After reading about Christina Ricci's continued refusal to stop wearing dead animals (including, for God's sake, reindeer), Dodger, the owner of Ricci's biggest fansite, replaced all of the site's information about her—including more than 900 photos—with PETA anti-fur ads and the following inscription:

When E! Online's gossip columnist heard about the story, he immediately contacted Ricci's publicist, who was evidently all dismissive and uppity about it … until she found out that Dodger's page is the second thing that comes up on Google and a bunch of other search engines if you search for Christina Ricci. You can read E!'s take on the story here, and check out Dodger's powerful message to Christina here.

Meggan, a PETA activist in California, just sent in some great ads she made for peta2.com. This one changed my world a little bit.

This one's for you die-hard Law & Order: CI fans (and closet Wonder Years fans) out there: We spent some time hanging out outside Vogue in New York this week, with some information for the magazine about their continued fur promotions, when who should show up but the lovely Olivia d'Abo? Anyway, I thought that was pretty cool, especially since she's in one of my all-time favorite movies, Kicking and Screaming. Check it out—here she is at the Vogue Christmas party:

So we just heard from Christina Aguilera that she has replaced the fox-fur stole she wears on stage with a faux-fur version after receiving a letter from PETA. Apparently, she had specifically asked her tour's costume designer, Roberto Cavalli, to only use fake fur, but in a press release to Women’s Wear Daily, Cavalli bragged that he had sent her a stole made from real, dead white foxes.

It may be that Roberto Cavalli was still sulking after PETA members disrupted his Milan fashion show this fall and decided to take it out on some foxes, but we're very grateful to Christina for doing the right thing from the start: After PETA VP Dan Mathews emailed Aguilera the Cavalli item and a link to Stella McCartney’s video exposé showing how foxes are anally electrocuted for their fur, he got an immediate response saying that Christina is “very upset” because she “only ever wears fake fur.” The fox stole has already been replaced with a faux-fur version, and the tour is continuing in Europe 100 percent fox-free. Thank you, Christina!

Shaq's sensitive hands

So, after a few months of getting used to their new synthetic ball, the NBA has decided they need to switch back to balls made from cows next year. Because Steve Nash and Shaq didn't like the way the new balls grazed their delicate hands. This has been tough for us sports fans at PETA, because while we were delighted with the NBA's decision to use nonleather balls (as the NCAA has for years), we're also well aware of just how sensitive the hands of some NBA players are—much softer than college players' hands—and we'd hate for Nash, Shaq, or LeBron to ruin their manicures.

But we have a compromise that will save Shaq's skin and cowskins at the same time: Today, PETA's Campaign Manager Dan Shannon sent an open letter to NBA players, offering a lifetime supply of cruelty-free hand cream to anyone who's willing to give the composite ball another shot. You can read the letter here, and if you have any extra sensitive-skin hand cream lying around, you might want to send it along to some of these guys c/o the NBA. We just hate to see them suffer.

This video is pretty cute. It's an award-winning PSA that a PETA member gave us to help encourage people to get their pets spayed or neutered. I'm not entirely sure where the narrator's odd accent is from, but I feel like it adds to the overall effect.

On a vaguely related note, when I first got Princess Cuteyface (she just came in through my window one day), the vet told me that she was at least a few months pregnant. This freaked me out because it was already kind of a big step for me to be committing in the first place, and, I don't know, everything was just happening so fast. Fortunately for both of us, it was a false alarm—turns out she's just a very big girl. Plenty of Princess C to go round. Anyway, I have a new vet now.

My good friend and colleague Joel Bartlett just started watching Veronica Mars, starring the lovely Kristen Bell, who was voted the world's Sexiest Vegetarian this year. Joel, who has never been one to let daily life get in the way of an obsession (see, for instance, his popsicle-stick castle), has not stopped talking about his newfound love for one second all week. So, in an effort to appease him, and for those of you who didn't catch Kristen on Jay Leno in, like, July, here's a video of her talking about Veronica Mars, PETA, and some other good stuff with Jay and our old friend Kevin Nealon. As Joel says of the video,

If you caught the new episode of CSI on Thursday, you'll know that the story involved a murder at a "poultry manufacturing plant." Meaning, like, a murder of a human. But there was also plenty of footage used in the show from PETA undercover investigations of chicken slaughterhouses. We're already big CSI fans because of our friend Jorja Fox, but hooray for the number-one show in the world taking some time to let people know exactly what goes on behind the scenes in factory farms.

If you didn't catch that episode, you're probably going to have to wait until this season comes out on DVD. Sorry about that—next time I'll mention this sort of thing before the episode airs.

Look out, ladies and gentlemen, here comes Madonna. In a £35,000 chinchilla fur coat. For those of you doing the math, that means Madge needs to have more than 60 furry animals electrocuted just to keep her warm on a Wednesday night—which means that if you're planning on being anywhere near her U.K. residence this Christmas, you might want to hide your babies and your family pets. The story, such as it is, is that Madonna was spotted last Wednesday at a Mayfair restaurant called Cecconi's positively drowning in the dead animals, which had been sewn together for her by the designers at Fendi.

Why would anyone with a shred of decency ever consider wearing such a thing? The prevailing theory around here is that when it comes to making headlines, Madonna is just too old to flash her beaver like Britney Spears, so she brought out the chinchilla. (Oh, zing! See what I did there?)

Anyway, we fired off a letter to her this morning to ask her to just for God's sake, stop it, and you can read that here. If you'd like to let her know how you feel yourself, you can contact her using the following information:

Liz Rosenberg (Madonna's US publicist)
liz.rosenberg@wbr.com

Barbara Charone (Madonna's UK publicist)
bc@mbcpr.com

Up until a couple of months ago, I had never heard of POM Wonderful, but apparently they're this big company that sells pomegranate juice for like three times what any sane person should pay for a beverage that has no known alcoholic effects. If I'm going to pay five bucks for a drink, I want some kind of assurance that I'll be blathering incoherently or trying to breakdance by the time I'm finished with it, but all POM does is turn your mouth red.

Anyway, the reason POM is on my radar all of a sudden (despite the fact that I'm clearly not part of its target market) is that—in a twisted attempt to hide the fact that their juice is just some kind of glorified Grape Drink in a fancy bottle, the fine folks at POM have been asphyxiating mice and torturing rabbits so they can make claims about the juice's health properties.

Pam vs. Pom