When he's not getting slammed for sopping up the last of Katie Holmes' placenta with a thick slice of Italian bread (mildly exaggerated),  Tom Cruise is being scrutinised for his movie promoting antics, like racing around NYC in a wide array of vehicles – none of which is a jetpack (that's what we scrutinise).

Not everyone's against Tom Cruise, though. He's still got legions of loyal fans just waiting for a call to arms. They're sitting by their phones with Days of Thunder playing again while mindlessly flipping through Dianetics, silently wishing it had more pictures. Of Tom Cruise.

Well that call to arms happened just a few days ago, and all the computer literate Cruise-ites responded quickly, silently, and without mercy – which loosely translated means they massively stuffed an online poll held by Parade magazine.

Parade magazine is a ponderous magazine indeed. When they're not asking us questions like "Who wants a Lockhorns/ Marmaduke crossover?", they're asking us if last year's apparent fall from grace was Tom Cruise's fault, or that of the media – we wanted to know too. 84% of the responses blamed the media.  

In any poll, 84% for either side is a questionable turnout – so Parade took a dubious closer look. It ends up 14,000 votes (out of around 18,000) came from just ten computers. Not only that, 8,400 came from one computer alone. Middle-aged lonely women can be a powerful backing force – did you hear that Army? Alexis Collado, a Parade magazine publicist, said:

"It seems these folks resorted to extraordinary measures to try to portray Tom in a positive light for the Parade.com survey. There is even a chance they wrote a special 'bot' program for the sole purpose of skewing the results, rather than casting the votes by hand on a computer."

The results were thrown out.

So who did it then?  Of all the Cruise-crazed fans in the world, who's most likely behind it? It wasn't Goose – he's dead. It wasn't Tom's new baby – as she's only recently gained computer access. Was it Cruise himself? Probably not, as he's been too busy not ever jetpacking anywhere – what a turkey! We just wish someone would step forward and fess up – we need to know!

We'd also like to know why our office mouse recently has a melted left clicker, and why we all hope to one day spoon Tom Cruise in unison – in a straight way though, like at baseball camp.

Read more:

Parade: Tom Cruise Poll Was Skewed – Fox

[story by Shawn Lindseth]