flaming poop bag similar to 17 others found in four states was discovered on a rural doorstep outside Amarillo, Texas, the FBI said Tuesday.

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."

he economic hit taken by the US in the wake of Sept 11th has largely been wiped away by huge growth in the absurd collectables market, according to Harvey Rosenblum, president of the National Association for Business Economics.

"While the market for more traditional items, like home computers or appliances, is still weak, new markets for products like misprinted dog food bags and celebrity nerf ball fuzz have been driving the economy for months. A nation shaken by terrorism has been economically buoyed by its passion for truly useless shit," commented Rosenblum on Monday.

Useless collectables have long been a factor in the national economy, with a strong demand for Thomas Kincade paintings, beanie babies and dot-com stocks helping to pull America through the recession in the early 90's. But the recent surge has been unlike anything this country has seen before.

"Americans have realized that any new computer they buy is just going to seem as slow at their old one in two months, and a new Chevy's going to break down just as often as their old one, but original mint-condition promotional materials from the short-lived Wintergreen Nerds candy line are going to be something they can pass on to their grandchildren," said Frank Nettle, editor of Trendy Obsession magazine.

In spite of numerous public statements from the Franklin Mint reminding the public that if it's not hand-numbered and cast in pewter, it's not a collectable, the current collecting trend has moved beyond the traditional "bullshit painted on plates" market, branching out beyond porcelain figurines and glass elephants into the unknown realm beyond. The latest frontier of collecting is as varied as the American people themselves, whose collections range from the intensely personal to the just plain bizarre.

Asked why he began collecting caps from different brands of ranch dressing over fifteen years ago, Arlo Turtle of Angel Falls, TX replied: "it seemed as good as the next thing." Angie DuBank of Peoria, IL collects pictures of places where Annette Benning has had her hair cut, while Ted Middlebaum owns over 35 ticket stubs from the original screening of Porky's in Las Vegas. Beatrice Fraumbalt, who collects address labels from old TV guides, explains: "It's not about what something means to you, or where it came from. Or even what it costs. Or if your grandchildren look forward to inheriting your collection when you die. It's about keeping the Space Invaders from finding out where you live and laying eggs in your preserves."

Modern collectors range from a budget-conscious gatherer of little green army figures like Tank Reynolds ("I've got a soldier in every position except the one where the guy's tip-toeing, presumably into a Hamburg cat show, which is thought to be a crawling figure who was miscast in the molding process during the factory fire in 1971") to a high-roller like Chelton McNesh, who owns an extensive collection of Visa cards with low account numbers. Though the collection is his pride and joy, McNesh still peppers every conversation with bitter references to "the Honus Wagner of all Visa collectables, card number 4500-0000-0000-0001" thought to be owned by a Saudi collector. Though just how many Saudis the man owns can only be guessed at this time.

"A person's collection reflects a bit of who they are and where their passions lie," said Lillith Barnes, owner of the world's largest collection of things that have been pulled out of Ted Kennedy's ass. "Obviously I'm a political junkie at heart," explained Barnes, gesturing toward a display case containing an electric toothbrush, one improbably large shoehorn, a Holly Hobby Doll, a bicycle inner tube and a set of three matching Happy Apples.

Oftentimes terrible miscues by major manufacturers are offset by the profits gleaned from marketing aborted runs of products as limited-edition collectables. "Sure, I know they make a lot of jokes about New Coke and how it flopped. But what nobody ever tells you is that we're still making the stuff and selling it on eBay," confided Bernard Manhouse, head of Research and Development for Coca-Cola. That same collector's mentality has allowed Chevrolet to turn a profit on the ill-fated Looney Tunes Corvette, and helped cut the losses related to the similarly misguided Muppets-endorsed Wok-a-Wok-a-Wok from Kitchenade.

The collecting trend which has gripped the nation has spread even to the commune offices, where repeated attempts have been made to steal Rok Finger's shoes, the same pair he has been wearing nonstop since 1953.

Toudle-Lou and Toudle-Lee sat in a tree and ate cranberries. That's the way they'd wile away a Thursday in the land of Margoline. Some are fonder of a wander through the woods, while peeling strands of string cheese. But not the Toudles, for them noodles were as stringy as they cared to be.

One day Morris, in his Taurus, drove to Margoline. He'd tied a blender to his fender for making blue Icees. And unlike monks, who love the chunks, Morris liked his smooth. He voted chunkless, like his uncles, who signed up at a State Fair booth.

So Lou and Lee sat in their tree, eating their berries cran. They talked to Roger, a salty codger, who lived in a bright yellow van. They'd been through hobbies, like sleeping in lobbies, and making underwear out of cats. They'd sat in a urinal while folding the Journal into intricate stock-market hats. But even lawn bowling and old bathtub trolling had left them feeling fizzless and flat. So up in that tree is where they will be if you come round looking for your cat.

Morris and me crashed our car in that tree one Thursday late in July. The Toudles fell down with a thunderous sound and the blender flew up in the sky. Roger the codger and a lodger named Hodger ran up to inspect the commotion. The scene was a mess as everything, I confess, was all covered in cranberry lotion.

But in spite of the gore and all the marshmallow spores that swirled round like a tornado in Texas, the Toudles, I thought, were more excited than not since they though that the car was a Lexus. They drove it away, and when Morris yelled "Hey!" we just heard the horn beep "ta-ta" as they headed toward Rio. Morris thought I was wrong, he said "They're beeping along to Da Da Da by that German band Trio."

So the Toudles survived and are well and alive though now Lou has blenders on the brain. Lee accidentally ate a bird and the last that I heard the Toudles were laughing at mules out in Spain. That's the rumor today, though the word, as they say, can get twisted round as it carries. And now Morris and me sit here in their old tree and wonder where they found the berries.

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