SNAPPER MCGEE The Amarillo bomb squad suits up for hazardous bag duty

FBI agent Harry Nuxombelt in Omaha, Neb., said a note was scribbled on the bag in grease pencil. Investigators had not yet inspected the note, Nuxombelt said, because it smelled strongly of burnt shit and was incredibly nasty.

“It’s another poop bag. It looks similar to the others,” he said. “Upon our initial inspection, it appears it would be from the same source.”

It wasn’t certain whether the bag, which was stomped on, hit with a broom and kicked off the porch, was filled with human or animal excrement.

“We haven’t made any comparisons yet, but everything else, including the bag itself, looks similar in nature,” he said.

Amarillo is about 400 miles southeast from Salida, Colo., where one of the flaming poop bags was found Monday.

The Colorado bag was set aflame on a residential porch and may have been left by the same person or people who left them on doorsteps in Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska, said FBI agent Mike Bautrom.

“The logical concern here, given that this shit candle is consistent with the others, is ‘Is the tip of the shitberg?”’

A second flaming poop bag was found later, also in Colorado, but officials said it did not appear to fit the characteristics of the other scat satchels.

Investigators told the commune News’ Ramon Nootles that they hoped the bagger was intentionally making the devices less shit-filled, having received the national attention that a note accompanying the earlier bags said was the bagger’s goal.

Still, “we have a rather disturbing pattern where the subjects are moving west rather quickly,” Bautrom said. “We’re looking for someone who is mobile. This sick bastard is like some kind of poop bag Santa Claus and we’ve got to stop him before he gets to my house.”

After hearing his doorbell ring, a resident found the bag on fire on his porch in the small mountain community of Salida, 100 miles southwest of Denver. A hasty stomping to put out the flames revealed the bag’s shitty contents.

The area was blocked off while police short-straw units inspected the porch. The FBI confirmed in a statement that it was a real poop bag, not a hoax.

Authorities described the bag for commune affiliate Rocky Mountain Elementary Gazette in Denver as a brown paper lunch sack 10 inches high, filled with some of the nastiest, call-in-sick scat anyone had ever seen. It was accompanied by a charred piece of paper, but it was not revealed whether the paper was a note similar to the scorched, unreadable but presumably anti-government letters found with the other bags.

The poop bag scare began last Friday when six people had perfectly good shoes and slippers ruined by flaming poop-filled bags in Illinois and Iowa, creating new fears about domestic terrorism striking the heartland. The poop bags were accompanied by what could have been anti-government notes, had the text not been besmirched beyond readability.

The poop bag discovery in Colorado now has authorities looking for geographical patterns.

The bags in Iowa and Illinois were found in locations that form a large, uneven ring about 70 miles in diameter. The Nebraska bag sites form a large ring of about 90 miles across. Both rings together are seen by some to form a crude representation of large buttocks, with Omaha falling into its customary role of “the asshole of the country.” Also, if you draw lines connecting each of the sites to every other site, it forms a bitchin Spirograph picture that looks like some kind of psychedelic owl.

Bautrom said the fact that the other devices were found in clusters makes authorities fear that more bags may be delivered in Colorado. Homeowners near Salida have been told not to stomp on any suspicious flaming bags unless they are certain of the source.

By the end of the weekend, eight bags were found in Illinois and Iowa, and seven were discovered in rural areas of Nebraska.

The 16th flaming bag was found Monday in rural Nebraska on the porch of someone who had been away for the weekend, authorities said. The bag had apparently burnt itself out, though none would come close enough to the charred, stomach-turning mess to investigate further. No one cared to comment on whether it was accompanied by the same “anti-government” note found with the other bags.

The letter left with the bags referred to the bagger as “I,” not “we,” FBI Special Agent Jimmy Bonger told the commune’s Ramon Nootles in a nearby strip club. “We believe it’s a person who has tried to communicate with the government in the past, gave up after about eight hours in the phone queue, has issues that are unresolved and we are continuing to work on that. Same thing happened with the UNAbomber,” he said.

In Omaha, Neb., FBI Agent Harry Nuxombelt said the construction of the poop bags also supported the theory that a single party was behind the baggings. Though by that he didn’t mean a party like where you have friends over to drink punch and play records, though that’s an intriguing possibility. Get-togethers revolving around animal waste are not uncommon in Nebraska, but Nuxombelt was referring instead to a single person constructing the bags. Though by that he didn’t mean to exclude the possibility that the bagger could be married. Anyhow, all were made with the same materials, except for slight variations in the corn content of the poop itself, he said, refusing to elaborate.

“There is no question that these were planted by the same person or persons, though there are clearly multiple shitters,” Holmquist said.

The grease-pencil-scribbled letter, the text of which was posted on the FBI’s Web site, indicated that the bagging campaign would continue. FBI officials said they considered the baggings to be “domestic terrorism,” and that any snickers or jokes made about this would also be considered “domestic terrorism.”

“If the {illegible, possibly either “government” or “grannypants”} controls what you want to do they control what you can {“donut”},” it reads in part. “... I’m {something} your {“action figure”} in the only way I can. More {“info” or “afro”} is on its way. More ‘attention {“graham crackers”}’ are on the way. Ding-dong.”

the commune News thinks You Dropped a Bomb on Me is a perfectly acceptable song to play in a continual loop with the speakers facing the floor, and the staff of Crochet! magazine downstairs should lighten the fuck up. Ramon Nootles would like it to be known that any claims as to his being a monkey’s uncle had better be backed up with solid DNA evidence.

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