Some of your entries were good, some were bad, and some were very, very ugly. We whittled it down to ten. Vote for the one you like best and it just might win. We're still going to pick our favorite anyway—this isn't American Idol, this is the real world—but popular opinion just might sway us. The poll is at the bottom. Enjoy!

"And I'm Spent..." by Kimsama

"I don't know I think it's supposed to move" by Colander

Opposites Attract by Anonymous

Balloon Boy 2 by Anonymous

"If only they had read the contract they signed, Ivanka and Jared would have been spared the humiliation of being kicked off their own dance floor for 'sexual bending.'" by Kimsama

"Such a charming wedding tradition. Imagine, though, the poors have to do it with cake!" by Kimsama

Monster Mash by Foster Kamer*

*not actually eligible to win the cash

"It's subtle..." by Anonymous

Trump Soho by Anonymous

Bachelor Party by Anonymous

MP Valerie Boyer and 50 other lawmakers this week introduced a bill that would require "digitally enhanced" images to come complete with the following warning: "Retouched photograph aimed at changing a person's physical appearance." Explained Boyer:

These photos can lead people to believe in a reality that does not actually exist, and have a detrimental effect on adolescents. Many young people, particularly girls, do not know the difference between the virtual and reality, and can develop complexes from a very young age.

Everyone's then dragged into an ugly, puke-scented world of binging and purging. It's not good.

If this law passes, a failure to warn consumers could come with a $54,930 fine or half the advertisement's price. And, because reality can be bent in other ways, the MPs want the law to cover political campaigns, as well.

We wonder how President Nicolas Sarkozy will feel about all of this. Paris Match recently airbrushed his tummy to hide the flab he revealed on a canoe trip. Because no one, especially Paris Match, wants to see a President's spare tire.

But, another question here is whether people really want to see realistic models? Probably not, but that doesn't mean they want to see emaciated waifs, either. So, in the end, this is a good move, however melodramatic. But how would the law be monitored? Literal fashion police?

Also, what of celebrity endorsements? Can you imagine if they didn't airbrush Madonna's Louis Vuitton ads? It would be a nightmare.

It really is worth reading Torontoist's loving exposé of City Living, proof that success in the media can be found anywhere, anyhow. Maybe publisher and founder Patricia Binns was inspired by her very own self?

Charming of exquisite beauty, articulate, cultured, Patricia E. Binns created a magazine that would stay on coffee tables longer than any other and she named it City Living Magazine because it was devoted to all that was distinctive, beautiful and elegant.

Disturbing.

According to the LA Times, the perpetrator is a 20-year-old University of Chicago Illinois student named Firas Alkhateeb who made the image during his winter break from school using PhotoShop, naturally:

Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.

Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.

Alkhateeb says that he then posted the image to his Flickr page where it sat largely unnoticed for a couple of months. Then an unknown individual found the photo, removed all of the references to Time, added the word "socialism" across the bottom of the image and posted it all over the streets of Los Angeles. The original image was found on Alkhateeb's Flickr by the LA Times after they were tipped off to it by a reader, but he closed the account after they contacted him because he wanted to "lay low" in the "very, very liberal" city from which Barack Obama's political career was sprung.

"After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," Alkhateeb said. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him."

"I abstained from voting in November," he wrote in an e-mail. "Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state." If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

So yeah, good luck wrapping your brain around this one.

Kansas City's alt-weekly The Pitch has the scans, and points out that depicting Muhammad is something of a no-no in certain parts of the Islamic world, especially when he's clearly depicted as subordinate to some guy in a blazer. Shouldn't Scientologists know better than anyone what can happen when you screw around with violent, angry, religious zealots who brook no dissent and will stop at nothing to defend their twisted authoritarian cult?

PDN finds telltale evidence that the photographer, Edgar Martins, digitally reproduced parts of his photos—things as small as leaves and sections of trees. Which raises the question, "Why bother?" Especially when the magazine went out of its way to say in its introduction to the photo series that Martins "creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation." Seems...dumb.

Adam Gurno, the Metafilter user who was the first one to call bullshit on the photos, is getting some attention himself. Good for him.
[Pic: PDN]

People on Metafilter originally called bullshit on the Edgar Martins photos. Here is a fun animated gif showing maybe some Photoshopping in action! Points to the NYT for acting quickly. They still have nothing on the twin towers of Photoshop terrorism, on Seventeen magazine and the Iranian government.

