "14-year-old helmeted guinea fowl" into a tree-covered area of the Flamingo's courtyard, which hotel guests and anyone randomly coming in off the street can stroll through. Though not seen on surveillance video, a witness allegedly saw the two men walk out of the trees carrying the bird's body, and it's severed head.

I no longer feel that bad at all about any of the ridiculous things I've ended up doing in Vegas.

In honor of October being National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the pornography streaming website Pornhub has announced that they'll be donating one cent for every thirty views of "breast-related videos" to the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

The Komen Foundation, for some strange reason, has decided to refuse this money.

I'm just as shocked as you are.

According to the Huffington Post, the Komen Foundation has told them, via email:

Susan G. Komen for the Cure is not a partner of pornhub.com. We will not accept donations from this organization and have asked them to stop using our name.

To their credit, Pornhub apparently still wishes to donate the funds to another organization. Again, from Huffington Post:

Unfortunately, we have had to change our targeted beneficiary. As such, Pornhub.com is now calling on all breast cancer foundations to come forward and be considered as the recipient of this cash donation.

Classy job there, Pornhub. Classy job.

[Huffington Post - Pornhub.com Donates To Susan G. Komen When Users Watch Breast-Related Videos This Month]

This is handy bit of information for those who might consider themselves follicularly challenged — according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, men with shaved heads are perceived to be more masculine and dominant than those with hair.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Wharton management lecturer Albert Mannes conducted three experiments to test peoples' perceptions of men with shaved heads. In one of the experiments, he showed 344 subjects photos of the same men in two versions: one showing the man with hair and the other showing him with his hair digitally removed, so his head appears shaved.

In all three tests, the subjects reported finding the men with shaved heads as more dominant than their hirsute counterparts. In one test, men with shorn heads were even perceived as an inch taller and about 13% stronger than those with fuller manes. The paper, "Shorn Scalps and Perceptions of Male Dominance," was published online, and will be included in a coming issue of journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

The study found that men with thinning hair were viewed as the least attractive and powerful of the bunch, a finding that tracks with other studies showing that people perceive men with typical male-pattern baldness—which affects roughly 35 million Americans—as older and less attractive. For those men, the solution could be as cheap and simple as a shave.

The story goes on to talk about how baldness plays into perceived traits of dominance, and how some balding businessmen made the cue-ball look a part of their personal brands.

For more, check out WSJ.com.

Before we jump in, let's give some praise to Valerie Cavazos at KGUN Channel 9 for her series on the Rose Hamway retaliation case and the Tucson Unified School District special education issues she's unearthed in the process. So far, Cavazos at KGUN and Weekly World Central are the only Tucson media outlets to dig a little deeper.

If you haven't had a chance, take a look at Cavazos' work on the KGUN website under Education Watch. And you can get to our work here. A third Weekly story with a parent interview runs this week, followed by an additional parent story and a story on the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights' process.

So let's get to the matter at hand with a question: With this body of work out there on the Hamway story, what is the point of a recent KOLD piece on TUSD's "Exceptional Education" department that not once mentions the issues raised by the school psychologist in her complaint?

While it's true, not every special ed student or parent in TUSD has had the same experiences as the 14 parents Hamway helped during her short time in the district, this story only takes a small look at a program, a couple of parents, and makes the district's program seem like a sought-after gem it must keep hidden.

The truth on special education, its successes and its difficulties is somewhere in between both stories. Nonetheless, Hamway's issues should be alarming, because there are other schools and many other kids who didn't have a Hamway intervene on their behalf or help parents' file much-needed OCR complaints.

Point is, Hamway isn't an anomaly.

Chuck Norris, action film star and the man responsible for creating giraffes after having kicked a horse in the chin, has taken to YouTube, begging for the "30 million evangelical Christians" who sat out last Election Day to make it to the polls this year.

Norris (who is reportedly able to speak braille,) and his wife, Gina, spend nearly a minute reciting quotations from Ronald Reagan and Edmund Burke, intended to inspire voters to make sure that Obama is run on a rail back to Chicago, where, presumably, he would continue conspiring to make America a socialist paradise from an underground lair below the Shedd Aquarium.

As you may know already, the 72-year-old Norris (who is said to be alive today because the Grim Reaper is too afraid to collect him) is no stranger to involving himself in political discussion, going on record in 2009 to claim that, had Obamacare existed 2000 years ago, Mary of Nazareth would have had to abort Jesus Christ.

We interrupt your post-election coverage to bring you this:

Holy crap.

The Venezuelan Poodle Moth has the distinction of being both something that I would run away in terror from, as well as something that I want to capture and train to battle other frightening creatures with inexplicable elemental powers.

Below the jump, the story behind the moth's Internet fame.

Sad, strange news out of Big Sky Country. A man dressed in a Ghillie camouflage suit, designed to look like a big pile of grass and sticks, was killed after being hit by two cars on a Montana highway on Sunday night.

That's the sad part. The strange part?

From CNN.com (emphasis added):

(The victim, Randy Lee Tenley) was "well into the driving lane," and according to his companions he was "attempting to incite a sighting of Bigfoot — to make people think they had seen a Sasquatch," (state trooper Jim Schneider) said in the KECI report.

According to police, a 15-year-old driver struck Tenley with her car, a second car swerved to miss him, while the third car ran over him.

Apparently, no one had called that evening to report any Bigfoot sightings, which means that not only did a man die for no good reason, he didn't even accomplish what he hoped to do with his final actions. Bad times.

What four words would you guess the English speaking world most often uses to complete this question?

Why is Arizona so...?

Yep, according to a super-scientific survey of Google's auto-complete feature, blogger Renee DiResta developed a map compiling the top responses for the question "Why is [state] so...?" and of course, the top responses for Arizona include racist, crazy, and hot. To be fair, most states, when using this particular metric, don't come across so great: Tennessee is stupid, Utah is weird, Pennsylvania is haunted, apparently. However, it would be nice if something positive came through, but at least we beat out Arkansas, a state so defined by being poor, that no other auto-complete suggestion is even made on the Googler's behalf.

Now that Arizona allows Bible classes in public schools, maybe it's a good idea to think about what that curriculum could look like.

Let's hope that no one takes an interest in any of the textbooks used in Louisiana voucher schools. The folks at Mother Jones looked at those schools and their textbooks from such great education publishers as the Bob Jones University Press.

Lessons include how dinosaurs and humans hung out; dragons were real; God used the Trail of Tears to bring Indians to Jesus; Slave masters were cool; the KKK was A-OK; Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson were hacks; gay people "have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists;" and globalization is a precursor to rapture.