Thank God.

So it was a humor piece after all. I kinda thought it was hinky.

(And thanks, North Denver News, for your "I'm smarter than you, haw-haw." It just goes to show how corrupted the news has become, that a humor piece is run in what is assumed to be a serious newspaper, and people, being used to stories of "extreme makeovers," fall for it, and then the newspaper basically preens itself on being too smart for the room. Egad, how I hate the modern climate of snark and "nothing is serious or sacred.")

Oh, and nice slam at Fox News there. I think the real "faux" news is your paper, folks.

I don't know. It irritates me that we live in a world where (a) we're so inured to the sort of stupid self-mutilating things people do to themselves that we don't immediately see through a story like this and (b) that a newspaper thinks it's really funny and clever for having suckered people.

Boy who cried "Wolf," much?

(I will say, in my defense, as I was driving out for my day's errands, I did think about the story and was caught up short - "how can they 'remove and replace' a person's fingernails? They're a growing tissue from a nailbed and screwing with the nailbed will make the nail stop growing. It's gotta be a fake." Other than that - well, what do they expect, that we're all knowledgeable about the fine anatomy of the hand? I mean, I'm a biologist (but not a human physiologist) and I have only a dim comprehension of how all the tendons and muscles interconnect.)