Montauk Monster Wins Awards, Stars in TV Commercial

The Montauk Monster is proving to be more than a one-season wonder. Now there are awards and maybe a TV commercial! After all the intense interest in Monty during this past summer, when the monster washed up on a beach in Montauk, New York, the attention died down during the Fall, with Monty keeping a low profile. But the Montauk Monster is back in the news as Winter sets in, capturing the coveted "WTF of the Year" title at the URLie awards.

I lobbied hard to have John McCain name Monty as his running mate, and even (prematurely) wrote a post saying that Monty had been picked as VP. And of course who can forget the Montauk Monster chilling with his celebrity buddies?

Now it seems Monty is doing commercials (see below), specifically a German Volkswagen ad. The dog-fish in the spot bears too much of a resemblance to the Montauk Monster to be a coincidence. But is it Monty or a celebri-creature lookalike? If that's not Monty in the ad, he should sue Volkswagen for unauthorized impersonation!

Montauk Monster Chillin' With His Fellow Celebs - PHOTOS

It's been said that Law of Attraction notes that people are attracted to things that are like themselves. If that's true, then many A-list celebs want to be like a rotting animal carcass, because they've been making a beeline to get close to everyone's favorite "thing," the Montauk Monster.

Doing the fist pump with Barack ... jumping on Oprah's couach ... hangin' with Marlon Brando in a vintage poster for The Godfather ... joining the Full House gang ... the stars all want to hang with Monty!

Celebs love the Monty almost as much as Photoshop does, and that brings up to these photos from the new Montauk Monster mashup site, www.Montymash.com. Some examples here...



Oprah shrieks, "I'm in love! I'm really in love with Monty!!"



(Of course, there are some D-list hangers-on, like Carrot Top here.)



Get this pasty-face, orange-haired FREAK away from me!

Inquiring minds will naturally be asking, John McCain chose the Montauk Monster as his running mate, but there are no pictures of the two of them here. What's up with that?

Patience, dear reader. Johnny Mac knows that Monty is a unique running mate and is letting his light shine all on its own for now. There will be plenty of time for Mac and Monty to do joint appearances, once Monty is done with Jay and Dave and Conan and Rachael Ray (bet you didn't know that the Montauk Monster could cook up a mean lobster tail fra diavlo with linguine and white clam sauce!)

Montauk Monster 2.0: New Pictures, eBay Auction, and More!

It was sad to think that the feel-good event of this New York summer, the discovery of our very own Montauk Monster, had outlived its 15 minutes of fame. But wait! There's more!

Gawker has put together a photo album in tribute to the Montauk Monster. Called the 2008 Montauk Monster Yearbook, it includes many of the photos of the Monster, as well as some clever take-offs, including the Montauk Monster cuddling up to a woman in an evening gown, the Monster with sunglasses and a hand of playing cards, and even the Monster sticking out of a bucket of KFC! "Finger Lickin' Gross," as the caption says!

Even better, Gawker alerts us to a new site, MontyMash.com, that collects some of the best Zelig-like moments of our beloved Monty, including some of the ones mentioned above, plus an ever-growing collection of reader-submitted contris. You can see Monty in The Godfather, as part of the Full House TV gang, and even wading into the political sphere, appearing with Hillary Clinton and doing a fist-bump with Barack! (No word on whether these Democratic photos will have an adverse impact on the Montauk Monster being chosen by John McCain as his VP.)

And... miracle of miracles!... a man has claimed that the Montauk Monster magically appeared on his piece of morning toast!



It's a fitting tribute to the Montauk Monster as we knew him, as he used to be (unfortunately he has now turned to bones and black goo, in a plastic bag in someone's garage).

John McCain Names the Montauk Monster His Running Mate

Wolf Blitzer breaks the news: McCain picks Montauk Monster for VP!

Seeking to prove that Republicans can offer "change" just as well as the Democrats, John McCain has reached deep into the diversity well and chosen the Montauk Monster as his running mate.

The Montauk Monster, which became an instant celebrity last week after pictures of it lying on a Long Island beach were published in Gawker and other places, has made headlines not just in local news sources like Newsday and the Hamptons' Plum TV, but also Scientific American and CNN.

