ohmidog!

A woman who didn’t want to tell a TV news team “how she felt” about her daughter being shot threw a rock at them, shook a baseball bat at them, and then sent her dogs after reporter Abbey Niezgoda of ABC 6 News in Rhode Island.

The crew was on assignment in Providence, seeking to interview the mother of a teenage girl who was shot at a graduation party over the weekend.

Instead of politely declining to speak on-camera, Melissa Lawrence hurled a rock at ABC6 photographer Marc Jackson, then went inside for a baseball bat. Seconds later, she told her dogs to attack.

As Lawrence shouted commands, the dogs chased Niezgoda into a backyard a few houses away.

Niezgoda was a treated for a bite on her forearm.

Melissa Lawrence was charged with two counts of felony assault with a dangerous weapon.

Lawrence’s daughter, who was shot in the lower back, has since been released from the hospital.

The Oklahoma tornado victim whose missing dog emerged from the rubble in the middle of a TV news interview may get another prayer answered.

Barbara Garcia’s Scottish terrier, Bowser, was spotted under a pile debris by the news team interviewing her after she lost her home in Moore.

“Well, I thought that God had just answered one prayer, to let me be OK,” Garcia said after freeing her dog. “But he answered both of them.”

Now, those touched by the scene, which went viral on the Internet, have donated enough money to make a new home a possibility.

A fund set up to help her get back on her feet and under a new roof was approaching $40,000 as of Monday night, just $10,000 short of its $50,000 goal.

“We’re still looking for a corporate sponsor who will match funds donated, so we can make the dream of building a new home for Barbara and Bowser a reality. Not only did Barbara lose her home, her daughter did as well,” said Erin DeRuggiero who’s spearheading the fund drive.

According to CBS News, the clip of Bowser emerging from the rubble has been viewed more than 3 million times.

“All of the other things … you know, one by one they can be replaced. A lot of it wasn’t even important, but I couldn’t replace him,” Garcia said in an interview.

Garcia didn’t have homeowner’s insurance.

“I was really just compelled, personally, to do something,” said DeRuggiero. In the first five days of the fundraiser, more than $35,000 was raised.

“Before the CBS piece aired, I didn’t know Barbara Garcia personally, but was incredibly moved by her story and of her reunion with her sweet dog,” DeRuggiero wrote on the Gofundme page. “… My goal is to ease her recovery, raise enough money to help her start to rebuild or relocate her life, and above all else, to show her that ‘life in the big city’ also means helping one another, even from 1500 miles away.”

Garcia says she’s overwhelmed by the support: “I didn’t know I was that important. Really, truly, I didn’t. I just thank everybody,” Garcia said in a follow-up interview with CBS News.

The “Build Barbara Garcia a Home” fundraising page can be found here.

An Oklahoma teenager has admitted he shot and killed a pit bull with a bow and arrow and posted a photo of its corpse on Facebook, but says the dog appeared aggressive.

Caisen Green, 18, who had fled his hometown with his mother after outrage over the Facebook post led to threats, was interviewed Tuesday  night by Cherokee County Undersheriff Jason Chennault.

Chennault said he will add Green’s statement to his report and deliver it to the District Attorney’s Office today. Prosecutors will then decide whether Green will be charged, the Tahlequah Daily Press reported.

Green told sheriff’s officials that the dog was one of two that wandered onto his family’s property as he was practicing with his bow and arrow.

“The pit and a smaller, non-pit bulldog came into the yard,” said Chennault. “The pit bulldog looked diseased.” Green told Chennault that when he tried to scare the dogs away the pit bull growled and began to move toward him. He said the dog ran about 30 yards after he shot him with an arrow.

Green posted a Facebook photo of the dead pit bull with the message, “For all you Pit lovers out there, here’s what happens when one shows up around my house.”

Lou Hays, who volunteers with the Humane Society of Cherokee County said Green bragged about killing when he was contacted about the post, and didn’t indicate that the animal was causing any trouble .

