However, some people – some French people to be precise – don’t approve of Lindsay Lohan’s continued endorsement of animal fur. As such they’ve felt the need to attack Lindsay Lohan, and attack her with a starchy baking ingredient. too. To put it bluntly, someone threw flour at Lindsay Lohan this weekend, and it made Lindsay Lohan sad.

But it also made Lindsay Lohan’s boyfriend Samantha Ronson furious. Furious enough to dash to her computer and thrash out an angry dollop of screed about it on her blog. So it must be serious – Sam Ronson only uses her blog for important matters, like politics and private matters and reality TV shows and that time she totally just spent like six hours playing Guitar Hero until her hands were sore. You know, the big stuff.

As part-reptile – on her mother’s side, genealogy fans! – Lindsay Lohan feels the cold a lot more than regular human beings do. Well, to be fair it’s partly because of her reptilian ancestry and partly because Lindsay Lohan has never worn a pair of knickers in her entire life, but whatever. Lindsay Lohan gets cold a lot. That’s the point we’re trying to make.

And, as such, Lindsay Lohan relies on fur coats for warmth like nobody else. If she can get her hands on a fur coat, she’ll wear it. If she can’t get her hands on a fur coat, she’ll allegedly steal one from an idiot. And if Lindsay Lohan can’t steal a fur coat from an idiot, then this is what happens. And who wants to see that, now, really.

Anyway, French animal rights protesters don’t seem to understand this little fact about Lindsay Lohan. That’s why, when Lindsay and Samantha Ronson went to Paris recently, Lindsay Lohan ended up taking a flourbomb to the head while being called a ‘fur hag’ by local rights activists.

Personally, we think the French protesters were being a little bit ignorant – Lindsay Lohan doesn’t have the luxury of the overwhelmingly hairy armpits, faces and pubic areas that the French women enjoy, and she has to use animal fur to make up the difference. In that sense they’re mocking the disabled. But whatever.

Lindsay Lohan has yet to formally respond to the flour attack, but that hasn’t stopped Sam Ronson from hopping onto her MySpace blog to speak on her behalf. Well, we say ’speak’ but we actually mean ‘wail like a mental seagull falling down a liftshaft’. Sam wrote:

“It seems lately I am learning that there are too many people who put another species before their fellow man and that’s sad. I don’t wear fur, but I don’t think I have the right to attack those who do. No one has that right… The girl who threw it acted like an animal herself. I take that back, it’s an insult to animals to group her in with them, my dog is FAR more civilised than that person.”

Thank heavens that Sam Ronson took back that bit about the flour attacker being an animal. If Lindsay Lohan actually thought for a second that the girl really was an animal, then we have no doubt she’d have skinned her long ago. And we hear that walking around New York with a French cadaver draped around your neck is something of a faux pas these days. We think we saw that on Gok Wan.

We’ve scoured the internet looking for Black Umbrella stories, but we couldn’t find anything except for what the caller himself has posted.

Still, It’s quite interesting.

To start, we’ll let the half-cat man himself tell what the Black Umbrella Project is. This is as he phrases things on his own website Blackumbrellaproject.synthasite:

“From what I’ve been told The Black Umbrella Project was the name given to a research team of military scientists and doctors that was put together in the late 1960’s in the hopes of finding a way to turn human beings into more efficient weapons. They asked the question; who are the most feared killers on the planet? What, no matter how big or tough a man is, would cause him to run screaming in the other direction?

“They all pretty much came up with the same response…the vampires and werewolves of myth and legend, and the predators of the animal kingdom. Since you can’t very well give a wild animal instructions for an assassination or covert operation, they decided to try and combine human and animal to create their very own “vampires” and “werewolves” using the animals to do it. They isolated the desired traits in the animal genetics, and combined them with human DNA. They had created a “hybrid” between the two…a person with the abilities and senses of the animal. A predator with a brain.”

This all sounds like it’s straight out of a Hollywood storyboard – pretty cool. But as we already said – running ‘Black Umbrella Project’ through Google leads only to what Russell (the Coast to Coast caller) has posted himself. It doesn’t look good.

Still though – in his defense there is plenty posted on 100% real animal/human hybridisation. It wasn’t so long ago scientists actually did mix our genes with those of a cow. Check out this excerpt from an article posted on ABC.net on April 3, 2008:

“The researchers say they have hollowed out the egg cells of cattle, inserted human DNA to create a growing embryo, and then taken it apart to get embryonic stem cells.”

See that? That’s absolutely true. As far as the military is concerned though, they have no real use for soldiers that have to run around dragging gigantic utters behind them, although they would probably admit it would save them millions in milk cost on any given battlefield.

The New York Times carried a similar story about the proposed mixing of human and mouse genomes:

” A group of American and Canadian biologists is debating whether to recommend stem cell experiments that would involve creating a human-mouse hybrid. The goal would be to test different lines of human embryonic stem cells for their quality and potential usefulness in treating specific diseases. The best way to do that, some biologists argue, is to see how the cells work in a living animal. For ethical reasons, the test cannot be performed in people.

“But if the human stem cells are tested that way in mice, any animals born from the experiment would be chimeras — organisms that are mixtures of two kinds of cells — with human cells distributed throughout their body. Though the creatures would probably be mice with a few human cells that obey mouse rules, the outcome of such an experiment cannot be predicted. A mouse with a brain made entirely of human cells would probably discomfort many people, as would a mouse that generated human sperm or eggs.”

Did you read that last part? It said “a mouse that generated human sperm or eggs.” A situation like that would make it pretty hard to play catch with dear old dad in anything but the literal sense. The best story – also 100% true, was provided by Russell on his own website. It’s from National Geographic, and it’s terrifying:

“Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003 successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells.

“In Minnesota last year researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human blood flowing through their bodies. And at Stanford University in California an experiment might be done later this year to create mice with human brains. Scientists feel that, the more humanlike the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or possibly growing “spare parts,” such as livers, to transplant into humans.”

There you have it. That’s three concrete pieces of evidence that several human-animal hybrids have legitimately been created, and two concrete pieces of evidence that a fourth experiment is in talks. In the case of the rabbits, it said the Chinese let them develop for several days before destroying them. What would the end result be if a full gestation period were allowed?

Russell himself claimed to be part cat – created in a petri dish and told he was an orphan, if we’re not mistaken. And he has chest x-rays to prove it. He said he’d get these x-rays to George Noory, but we have no idea if he ever did or not. So little being available about the alleged ‘Black Umbrella Project’ seems pretty dubious.

But it seems it’s really not far-fetched at all.

Frightening.

But not any more. Now we’ve seen this instructional video on how to win at street knife fights, we’re going to be unstoppable. And you can, too, if you watch it. We’re no experts, but we’d say that this is probably the best murder tutorial presented by a bearded, ponytailed man called Animal and his even more terrifyingly demented sidekick who probably doesn’t even have a name that we’ve ever seen.