I Perceive a Badly Regurgitated Balrog

I can't read the image source page, but I know this ain't Jesus facing 40 days and nights of temptation.

Do I think a single, original thought? Hardly, if I can avoid it. I didn't make up any of these words I'm using either, because you'd get things like mumphlibcshidullenx, which I find visually majestic and deserving of an equally impressive definition, but also difficult to break into pronounciation emphases for spelling bees. Also unfortunately, I don't know how to make umlauts in this font, because there are three.

So, instead I piggyback on the efforts of those more diligent, clearthinking, and expressive than myself, serving up the retreads with (at most) a pithy tip-in. I should be ashamed, except I am as vigilant as a flibbertigibbet can be about attribution so you can read this good stuff first-hand and know whom to thank. Today, it's Grumpy Old Bookman mostly. However, I do experience a certain twinkling joy in combining relevant and/or grossly unrelated items together in what is to me pleasing assemblage. On with the leftover slop:

1) From GOB, Galleycat covers two of my fave subjects: fake psychics and fake writers, and in this case- Oh, rapture!- they're the same person!

2) It also took Grumpy Old Bookman to notice that bad writing's World Series, the 2006 Bulwer-Lytton contest results are in.

Winner: Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Read all the best/worst entries here.

3) This item I found on my own, sort of. Well, Steve posted a link to it in the FBS forums, so ha! In one of those ignore-real-stuff 06/06/06 idiot-news stories, Colbert recognized that CNN had used artwork of a Tolkien-world denizen, the balrog, misidentifying it as Satan. Colbert said:
Now devils and balrogs are totally different. Devils are angels who refused to serve God and instead followed Satan into Hell. Balrogs are Maiar who refused to serve Eru and instead followed Morgoth into Thangorodrim.

Yea, but. As Tensor points out: The Thangorodrim were the mountains Morgoth raised above his underground fortress north of Beleriand, not the fortress itself, which was known as Angband...If we can't trust you to know Utumno from the Thangorodrim, why should we trust you any more than the MSM? Oooooh- Burn!

Update: Colbert makes the correction on Conan, but still doesn't give props to the peeps.