Real Estate, destroying us even in its death.

Which it probably is! But the Internet is full of fake shit, which people mostly (if they're smart) just ignore. Last July, when Iran docotored a missile test photo to make it look 33% scarier, it ended up on the home page of the New York Times, a place that has a general disregard for fake shit.

As near as we can tell, this crowd photo first showed up on a blog belonging to an Iranian photographer (that's because one of the only English words on the site is "Photographer"). And now Boing Boing and Gizmodo and DailyKos and everyone else is reprinting it as if it is a revelation that has effectively changed the debate about Iran and its theocratic regime.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Of course, we also know nothing about this particular image. Was it printed in a national newspaper? Dropped in a leaflet? Ginned up on someone's home computer? Who knows! And, probably who cares. You don't need a clumsily manipulated photo to know that the Iranian regime engages in propaganda.

Either way, this little episode is not really a big deal. Except, it's kind of depressing to see the same knee-jerk Internet hysteria that gripped the U.S. during last year's presidential election (backwards B!) now become The Way We Make Social Media Matter Now.

All the attention to the Iranian crowd photo has overwhelmed the site it was originally posted on. Or Iranian security has taken it down. But here's a screencap of the text describing it. Anyone who can translate, please let us know in comments what he/she said about it:

Update: Commenter MarkFL offers this kinda translation of the text:

It's basically saying that this image was published on the front page of كيهان (Kayhan), which is one of the main Iranian newspapers. Kayhan is very loyal to Ahmadinejad, so it's not really a surprise that they would try to make the number of his supporters larger.

Here's Wikipedia (because I'm not even going to pretend like I'm a sudden Iranian media expert) explanation of Kayhan, which says the paper is controlled by the Iranian government.

Another update: An Iranian reader kindly sends in this translation:

At the very top of the paper: "People's Support in Tehran for Ahmadinejad"
And main text: "And another interesting debate which was about to be hidden from our eyes. Yesterday in Keyhan paper (state paper) in the first page had this photograph and in this manner he tried to publicise a massive support for himself. It's obvious that the image must have had a white margin around it which they decided to fill with protesters. I hope that we always move in the direction of truth with eyes on precision even if we feel our interests are threatened."

Picture on left: the original. Picture on right: the actual cover of Toronto's "Summer Fun Guide." The juxtaposition is just...yea. The city's spokesman responded to skeptical questioning like so:

"That's an interesting conversation," Mr. Sack said. "This does not look like a nondescript white family, it looks maybe Latino."

Well then.
[National Post via Adrants]

Videogum smartly invited its readers to use the magic of electronic photoshopping and place Heidi and Spencer in situations you wouldn't normally expect, such as maybe reading a Cheesecake Factory menu without having to move their lips. Users stepped up. Some good ones::

Hahah it's funny because I wish these things would happen to them for real! Photoshop is about dreams, guys.

[Videogum]

[Thanks to our astute commenters for their assistance with this matter]

1. Her skin has been lightened.
2. The skin tone on her thighs has been evened out.
3. Her arm is thinner.
4. Her hips have been shrunk.
5. Her waist has been shrunk.
6. Her thighs have been shrunk.
7. Her butt has been shrunk.
8. Her boobs have been shrunk.
9. Her sleeve has been smoothed out.
10. The color of her dress has been lightened.
11. The background color has been lightened.
12. Her pantyline has been reshaped.
13. The top of her hair has been evened out.
14. And just a leeetle bit of nipple has been erased.

Add any extras in the comments, obsessives.
[Photo-morphing illustration via Celebslam.]

He has more than 5,000 orders for the spring version of the hat, selling for $179 apiece. That's an $895,000 Aretha windfall, folks!

Commerce is ephemeral, though, and Aretha's hat really belongs to the ages. Franklin has lent the original hat to the Smithsonian, and afterwards, it will rest in Obama's future presidential library.

On the Internet, it's still going strong! (Gay men love it, because they all like to think they are strong, proud black women like Aretha on the inside, except without the racism or sexism or loss of actual privilege.) A parody Twitter feed for Aretha's hat is still posting 140-character messages direct from "the haid." And through the magic of Photoshop, the hat can be one with us all:

Oh no! Now Shepard Fairey will sue us and everyone else on the Internet!

