Pat Boone's All-American Meats and five other disturbing meat-related tie-ins

From hot dogs at baseball games to, well, hot dogs pretty much all the time, meat occupies an important place in our cultural values system, right up there with protestant work ethic and war. But that's not to say meat can't (forgive me) go bad -- sometimes in subtle ways,. Even though, sure, both meat and Pat Boone are about as American as a bald eagle that also shoots lasers, there's something a little troubling about the crooner shilling for the Colorado Springs-based All-American meats -- it's just hard to know what. In other cases, though, what's troubling is more apparent. 05. Lady Gaga's various meat outfits Why, just last week, in fact, Lady Gaga appeared on the cover of Vogue in a bikini made out of meat, and then again this weekend in a meat outfit at the VMAs. By way of explanation on The Ellen DeGenres Show, she expounded thus: "If we don't stand up for what we believe in and if we don't fight for our rights, pretty soon we're going to have as much rights as the meat on our own bones." Which, interestingly, is a statement that makes utterly no sense.
04. Hats of Meat It's a website dedicated to hats... that are made out of meat. Why? Well, that's like asking the wind why it blows, friends, in that you're not likely to get an answer, and if you do, it's probably just your buddy fucking with you. Unsurprisingly, the site is very excited about Lady Gaga's championing its cause.
03. Bunny Ghengis dons costumes of meat In 1993, the notorious Bunny Ghengis had a brilliant idea for upsetting the animal-rights-endorsing activist punk group that was headlining its show at Club 156 in Boulder: Wear costumes made out of meat. Unfortunately, the meat was not good, and two members of the band ended up with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever as a result of wearing tick-infested deer skins. But that's not even the best part. Since we couldn't say it better, here's the quote from the YouTube synopsis of this video: "The following morning's Daily Camera included a 'shame on you'-type of blurb about how 'stupid' Bunny Genghis were. Elsewhere in the paper was an unrelated article about a bunch of animal skins dumped the night before on the lawn of a wealthy homeowner on Mapleton Hill."
02. Meat fills suckers with meat Not to be outdone, the appropriately named Denver act Meat upped the meat-related stunt ante at a DIY house show in the early 2000s. Painstakingly, the group unwrapped dozens of Tootsie Pops, extracted their sticks, scraped out the Tootsie Roll filling and replaced it with raw hamburger, then put the sticks back in, re-wrapped them and handed them out at the show. Did we mention the show was at a warehouse collective mostly occupied by vegans? Needless to say, the show did not end well.
01. Meat with a scary, scary clown face on it This is just... this is just horrifying.