Hays said HSCC would push for Green to be prosecuted and receive community service at the local shelter.

Green’s post was removed after calls, emails and faxes flooded into Cherokee County authorities over the weekend, many of them demanding he be arrested and expelled from school, some of them making threats.

Chennault said his meeting with Green and his attorney had to be set up at an “undisclosed location” because of the threats made toward Green and his family.

That sound you hear is the collective bile rising in the throats of hundreds of thousands of Michael Vick-haters, who — if his new clothing line and new book aren’t distressing enough — will surely blow their tops, or lunch, upon hearing this news.

Michael Vick says maybe he’ll get a dog.

And, worse yet, at the end of this month — when the no-dog clause of his sentence for dogfighting expires — he legally can.

Vick makes the comment tonight, during an interview with Piers Morgan on CNN.

Above is a segment of what will be airing (with apologies for the 30 second commercial).

In the interview, we’re told, the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback “speaks candidly about his fall from grace in 2007 when he was implicated and convicted of participating in the operation an illegal dog fighting ring.”

In his new book “Michael Vick: Finally Free, An Autobiography,” Vick expresses his love for dogs, despite taking part in training them, killing them and watching them fight to the death.

As part of his sentence, Vick was banned from owning a dog for three years, but this month the ban expires.

During the interview, Morgan asks Vick if he will get a new dog.

He says he would — for his children:

“I can’t take that dream away from them. That’s selfish on my behalf. You know, so, gotta find a way to make it right and, you know, I put everything in God’s hands to make it right.”

When Morgan asks Vick what kind of dog he would adopt, Vick replies “I would let them pick it out. Certainly wouldn’t be a pit bull.”

The interview airs at 9 p.m.

Kyle Dyer, the Denver anchorwoman bitten on the air, said she probably did stick her face too close to the 85-pound Argentine mastiff, and that’s she glad he’s back home with his family.

Dyer, of KUSA-TV, was bitten on the mouth earlier this month while doing a segment with the dog’s owner and a firefighter who had rescued the pet from an icy pond.

“Everyone says ‘you were too close to the dog.’ I guess I was because this happened. I guess we’ve all learned a lot in the past two weeks,” she said in an interview with the Denver Post

“For me it has been in its odd way a positive experience. In this business, yes, what you look like is a lot. What this whole experience has taught me is it’s more than that. It may seem like a superficial busines, but the people out there in Colorado are not superficial, the way they’ve reached out to me, and letting me know ‘you’re beautiful inside and out’ and all that.”

“I just keep reading those letters and know that I’m healing. I don’t know how quickly, but I will.”

The station said Dyer had a second surgery on Monday. She was given 20 new stitches and had the 70 stitches that were initially put in on Feb. 8 removed.

As for Max, the dog that bit her, Dyer said, “I’m glad the dog’s back home with his family. I never wanted anything but.”

Max, the Argentine mastiff who was impounded last week after biting a Denver television news anchor on the face, is headed home and won’t face any serious consequences.

Denver environmental health spokeswoman Meghan Hughes said Thursday the dog will go home this weekend after completing a 10-day mandatory quarantine, the Associated Press reported.

Kyle Dyer of KUSA-TV received 70 stitches after she was bitten in the face by the 85-pound dog while doing a live in-studio interview with the dog’s owner and a firefighter who had rescued the dog from an icy pond the day before.

Hughes says the dog’s owner, Michael Robinson, was cited with failure to have his dog on a leash. He’s due in court Feb. 29.

The Colorado news anchor bitten on the air last week received 70 stitches and is unable to speak because her mouth is sewn shut.

That’s according to her Facebook page.

Kyle Dyer, morning news anchor for NBC’’s Denver affiliate, KUSA, was doing an in-studio interview with a firefighter and the owner of a dog who had been rescued from a frozen reservoir. When Dyer bent down to kiss the dog, an 85-pound Argentine mastiff, named Max, turned and bit her.

