Upsetting Day: CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, Part 2🌭

Last week I wrote about CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, the epic tale of triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler, a community theater puppetmaster who solved the Fermi Paradox with racist puppets, In Part 1, I focused solely on the art of Robert J. Gold, a maniac spending his retirement years on this CGI porn asset cinematic universe. It’s sort of like a horny Skibidi Toilet for boomers, if that helps.

“Huge tittied woman has a lot of real problematic puppets” has not historically been a dealbreaker in my personal life, but this idea had its time and place, and that time was 1993, and that place was the clearance bin in a KB Toys. Any reasonable person would discard this premise as the misfiring of dying neurons, and decide to stop huffing paint. But these puppets ate Robert J. Gold’s brain until all that remained was lust and puppet scat. He wrote a 70 page graphic novel, a 136 screenplay, and a 70,000 word novel of the exact same story. Just the Hand Puppet Commando origin story over and over again, and it all looks like this:

Absolute visual poison. Glossolalia for the eyeballs. A lens flare siphonophore held together by a network of beams, bolts, and rays. It somehow reads exactly like it looks:

That’s enough to medically diagnose a hyperactive child. It’s what a Decepticon tells his dementia nurse before transforming into a rhombus. I can tell you with authority that reading this is what it feels like to get hit on by Ernest Cline. Robert J. Gold has spent years of his life writing a faithful transcription of a car wash. But, remember, horny.

This is a comic book, screenplay, graphic novel and animated trailer that could’ve been a math doodle. It’s somehow both not enough and way too much effort. Robert J. Gold has been working on this for, let me check-

Twenty years. Two decades of bothering his wife and co-workers with puppet accents he swears are ironic. A quarter of a lifetime spent tweaking the computerized feet of a virtual model meant to be plowed by Sonic the Hedgehog. I’d say this is a man in love with the first and only idea he ever had, but nothing could be further from the truth. Robert J. Gold is literally an idea man.

That’s exactly the Photoshop I would’ve made as a punchline for the obsessive puppet guy’s life. But that’s a real book. Not only that, Simon & Schuster published it. They’re one of the Big Five, the largest and most prestigious traditional publishers in the world. That doesn’t mean it’s legitimate, just that Robert J. Gold got paid actual money for it. It’s important to remember “inventor” has always been a polite term for grifter. If somebody told you they were an inventor in the 1990s, that meant they were going to sell you a headscratcher for $40 and skip town. Not so with Robert J. Gold, he spun that one book into an empire, culminating in the most prestigious of 1990s publications: the interactive CD-ROM.

Suddenly, the design sensibilities of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos make total sense. It does have “1995 Educational CD-ROM learning to fuck” vibes. The weird thing is, when you drill down into Robert J. Gold’s actual inventions, they get very boring. A 1990s grifter usually claimed to have invented a working hoverboard or a cancer preventing straw. Robert J. Gold claims to have invented a flat panel display controller and a new kind of energy bank. Boring shit. Legitimate sounding shit. But then there’s this-

That’s the grifter we want! Scam inventors love to say they worked for the military, and it’s not always a lie. DARPA owns a lot of hilarious patents because some charismatic weirdo came in with a slick PowerPoint presentation about a Battle Whistle. Let me guess, Robert J. Gold tried to sell DARPA some kind of beam-based weaponry.

Wait! Laser puppet.

Wait! Racist laser puppet.

Once again, that sounds worryingly legitimate. There’s no way the horny CGI puppet guy actually invented a real flashbang grenade in use by SWAT teams and militaries. Let’s track down that patent.

No mention of lasers, beads, or magnets – the holy trinity of ‘90s grifter inventions. This might be real. There’s one way to check how legitimate a patent is, and that’s to see who’s cited it. Check who might be using elements of the invention outside of the owner. If it’s a patent for some stupid scam device, the only thing in the citation section is the original inventor wearing a fake mustache, trying to run the scam again under a different name. Here’s the citations of Robert J. Gold’s flashbang grenade.

That’s too many for a scam. Let’s pull out just one:

So he really did invent an influential form of the modern flashbang grenade back in 1992, it truly was used by military and police forces around the world, and it’s still relevant decades later. Normally when I go looking into sexual puppet maniacs all I find are crusty felt holes and unhappy churches. The occasional cannibal. I have never found a real life weapons designer. But it makes sense. It’s all there in the work: Each and every racist puppet has a bright beam, a stun ray, or a novelty grenade. Like all the best authors, Robert J. Gold is subconsciously writing his past trauma into his current fiction.

Hold on, “trauma” is a spoiler.

Before we find out what that trauma is, we have to start at the beginning. Flashbang grenades existed for a very long time, but they did not work very well, and they weren’t used often. What you think of, when you think of a flashbang today – that all started with Bill Nixon, who invented a more stable version in 1988. He filed his patent and began widespread distribution in 1990. Flashbang grenade usage skyrocketed around the world, but especially in the US. And Robert J. Gold rode this wave right behind Nixon, with his own patent just a couple years later in 1992.