Approached while running to catch a plane, McCain would neither confirm nor deny the choice of the Montauk Monster as veep, saying only, "The Montauk Monster has touched a lot of Americans in the last week or so, and I know he believes in the values that my campaign is stressing. Like me, Monty shares a love of American freedom and a firm belief that lower taxes, less government regulation, and offshore oil drilling will keep America strong and prosperous."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was less enthusiastic about the potential VP choice. "An old, decrepit, rotting corpse is not the change America is looking for. And having the Montauk Monster on the ticket doesn't help, either."

Of course, the seemingly dead creature known affectionately as "Monty" must clear some piddling legal hurdles before being able to accept the number-two spot on the Republican ticket: Is he 35 years old? Is he human (I'm not sure if the Constitution specifically demands a "human")? Then there are of course the traditional political skeletons-in-the-closet questions to be tackled: Has the Montauk Monster had any tawdry affairs, hired an illegal nanny, played footsie in an airport bathroom with a Federal agent, etc.

Montauk Monster Has Curious Americans Wondering, "WTF *is* that Thing?!"

Four-dollar gas. Recession. An endless war overseas. But the thing that's preoccupying Americans these days is a butt-ugly, bird-beaked, nekkid-as-a-jaybird rotting animal corpse that's washed up on the northeast end of New York's Long Island. So what the hell is this "Montauk Monster," as it's being called?

[BREAKING NEWS: John McCain has named the Montauk Monster his running mate!]

Here are some possible explanations of what the Montauk Monster is, ranging from the practical to the absurd (you can decide for yourself which is which). [UPDATE: A blog called Amnesia Blog has a good collection of Montauk Monster pictures, so you can get a better look at The Thing.]

* Lab experiment gone wrong, escaped from a nearby agricultural research facility, the Plum Island Animal Disease Center
* A turtle without a shell (never mind the fact that turtles can't just detach from their shells, like in those TV cartoons)
* A shaved raccoon
* An alien creature from outer space, come to warn us about the end of the world (or to go on a tour of one of the North Fork's many wineries)
* A new undiscovered species of animal, just out looking to check out some of the North Fork's wineries
* A pretty snazzy creation of someone's imagination and a lot of time spent on Photoshop
* An escaped pet (notice the cloth wrapped around it's right front arm... leg... whatever it is)
* A very large rat, escaped from the NYC subway or maybe the Long Island Rail Road (it got injured after not Minding the Gap)
* A Department of Defense experiment - a successor to the attack badgers the British were supposedly using in Iraq
* A very lifelike synthetic creature made by an unemployed movie prop maker with a lot of free time and even more spare latex
* A viral marketing stunt for a sci-fi TV show
* Joan Rivers fell off a cruise boat... this is how she looks without her wig

What do you think the Montauk Monster is? Let us know!

The Montauk Monster - Just the Thing for a Slow Summer!

Things can get kind of slow in the news business during the summer in New York, so writers and bloggers must have been cheered by the mysterious appearance (and apparent disappearance) of what's being called The Montauk Monster, which was seen lying on its side on a Montauk, Long Island beach.

What... the... frack?!

The creature looks like a hairless dog, with an eagle-type beak for a nose. Gawker published a photo of the Montauk Monster along with a story, with some of their classic commentary. It notes that one person has claimed that this might be an escapee from a government animal testing lab that's supposedly nearby, but Gawker disagrees:

"... unless the government is trying to design horrible Montauk monsters that will eat IEDs and fart fire at bad Iraqis, we're not sure why they would create such an unthinkable beast. Our guess is that it's viral marketing for something. Ali Lohan's new album perhaps."

Ali Lohan and her famous sister (and father, and mother) were apparently unavailable for comment.

So is this a viral marketing scam, as Gawker suggests? We may never know, because liberal blog The Huffington Post has wasted no time in jumping on the Montauk Monster bandwagon, giving the creature his (her?) own column, entitled The Montauk Monster.

In the current column, the Monster says that he (she?) came to the beach for sun and surf: "The sun was very hot and I took a nap, naked. And then it turns out a picture of this very nap was posted on the Internet, paparazzi or some such thing, I'd imagine."

There you go, straight from the Montauk Monster's mouth. Now that the Monster is working for HuffPo, I guess its job will be to blog about New York nightlife and write puff pieces on Barack Obama.