On her Facebook page, she says she spent four hours in surgery, receiving 70 stitches in her upper lip, lower lip and nose.

“I am unable to talk because my mouth is stitched shut to allow for the skin graft to take and get the blood circulating in my lips again.”

Dyer was released from the hospital Thursday.

Back about the time Ace and I were in Fargo, last October, I got word that a friend had died, a person I once wrote about, a woman who was Miss USA — for one day.

It was, probably, one of the saddest stories I ever wrote — how Mary Leona Gage, a country girl from Texas, ended up in Maryland, quickly grew bored with life in Glen Burnie and, with help from a beauty-show savvy accomplice, became Miss USA Maryland and then Miss USA.

Just one day later, the first Miss Maryland ever to win the contest, she’d be stripped of the national title when word leaked out that she was married and a mother of two.

The year was 1957, making it a forerunner of the many beauty queen scandals that have followed — and in my view the best one, because Gage, unlike her successors, slyly outwitted the system (now part of Donald Trump’s empire) to escape what she described, to me anyway, as a life of oppression.

Unfortunately, after the scandal, she went on to a  life of exploitation, which happens in Hollywood — and happened often in the Hollywood of the 1950s.

She’d go on, after her public humiliation, to become a Las Vegas showgirl, date the likes of Frank Sinatra and John Barrymore, get some movie and TV roles, make commercials for hand and foot cream, attempt suicide five times, go through six divorces, lose her children, become the subject of a pulp paperback biography and end up appearing on the burlesque circuit — but as a singer, she was quick to point out.

In October of last year, after her death, her housekeeper called me, apparently finding my cell phone number among her effects. The housekeeper spoke little English. I spoke less Spanish. She told me she thought I’d like to know about Leona’s passing.

When I interviewed her, in 2005, Leona was tethered to an oxygen tank. She’d been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for 10 years, and lived alone in a North Hollywood apartment. We met over two days, and were going to get together for a third talk when she called me, irate, and accused me of stealing one of the photographs she had shown me from her scrapbooks.

(She found it behind her sofa about two months later and — though she never apologized, and insisted she didn’t like the story I wrote at all — she asked for extra copies of the article and stayed in touch, calling every couple of months to chat about politics and things in the news.)

You can still find the story online at the Baltimore Sun.

She was dressed entirely in white at both our meetings — a color she said she associated with good health and — though sick and in her 70s — was still a remarkable, and remarkably unwrinkled, beauty.

“Oh, honey,” she said at one point, “if I wanted to put the real make up on, I could still look darn good.”

Leona recounted how she outfoxed pageant officials, and the circumstances she said led up to her competing — an effort to escape from what she saw as an oppressive husband, an airman who married her after getting her pregnant at age 14.

She remembered how reviled she was after her deception became known — Miss USA rules prohibit married contestants and mothers — and how one of the few that it didn’t bother was Ed Sullivan, who booked her on his show. All she did was wave. A week later she appeared live on the Steve Allen show, but flubbed the song she said she wasn’t given time to rehearse — “Sentimental Journey.”

Life after that had more downs than ups. There were suicide attempts, an institutionalization, the release of a paperback, “My Name is Leona Gage: Will Somebody Please Help Me” that portrayed her as pathetic — the common theme, she said, of most everything ever written about her.

Still, she was at peace with herself. She’d converted to Judaism. She’d become celibate. She had only one one regret — not being on good terms with her children.

Despite all the sadness in her life, I found the lengths she was willing to go to, as a woman of the 1950s, to gain her independence, kind of inspiring. And I’ll even admit to admiring (wrong as it was) how, for a day at least, she stole the crown, turning the tables on the exploitative and anachronistic world of beauty pageants.

What brings all this back to mind was a promo I saw on TV last night for one of the handful of movies she was in — “Tales of Terror,” a trilogy of Edgar Allen Poe stories produced for the big screen by famed B-movie director Roger Corman.

