Feel free to call P.J. O’Rourke a “doodyhead”—it’s basically the truth. O’Rourke arrived at The Atlantic Monthly’s 150th-anniversary bash on November 8 with a giant scab on the bridge of his nose. What happened? “I’ve been waiting all night for someone to ask me that,” he said. Seems that the conservative humorist had recently been horseback riding at a friend’s place in Virginia. “My horse, Pronto, and I had a kind of parting of ways,” he explained. “He simply came to a stop, and I did not. I just flew into the ground. It was a one-point landing, face-first.” Which would have been fine, except that the polo field he was riding on had just been, uh, fertilized. “I essentially fell face-first into shit,” O’Rourke said. “Most of this scab is from me scrubbing the stuff off.” He was reminded of the old joke: “ ‘With this much shit, there must be a pony around somewhere.’ And there was.”

Have good intel? Send tips to intel@nymag.com.

Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Jada Yuan
• Table of Contents: Nov 26, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!