Alas! the ferocious little beastie isn’t real. He’s just been photoshopped from the image below.

Western pygmy possum (Cercartetus concinnus).

To insert characters from Renaissance paintings into contemporary photographs with amusing results. Twisted Sifter

Allegedly observed crossing Route 128 in Northeastern Massachusetts.

Alexey Kondakov, an artist based in Kiev, Ukraine, has created a series of Photoshopped images demonstrating how the gods and characters of antiquity portrayed in classical paintings would look if they appeared alongside us in contemporary settings. leenks

Russian title says: “Hazardous Work Operator” and Discovery.

Jeremy Meeks, a blue-eyed 30-year-old ex-convict got arrested in Stockton, California last Wednesday during a weapons sweep, when police found a .45 pistol in the trunk of his car. Mr. Meeks previously served two years for grand theft, and has tattoos implying that he is affiliated with the Crips gang and has previously killed someone.

The Stockton police make a practice of posting their most recent mug shots on-line, and the arrest photo of Jeremy Meeks immediately went viral on the Internet, causing women (and Andrew Sullivan) to swoon over the convict’s ethnically-diverse good looks.

The story of the excitement over the photo even gained international coverage by British newspapers like the Daily Mail. And Meeks’ mugshot has also become the object of the latest Photoshop humor meme. Buzzfeed

You might think that some adversary of the current administration must have photoshopped this photo of the President seated in the Iron Throne, but no! it turns out that the photo was tweeted Saturday evening by the White House itself, titled “Westeros Wing.”

Business Insider tells us that Barack Obama is a major “Game of Thrones” fan.

Apparently actually a Su-27 Russian Knights Aerobatic Demonstration Team photo. The missiles are photoshopped in, the plane has been launching flares as a tribute to Flight Leader Igor Talachenko who was killed in a mid-air collision a week earlier.

This image was even more extravagantly photoshopped here.

Claire Shipman (wife to Obama press Secretary Jay Carney) is co-author of a book coming out (apparently grounding self-help career advice for women in junk science) and her promotional campaign includes just about the puffiest puff piece that anyone’s ever seen in Washington Mom.

Tout le monde is twittering about the piece this morning, gleefully mocking the supposed perfection of the successful couple’s home and family life.

Walter Olson, on Facebook, snarkily remarked:

Does something about this portrait of the WH press secretary’s family seem, I don’t know, stagey and overly polished? Somehow I imagine the shoot wrapping and the crew breaking set (“okay, you clean up the carefully strewn blueberries, I’ll start Photoshopping in the bookcases, tell them they can change back into regular clothes.”)

The cherished and framed Soviet propaganda posters in the kitchen shot did not go unremarked. But what really brought the house down was the photo below featuring Photoshopped evidence of the mouthpiece of the smart people’s book collection. The duplication of the kid’s finger was particularly admired. Twitter 1 Twitter 2

Charles O’Rear, the professional photographer who took the photograph titled Bliss which he sold to Microsoft to be used as the world-famous wall-paper for Windows XP, explains where he took the photo, what camera and film he used, and tells us: No, it was not Photoshopped.

Oberlin’s most famous alumna, Lena Dunham, appeared in Vogue this month, prompting Jezebel to offer a $10,000 reward for copies of the pre-Photoshopped images of Dunham.

Jezebel explained:

Vogue [now] has a woman who rightfully declares that her appearance, with all of its perceived imperfections, shouldn’t be hidden and doesn’t need any fixing. Lena Dunham has spoken out, frequently, about society’s insane and unattainable beauty standards. Dunham embraces her appearance as that of a real woman; she’s as body positive as they come. But that’s not really Vogue’s thing, is it? Vogue is about perfection as defined by Vogue, and rest assured that they don’t hesitate to alter images to meet those standards. It doesn’t matter if any woman, including Lena, thinks she’s fine the way she is. Vogue will find something to fix.

To be very clear: Our desire to see these images pre-Photoshop is not about seeing what Dunham herself “really” looks like; we can see that every Sunday night or with a cursory Google search. She’s everywhere. We already know what her body looks like. There’s nothing to shame here. Nor is this rooted in criticism of Dunham for working with Vogue. Entertainment is a business, after all, and Vogue brings a level of exposure that exceeds that of HBO.

This is about Vogue, and what Vogue decides to do with a specific woman who has very publicly stated that she’s fine just the way she is, and the world needs to get on board with that. Just how resistant is Vogue to that idea? Unaltered images will tell.

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$10,000 works. Jezebel reports: “Within two hours of offering $10,000 for unretouched images from Annie Leibovitz’s photography session with the HBO star, we received six allegedly unaltered images.”

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Charlotte Allen observes:

The elephant (sorry, Lena!) in this room of rage is that, let’s face it, Lena Dunham really isn’t that pretty.. Even glammed up for Vogue, those monster thighs lobster-clawing the neck of the guy who’s bearing her on his shoulders really do have some “perceived imperfections.” The best that you say about Dunham is that she has nice hands and wouldn’t be too bad-looking if she lost a few and paid a visit to Dr. Tattoff.

But nobody can say that–because “body positivity”–considering yourself a raving beauty no matter how much you weigh or what you actually look like–is a central tenet of feminism. That’s apparently why Dunham gets naked in nearly every episode of Girls, why Jezebel is going all pious (it’s Vogue’s fault!), and why Slate’s Katy Waldman feels compelled to call Dunham “lovely”:

Jez is not trying to expose Dunham—it’s continuing its crusade against the fashion magazines that make us all feel like crap and have, in many ways, contributed to a pop culture in which Dunham’s perfectly lovely physique is so outside the norm.

Yes, the point of fashion magazines is to “make us all feel like crap.” That’s why Vogue has 1.3 million subscribers. But let’s go on pretending.