Flashbangs aren’t fun and harmless like in video games. They’re a modern plague. They were only meant to be used sparingly, in very specific scenarios. If you have to incapacitate a hostage-taker and only probably but not definitely kill the hostages, you use a flashbang grenade. That’s pretty much it. There just aren’t many times where throwing an explosive at somebody is the safe option. Flashbang grenades are still bombs.

After people like Bill Nixon and Robert J. Gold made them mainstream in the ‘90s, military and police started tossing flashbangs around like party favors. This resulted in at least 50 deaths, but probably more like hundreds.

Considering that statistic only goes back to the year 2000, it may be thousands. What was once used solely by elite military forces in hostage scenarios, was now being used by yokel cops to detonate the local Boy Scout troop. Did you think that was a fun joke example? That’s not a fun joke example.

Oh, good. He only exploded himself, and not the troop of Boy Scouts. Because those were the two options he left himself in that scenario. Real quick: Why do Boy Scouts need to know how to deploy a flash grenade? Do they work on bobcats? Troop 187 may not have learned the proper way to stun and disorient a chipmunk, but they did learn a little something about the militarization of the American police force that day.

This motherfucker was so desperate for 12 year-old nerd respect that he gave himself stun grenade leprosy. Somehow that was the last straw for inventor Bill Nixon. Ten years after his invention started exploding minorities, he helped turn a cop into a flashbang zombie and that was his Oppenheimer moment. He got out of the game.

If teaching Boy Scouts what the Rapture will look like weighed heavily on Bill Nixon’s conscience, the time a cop threw a flashbang into a baby’s crib must have ruined him.

This kind of guilt destroys a man’s soul. Bill Nixon must have built a Silent Hill in his mind because of that shit. He probably spends every dreaming moment sneaking past Boy Scouts with beams for eyes, trying to collect shredded baby clothes.

Look, I know this is darker than you want to go in a comedy article. I’m sorry. The line isn’t always clear, but for future reference it helps that we found it. It’s right here, between a cop blowing himself up in front of a Boy Scout troop, and exploding a baby. Both things made possible by the modern flashbang grenade. They’re truly an atrocity. The State Supreme Court of North Carolina recently classified them as “weapons of mass death and destruction.”

Which should theoretically make their use on civilians a war crime, but that’s American Exceptionalism at work.

We’ve lost track of Robert J. Gold’s whimsical puppets a little bit.

We needed all this groundwork to establish that flashbang grenades are a disaster, that their reckless use should probably be a war crime, and is for anyone but American police officers. But flashbang grenades are still a tool, and misuse of a tool comes down to training. Who’s training these cops?

The manufacturers, of course. Usually for a lucrative government contract fee. Ideally, that training would teach police to use flashbangs only in situations where it’s absolutely necessary, and not to huck them at protestors or air-drop them from helicopters.

Which I only mention because they’re two specific citations of intended use in Robert J. Gold’s patent application.

We all know the best people to teach how and when to use a potentially lethal product are the ones who make money every time it’s used. If it’s good enough for the pharmaceutical industry, it’s good enough for handgrenades. Robert J. Gold not only invented and sold grenades to the police force, he was responsible for some of that training everyone agrees was reprehensible. Some men are consumed by guilt. Some men stick in guilt’s throat. Bill Nixon is over here in Flashbang Hill fistfighting Pup Tent Head, meanwhile Robert J. Gold has this on his LinkedIn profile.

Accuracy Systems, Inc. of Phoenix, Arizona is where Robert J. Gold taught, and presumably learned flashbang safety himself before going on to start his own facility, First American Counter-Terrorist Systems. Let’s look into his alma mater:

Ooh, you don’t love to see headlines about explosive decapitation in your handgrenade certification school. This happened at Accuracy Systems, Inc. in 1989, just before Robert J. Gold filed his patent in 1990. Gold doesn’t list a date of employment, but the timeline implies our beloved puppet maniac was working, training, and possibly building his own future curriculum under Accuracy Systems owner, Chuck Byers, before Byers’ incompetence exploded a man’s head off. That’s me being generous, because the alternative is after.

You better believe we’re going off on a Chuck Byers tangent. If karate movies taught me anything, it’s that you can kill a guy by slapping him in the nose. If I learned two things, it’s that the student is only as good as his teacher. Robert J. Gold learned his Flashbang Style from Handgrenade Sensei Chuck.

First day, straight to grenades! Most places don’t let you work the cash register. If 1/7th of a Wendy’s Grill Skills program doesn’t sound like enough training to assemble sensitive explosives, you’ve got more foresight than Chuck Byers.

Somehow, this is not the decapitation story. This is what most places call criminal negligence, but in the grenade world is known as dramatic foreshadowing. By “grenade world” I mean “Arizona.” Not only did Chuck Byers not learn to change his ways from this, he told the recently exploded man to walk it off.

Put some dirt in those stumps and get back to work, pussy. In my day, we exploded ourselves to work at the grenade factory, where we exploded all day and then blew ourselves back home to our terrible wives, who were just a collection of handgrenades stuffed into a dress.

Why didn’t it stop there? Why would anyone watch a fellow employee explode themselves over the treeline, and still clock back in after lunch? Cult! The answer is cult.