Rod Blagojevich!

Did you know that President George W. Bush wore the hat while getting briefed about 9/11? True, except not!

Portland Mayor Sam Adams pays a heavy, felted price for the Beau Breedlove scandal!

Aretha's hat injured Dick Cheney's back! Except it didn't!

(Photoshop of Arethafied Chief Justice John Roberts through the power of Jameth; others via Buzzfeed and Political Irony and everywhere, because this is basically one of those Internet picture meme things)

Not only does the accompanying story not mention the photo fiction, but "Suri & Shiloh's Playdate" is actually an alleged plan for an alleged playdate, sometime in the future, allegedly. Hey wait, OK! magazine is just pure crap. Surprise!

And would you like to hear the bit of news that makes this really and truly astounding? Just yesterday, OK!'s UK edition was forced to print an apology to Victoria Beckham for doing the exact same type of Photoshop job on last month's cover there. Ha, incredible! Just incredible.

On the positive side, OK! finally hired a promoted someone already on staff to be the new editor. Congratulations and best of luck, Katie Caperton!

[This Photoshop hackery also pointed out yesterday by Dodai at Jezebel]

The constantly changing versions of the events surrounding Jett's death have gripped the public's imagination because it is so congruent with the story of his father's life. John Travolta would have us believe that he is normal; that he is not a member of a crazy cult; and that he is straight. At least two of those things are false.

Let's count the inconsistencies, which extend back long before Jett's tragic passing:

• Jett's parents, John Travolta and Kelly Preston, adherents of Scientology, have long maintained that Jett suffered from Kawasaki disease, an immune disorder which causes inflammation of blood vessels. But Kawasaki disease is not linked to seizures, according to medical experts.
• When they weren't blaming Kawasaki disease, they publicly maintained Jett's health was fine, even though many in Hollywood believed Jett suffered from autism. And suddenly, after his death, we learn that Jett wasn't fine; rather, he was constantly supervised by two nannies and a baby monitor.
• Autism would explain Jett's disturbingly affectless appearance in public; about a third of people with autism also suffer seizures. Travolta and Preston are followers of Scientology, which believes conditions like autism are all in the victim's head — that they are "degraded beings" requiring "purification." Preston has said in the past that Jett underwent a Scientology purification, which reportedly involves high doses of niacin.
• Police in the Bahamas said Jett, who was found unconscious late on New Year's Day in his parents' condo and died at a hospital shortly afterward, had struck his head, and reported blood on the scene. The nanny who found him, Jeff Kathrein, a Scientologist wedding photographer hired by Jett's parents, John Travolta and Kelly Preston, was once spotted in an intimate kiss with Jett's father. Police said Jett was alone for hours, after last being seen the evening of January 1; a family lawyer maintained that Kathrein, who slept eight feet away from Jett, found him almost right away.
• A funeral director hired by the family said there was no sign of a bruise and that Jett's body "looked great." The cause of death on Jett's death certificate was listed simply as a seizure.
• Two chartered planes and a police hearse, ostensibly carrying Jett's remains, waited on the tarmac Monday, as Bahamian police blocked access. It was a ruse: Jett's body was being cremated at the time, and the family planned to fly his ashes back to Florida on Tuesday.

Jett, in reality, had a rounder face. But so what? The need to airbrush away Jett's chin is the perfect metaphor for the pathetic misdirections and deceptions the Travoltas have engaged in. What they're covering up is not worth covering up. This is not some grand crusade for the truth — which in the end is the simple and tragic tale of a teen boy dying too young. The lies, big and small, that Travolta tells aren't for Jett. They're for him to maintain his fake public image. He asks us, out of politeness or gullibility, to swallow it whole.

Yes, everyone wants to let the family grieve. Let them grieve — but Jett Travolta is the only one who should lie in peace.

Venderbilt's artit rep Matthew Paul Bogosian blogged about how the "Indian looking woman has scars on her face and facial blemishes" (click the link for a larger version of the picture)/.

The white girl has no such facial flaws, even though she's in high school or something, as evidenced by the lockers behind her.

Obviously Jawbone is just trying to sell its product: A Bluetooth headset that lets you talk to ethnic poors while doing more important things. Nothing says "Third World" like unlasered facial flaws!

[via Daring Fireball]

[via Guanabee]