Leona played the title role of “Morella,” in the first of the three stories — about a woman who died during childbirth who comes back to life and kills her husband, portrayed by Vincent Price, who has kept his dead wife’s body at home for 26 years.

It airs tomorrow at 2 p.m. on  THIS TV.

The beginning of this video clip show’s the climax of the “Morella” story, where she rises from the dead and chokes Price’s character to death as flames consume the seaside mansion.

Michael Vick’s first post-prison endorsement contract — with a company called Unequal Technologies — appears to already be paying dividends, both for the quarterback and the company.

Vick, in exchange for a piece of the company,  is now shilling for Unequal, which makes protective padding for athletes, designed to help prevent injuries among those who take part in contact sports — dogfighting, of course, not included.

For Vick, who once raked in $7 million a year in endorsements, the contract puts him back on the lucrative path of touting products for pay — and, though it’s not quite on level of Nike and Coke, it’s another step, as he sees it, to redeeming his image, left tarnished by a dogfighting scandal and prison term. He also reveals, in this interview, that he has a “V 7″ shoe and clothing line in the works.

For Unequal Technologies, teaming up with the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback meant an immediate burst of publicity and a huge surge in sales. Chief Executive Rob Vito said within a day of Vick’s signing, there were 10 million hits on Unequal Technologies website. ”The sales went up 1,000% when Mike came on board,” he said, adding that they are still about triple what they were a year ago.

The company declined to disclose the terms of the agreement, but both Vito and Vick, in this interview with the Wall Street Journal, say the quarterback was given a share in the company, as opposed to a flat fee.

In the wide-ranging interview, Vick seems to contradict himself several times. He says he doesn’t read newspaper accounts about himself,  then says he reads them before games because their negativity motivates him. He says he’s not a Christian, but that his connection with God is ”uncanny”.

He says he wouldn’t change anything about his life, except maybe shortening his prison sentence, from 18 months to five months. His dogfighting conviction and imprisonment, he says, led to an opportunity to read, and work on improving himself.

“Because I handled it so well, I think that’s why the Lord is continuing to bless me,” he says.

Read more »

Who’da thunk it? American Idol’s Simon Cowell, prone to snarling at young and hopeful humans, is a PETA-certified animal lover.

Not being a close follower of his extra-curricular activities, I didn’t know Cowell has loaned his unexplainable celebrity to campaigns against wearing fur, for spaying and neutering, and cautioning against leaving dogs in hot cars.

Leave it to PETA to straighten me out.

Here are some excerpts of a recent interview PETA had with Cowell:

On mutts:

“…If I was buying a dog, I wouldn’t buy it from a pet shop, I’d go to a rescue shelter … It’s not where the dog came from, it’s the dog. … I get really annoyed when people start telling me about the make and the model of their dog like (it was a) car … A dog is a dog, no matter what background they’ve got … Often, the mutts, the strays have got more personality than a highly bred pedigree.

On dogs as accessories:

Well, I think the fashion accessory thing has become quite the thing here. You’ve got the rap and pop stars carrying around the highly bred dogs …. They think it’d be embarrassing to be seen carrying a mutt … when actually it would be endearing — people would think they cared more about the dog than their image.

On Bobama:

I think we’ve got to be balanced on this…I think it’s nice that they have made an issue of buying a dog for the kids. What I think would be great would be if they also took in a shelter dog, just from anywhere, to balance it. I’ll even pay for the dog food!

On dog shows:

Well, again, I have two thoughts about them, because I think the vast majority of people who go and watch something like Crufts or who are involved are animal lovers, not animal haters. The problem (in the U.K. at least) is that we have elitism in the dog world, which does bother me, for who’s to say what makes the perfect dog?

Yeah, dawg. The nerve. What gives those dog show judges the right to put contestants through the hoops and then sit back in judgment?

For Cowell’s full remarks, visit The PETA Files blog.