Star Jones, the fur-wearing manatee, is up in (flabby) arms over PETA’s plan to use drag queen Flotilla “Large” DeBarge to impersonate her in an anti-fur ad campaign. She sent her lawyers after the animal-rights group like hounds after the fox.

In a humorless letter to PETA, Jones’ lawyers wrote: “While the First Amendment . . . protects legitimate parody, [it] does not sanction the misappropriation of a person’s identity for purposes of trade or advertising . . . Thus, PETA does not have the right to use an impersonator . . . As you prepare your advertisements, we urge you to keep this distinction in mind.”

But the lawyers are insulting Star, because their argument only makes sense if the public could actually mistake DeBarge for her. They seem to be saying their client resembles an overweight, 6-foot-tall drag queen. (More)

Of related interest, a reader sent us this uncannily apt dictionary definition of the word star:

A self-luminous spheroidal body consisting of a mass of gas held together by its own gravity in which the energy generated by nuclear reactions in the interior is balanced by the outflow of energy to the surface, and the inward-directed gravitational forces are balanced by the outward-directed gas and radiation pressures.