Holy shit, I think there was some actual karate in there. This story truly has everything. We started at harmless horny puppet maniac and somehow wound up here, in an Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult. A marketing team’s favorite thing to ask new clients is “describe your brand in one sentence.” 1900HOTDOG does not have a marketing team, but we do have our answer.

The one good thing about a 1980s Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult is that they mostly just blow themselves up. Maybe some ninjas. Not the case with Chuck Byers and Accuracy Systems, Inc. They became a national threat.

Throughout the late 1980s, UPS was shipping boxes full of live handgrenades without so much as a FRAGILE sticker. That’s a Naked Gun gag. It feels like we’re veering off into slapstick.

Imagine slipping on a banana peel while carrying a box of live grenades and filing a workman’s comp claim for a tweaked back. The clerk would think they’re on a prank show. They’d start looking for hidden cameras and BAM! That’s when you explode. In the comedy world that’s called an Arizona Misdirect.

Eventually the government would catch up to Handgrenade Sensei Chuck…

And slap him with a fine slightly less than the cost of a well-loved jetski.

If you know anything about right wing maniacs, you know that “a minor fine laughably inadequate for their crimes” is enough to drive them completely insane. Here’s a letter Chuck Byers later wrote to congress about the worst military aviation crash in history, the Gander Air Disaster. It killed 248 American soldiers. In the letter, Chuck Byers spins up a conspiracy about a nuclear backpack bomb and a secret Iraqi sabotage mission-

All pretty standard right-wing nutjob stuff, down to the obligatory Oliver North. So what did Chuck Byers want out of this? The bad kind of attention? Backpay for the top-secret backpack bomb he developed? To cut a novelty rap single with Oliver North where they rhyme “and I’d like to say” with “handgrenade?” Nope, all Chuck wants is credit…

For killing the American soldiers.

Byers claims that an LAPD Bomb Squad officer recognized the explosive that blew up the Gander flight, and that Accuracy Systems, Inc. manufactured it. Byers wants congress to know he totally did that. He built the bomb that exploded the plane and killed those troops. It’s just that he thought it was for the CIA. Now, you might be asking yourself: What kind of lunatic wants this? What kind of absolute face-chewer wants false credit for 248 murders? What could he possibly get out of this?

He’s trying to get out of the accidental death charge at his explosives factory! Chuck Byers, Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult Maniac, thinks the best way to prove his innocence in a single accidental death charge is to implicate himself in a CIA conspiracy that killed 248 US soldiers and also, just for fun, the attempted assassination of the President of the Philippines. It’s like trying to clear yourself of a trespassing charge by saying you’re a 9/11 hijacker who jumped out right before the plane hit.

Because this has all the hallmarks of a political thriller, you’re probably picturing a fancy bomb at the heart of this scandal. Something with tubes full of blue liquid and multi-colored wires. No. Chuck Byers wants credit for putting napalm in a Coke can.

Okay, that’s enough about Chuck Byers. I only mention him to prove- I’m sorry. I’m being informed that’s not enough about Chuck Byers. He would eventually be convicted of a kickback scheme with the military unit who killed Osama Bin Laden.

Okay, now that’s enough about Chuck Byers, I only bring him up to talk about-

Hold on. Sorry, again. I just learned Byers sold his Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult compound without removing the grenades, and it’s still exploding people decades later.

We got off track again!

The important part is that Robert J. Gold, the horny racist puppet guy, probably got his grenade training from Chuck Byers, and definitely worked at his explosive decapitation factory. Gold used that knowledge to start his own flashbang grenade training facility, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that flashbang grenades are a disaster that cost many American lives due to the dogshit training methods around them.

Just knowing he was responsible for burning the shape of an exploding cop into the retinas of a Boy Scout troop was enough to do in Bill Nixon’s conscience. Robert J. Gold followed in Nixon’s footsteps back in 1992, and his products were likewise responsible for the surge of flashbang deaths in the ‘90s and beyond. He’s apparently cool with it. He’s still got it on his LinkedIn profile. He proudly lists his certification in Booms at Sensei Chuck’s Huckin’ Hut to this day. He worked for and studied under a guy who wants you to believe he blew up 248 American soldiers with Napalm Coke. Somewhere in there was an exploding baby.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, this kind of thing fucks you up. The inventor of dynamite started the Nobel Prize to try to make up for it. Oppenheimer resigned out of guilt. Bill Nixon is on GameFAQs right now looking up how to beat the gunpowder zombies in his mind. Robert J. Gold used his American war crime money to obsessively recreate the same story over and over again. A story full of stun rays and novelty grenades. A story where the tiny, vulnerable creatures are actually strong warriors who would never be blown apart in a crib. A story about puppets, and beams, and bright lights, and beams, and explosions, and more beams, and regret. And titties.

Fetishes are birthed from trauma.

I’m not saying I can prove Robert J. Gold’s weird puppet gigantism kink comes from a repressed brain trying to absolve itself of explosion guilt. I’m just saying puppet research always goes like this.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared Clack, who only has enough room in his heart for one Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult.