Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Miami Spice 🌭

Media empires begin with simple ideas: A happy cartoon mouse, an orphan child who discovers his fursona is a bat, a magical boy who believes in bathroom genital inspections. Small ideas that bloom big. So it was with Curt Hiss, the Drug Free Beatboxing Snake. At first, that’s all he was – a snake sock puppet who got so addicted to drugs he thought he could rap. You all had that friend. His name was Darren, he got into crypto. You don’t talk anymore.

Curt Hiss’ first video was a simple affair: a few backdrops, a suicidal brother, the grim reaper. That was the extent of writer/director Wayne Owens’ dream. It wasn’t enough for producer Randy Schmidt. He looked at this green sock hooked on coke and he said “a universe shall be borne from thee.” Curt Hiss’ second showing was a full blown action movie, complete with sinister drug kingpins, explosions, and the most powerful drug of all: love. Wait, sorry, it was still cocaine.

Then came Lenny the Crack-Smoking Lion, the first Curt Hiss spinoff.

Lenny’s story upped the ante with a crack epidemic, a pair of lovable rapping drug dealers, and an actual puppet overdose. One of those dealers, a black-coded puppet named Cool Cat (no relation), fucking died from a crack overdose. Actual sock death! We learned it from his screaming mother, who blamed the police for failing her family. It was way too hard a moment for a video you watch in 2nd grade gym class because the teacher is hungover.

After Cool Cat’s death, our heroes, Lenny and Ruff, swore revenge. Not for Cool Cat, but for Mr. Crack almost tricking them into sharing the same fate as a black puppet. That leads us directly into the second Lenny the Lion adventure: Miami Spice.

I used to joke that Randy Schmidt started doing anti-drug sock puppet shows and became convinced he was the next Michael Mann. Now here he is, actually doing Michael Mann. Fuck everything that happened before: Lenny and Ruff are now Drug Officers with the Central City Drug Program, and both clearly using the cocaine they confiscate.

It turns out Lenny the Lion’s last name was Sprocket, and Ruff the Dog’s last name was Bubbs this whole time. We thought he was just biting his own tongue off at the time, but it turns out Cool Cat’s last words were “beware nominative determinism.”

The Captain has just received information that Mr. Crack is opening a drug smuggling business in Miami. An adorable way to put that. Like he applied for a Drug Business Permit. Like he has a little CLOSED sign he flips to OPEN every morning to start his drug smuggling day.

Let us now pause to appreciate that the Captain Puppet is a fucking nightmare.

Specifically, the recurring nightmare you have about your step-dad and his prehensile penis. Best case scenario that’s a bubble-gum faced Ron Jeremy. Worst case scenario it’s in your house right now. This is how I’d depict Edward James Olmos in a whimsical children’s show called Edward James Olmos Fucked My Wife.

When they say “show me on the doll where he touched you,” this is the doll. They had to throw it away because it kept giggling. This is how I know crabs can live on felt. This puppet traded me a bloodstained van for a degaussing wand. This puppet fucks like a biblical plague, he-

Sorry, sorry. I got so hung up describing the only puppet violating parole to be here that I didn’t even think to mention “Drug Officer” isn’t a real job and “Central City Drug Program” isn’t a police agency. Sprocket and Bubbs are honorary deputees of a local drug outreach center and they’re heading to Miami in pursuit of a drug kingpin. Their next adventure is called An Unexpected Present and it’s their mothers opening boxes with Lenny and Ruff’s heads in them.

It seems like a pretty sharp turn from the last Lenny the Lion video, where they were both children singing the praises of crack. But there is some continuity. We are specifically told that Cool Cat remains canonically dead, and that Ruff the dog used to suck dick for rock. I mean, he doesn’t say those exact words, but what he does say is:

And he says that wearing an open collared suit and a gold hoop earring. Ruff might think an “inference” is $20 extra, but I know one when I see it.

Once in Miami, Sprocket and Bubbs meet up with another classic Lenny-verse character: Sneaky Snake, the Drug-dealing Hip-Hop snake. Some puppets can’t be redeemed, but they can all be reused. Sprocket and Bubbs need to bust him for possession with intent so they can press him for information on his boss, Mr. Crack. The perfect cue for a rap breakdown!

I’m not a music critic because all my analogies are too obscure. But these beats are so limp they’d never sexually rescue their whole race from invading conquistadors. This flow is so weak it loses the respect of its wife during an Avengers screening.

Anyway, in order to bust Sneaky Snake, Officer Bubbs first must go undercover as an addict to win his trust. He’s a little too good at it. This is the actual interaction:

Hold on! I know what you’re thinking, but that’s ridiculous. This is a child-friendly educational Miami Vice parody sock puppet show, you degen filth. This is perfectly innocent! The snake is simply handing the dog some crack to deal. Get your head out of the gutter and stop seeing this puppet get head in a gutter.

Since Sneaky has now been caught red-mouthed, Sprocket and Bubbs say they’re going to read him his rights. And then they do their complete anti-drug rap again. The same one. Word for word, from beginning to end, while Sneaky looks on in fearful confusion.

Sneaky Snake’s lawyer won’t even charge for this one. You can’t substitute an anti-drug rap for the Miranda Rights in any state except for maybe – oh right. Florida. Still, I don’t care how hard it is to sew little puppet handcuffs, you can’t just chain up a perp like a werewolf in any state but- you know what? This was, if anything, prophetic.

I know Randy Schmidt checked out of puppet morality plays long ago and is now abusing state drug-awareness grants to build a Puppywood sizzle reel, but this is getting awfully dark. I know you want to be the sock puppet Michael Mann, Randy, but this is a clear violation of rights. It’s like having an out of control cop brutalize a restrained criminal, you can’t-

Sprocket pulls Bubbs back, but only because this was the 1980s and you used to have to walk all the way across the room to turn off the cameras. Sneaky freaks out and immediately confesses, then begs not to be put in gen-pop because he won’t survive it. That sounds like I’m kidding!

No, that’s pedophiles and cops. Most convicts are in for drug charges, Sneaky would probably be fine if he wasn’t literally a sock with a lucious mouth. But he is, and he doesn’t want to go through the wash on cold again. Sneaky cuts a deal in exchange for solitary confinement, which is an insane sentence to type about a sock puppet play, only beaten by this one: He tells them Mr. Crack and his gang of drug rats are smuggling crack down by the docks.

Meet your new favorite characters, the drug rats!

Look how full of joy they are. If I were a little kid these would immediately be the stars of the show. I would rewind the tape over and over again to listen to their little song. Their little song that goes like this:

If the Lenny-verse had blown up, this would’ve been 1989’s “Baby Shark.” You’d call me a motherfucker just for typing the title, because that’s all it took to get it stuck in your head. If you heard an adult humming this at the grocery store, you’d know two things about them:

  1. They’re an attentive parent who spends a lot of time with their kids.
  2. They’re one loud noise away from going on a shooting spree.

This song bangs. I mean, it fucking bangs.

It’s still good today. Drop the remix. Put Peggy on the beat and 2025 will be “Drug Rat Summer.”

It goes so hard that one of the rats drops dead at the end of the song. The others gleefully dispose of his corpse with a comical zip sound. Drug rats rule!

It’s Mr. Crack time! You’ve been waiting for him, your favorite character! The only one to span both the Curt Hiss and Lenny the Lion franchises. Mr. Crack is the Lenny-verse’s Iron Man. Maybe he’s not your favorite, but it all falls apart without him. In his trademark skull hockey mask and Crack hoodie, he’s an NFT Jamie Kennedy bought for $800,000.

For some reason Mr. Crack lost his sinister grim reaper voice and now talks like an elderly Jewish man. He berates the drug rats for their incompetence and it just sounds like George Costanza disappointed his father again. It only makes me like him more. It’s too bad he believes in crack eugenics:

Smart kids need drugs the most, Mr. Crack! Only the bourgeoisie are happy under modern capitalism.

Mr. Crack orders the rats to distribute his new drug to the playgrounds. It’s ten times deadlier than cocaine, meth, and crack combined. It’s called… Ecstasy. Haha, hindsight is 20/20. I guess it’s still evil to get a bunch of kids rollin’ to the SpongeBob theme. We can’t have these first graders feeling the secret beat of the pencil sharpener and spending all recess petting grass.

Always a step ahead, Sprocket and Bubbs have already staked out Mr. Crack’s schoolyard drug dealer. Now, and this is probably just me reading into things here, but it seems like every time a Randy Schmidt production needs total street trash – not a high-end dealer, or a confused kid about to change their ways, we’re talking total unrepentant junkie dipshit – they happen to look like this:

And sound like this:

That’s Kit Kat. Like Cool Cat before him, he’s a problem and a confession all in one. He’s upset because the rats showed up with this new drug, but he didn’t check the Ecstasy box on his mail-in drug order catalog. That’s how drug deals work, as far as midwestern puppet producers know. The drug rats promise Kit Kat this new stuff will definitely kill some kids, which seems bad for business, but he’s all the way in. That’s all Sprocket and Bubbs need – they rush in to arrest everyone. Puppet cuffs still look like cockrings out of context, so Bubbs just chains them all up together. The optics are uh, not great.

Now it’s time to go after Mr. Crack himself. He’s all alone at the docks, ranting about what pussies the drug rats are for fearing the police. But one of the rats escapes and explains:

The way the rat describes it, singing and dancing in this universe are like beating the absolute shit out of somebody with a baton. So suddenly the part where Sneaky Snake asks about his rights and Sprocket and Bubbs just aggressively rap at him makes perfect sense.

That’s all Mr. Crack needs to hear, he’s not sticking around to get gang-sang by a corrupt volunteer police force. He turns to flee, leaving his last drug rat behind.

Haha, a boss ‘til the end. That’s the last we see of Mr. Crack. He gets away! What an inspirational American tale. A man sees a need going unfulfilled in the market, he supplies the product, he murders a bunch of children, then escapes all consequence while those who believed in him burn. In the next installment, he gets to sit on stage for President Sneaky Snake’s inauguration.

Then all audio cuts out and we watch the abandoned drug rat have a total mental breakdown in absolute silence.

It’s likely just an awkward scene change, but it’s the most harrowing moment in the entire Curt Hiss Extended Drug Universe. Without a single line of dialogue, this rat puppet portrays the unabashed fear, loneliness, and betrayal of realizing you were never a person but only an object whose usefulness has suddenly ended. If they gave out Academy Awards to weird lifeless rapping puppets on cocaine, Lin-Manuel Miranda still wouldn’t have one. This rat would’ve taken it from him.

Sprocket and Bubbs move in to arrest the rat, actually reading him his rights this time but pausing between each one to explain how they don’t really apply to junkies. None of these arrests will hold up in puppet court. This rat is walking free tomorrow and Sprocket and Bubbs are going to be punished with paid vacations and secret high fives.

Sprocket swivels to face the screen for his big speech, only it’s the same awkward scene change so he does it in a sudden, unexpected audio void.

I’ve never been more certain a puppet can see me, and I have fought a lot of puppets. It winds up being appropriate though, because the inspirational speech he’s supposed to be delivering to the children devolves into an unhinged rant about how drug dealers cannot escape Lenny the Lion, he will pursue them to the ends of the Earth and beyond the farthest corners of time.

One thing all Randy Schmidt productions have in common: At some point they forget that their audience is made up of children who might one day be tempted by drugs, and instead begin directly addressing the junkies and peddlers who are presumably watching this sock puppet educational video through the gymnasium windows. If you’re the kind of soft-ass drug dealer who can be scared away from crime by a rapping puppet, this just saved your life. Those mollied-up grade schoolers were going to pet the flesh right off your body.

Officer Ruff Bubbs, former dick-sucking crack dog, joins Officer Lenny Sprocket, one-time lion crack dealer, to deliver the final vow together. Addressed to an unseen enemy who has long since gotten away with it.

It is a very fitting moment in a Michael Mann movie about two traumatized undercover detectives who’ve lost all perspective and whose sense of justice has devolved into a vengeful god complex.

The sock puppets could have probably gotten away with “just say no.”

Thanks to ProseAndKahn for the Hot Dog tip!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: ND, a sock puppet with a god complex stuffed into the skin of a human.

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REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Hiatus Announcement

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Lenny the Crack-Smoking Lion 🌭

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You all remember Curt Hiss, the Drug-Free Beatboxing Snake. If you don’t, you need to click away right now. You’ve built a Puppet Week mental block and you can’t tear down that dam, or trauma will flood your soul like that village in China it’s illegal to remember.

Curt Hiss may be the simple tale of a drug-free beatboxing snake, but the tale behind Curt Hiss is one of unchecked ambition and hubris. It started when producer Wayne Owens had an idea. That idea? A green sock puppet is already a snake, you don’t have to do anything to it! Then he had part of a second idea: Something about drugs. He put together a grade school assembly puppet show starring a stoned snake and the grim reaper. Nobody watched it. He decided to go completely mad with fame anyway.

The tragedy of genius is that often the accolades go to your head, and your sophomore effort balloons out of control. For Wayne Owens, those accolades never existed, but again, it didn’t stop him. He took the characters from his 4th grade morality play and put them in The Departed. He went from a gymnasium puppet show to a movie about sock vigilantes taking down a drug cartel. It had courtroom drama, it had corrupt police officers, it had explosions, it still had the grim reaper. Once again, nobody watched it. Wayne Owens died, probably. Who gives a shit. This is not about Wayne Owens. This is about his creative legacy.

Because against all odds, he fucking had one!

Curt Hiss’ … hand actor? It sounds better than finger thespian. Curt Hiss’ finger thespian, Dwayne Stevens, was so inspired by Wayne Owens’ journey from sock owner to bankrupt puppet lunatic, he decided to try it himself. Now both writing and directing, Dwayne made 1989’s Welcome to the Streets with Lenny the Lion. But where Wayne Owens went insane trying to make a Michael Mann movie with socks, Dwayne Stevens lost his mind trying to make Boyz N The Hood. Also with socks.

In the opening scene, Lenny the Lion has just left his comfortable farm for fast-paced city life. These are his very first lines.

He made it one sentence into the big city before losing all faith in himself. This was filmed in Tupelo, Mississippi. So the “big city” they’re referring to here is Jackson, population around 100,000. They barely have a three story building. Let me explain: In a game of Civilization, you could build Jackson after researching plumbing, but before radio.

The one thing we know about this character is that he’s a lion. Why the eagle metaphor? Young lions are also forced to leave the pride and seek a place of their own. That’s zoologically accurate, plus there’s probably a pride pun in there! Let me explain: In a game of Comedy, you can make puns after researching farts, but before slapstick. That should be enough to dominate the Tupelo puppet scene.

Let’s try this again. The bird metaphor was a rookie mistake.

We’ll have to restart the game. Tupelo is fartlocked.

Dwayne Stevens has just discovered the narrative time jump. We can leap ahead in Lenny’s journey, after he’s been here a few years and grown disillusioned with the bright light of Jackson, Mississippi. They have a light now!

Why would we time jump two hours? It’s been half an afternoon. What could possibly have changed with Lenny the Lion, who just arrived in the big city and already finds its parking meters overstimulating?

Oh. Nothing. Nothing changed. No new developments.

This is like cutting away from a Batman fistfight to a MEANWHILE card and then cutting right back to that same fistfight. It achieves nothing, but in a more complicated way than doing nothing.

Lenny the Lion gave up the second he got off the bus, and continued giving up all afternoon, until he was so tired from giving up he gave up on it. He’s right, though: His friends would absolutely laugh at him. If he packed his bags to seek fortune in the big city and came back defeated in time for dinner, they would assume his bus broke down at the station. 8 year olds run away to the garage for longer than this. It’s the only time anyone has ever said this, but Lenny the Lion? Jackson, Mississippi is going to eat you alive.

And that’s when Sneaky Snake shows up.

Was he an eagle in the first draft? Could they not get hand insurance for beak damage, what the fuck is going on with the bird language? Somebody teach a metaphor class in Tupelo, it’ll be like that scene where color comes to Pleasantville.

I probably don’t need to tell you this, but Sneaky Snake is black coded. Coded is generous. He slides onto screen already talkin’ jive, then within a few sentences breaks into a song about dealing crack.

Right away you see where this is going. Every “naive kid in the big city” cautionary tale shares the same structure. Lenny the Lion has been here for two hours, so he’s still hanging onto his simple country morals. He’s going to tell Sneaky Snake off now, but someday he’ll be so beat down by city life he’ll take Sneaky up on the crack offer…

Oh, he’s already dancing to the crack song. He joined in on the first chorus. The one about getting children to smoke crack.

It’s been 97 minutes since he got to the big city. Bewildered German tourists who meant to fly into Jacksonville are still trying to decide which truckstop breakfast will give them the least diarrhea, meanwhile Lenny’s already harmonizing about crack babies. Where can we possibly go from here? Lenny won’t survive the next time jump. He’ll be dead in twenty minutes. His family will have to wait six hours for the evening return bus just to pick up his pine box.

Fucking!! Time jumps can be any length of time! They’re not a sex hotline or a coastal elite parking meter – they don’t charge by the minute. Go nuts and give it a week before you have your main character start dealing crack. Makes it relatable.

So where does the next day find Lenny?

Dealing crack!

Lenny meets crack dealers Ruff the Dog and Cool Cat who, I don’t have to tell you – real black coded. Yes, there’s a Tupelo primary school teacher doing “the accent.” But it’s somehow more offensive when Lenny drops that hard g and two hard z’s. If there’s enough hate in someone’s heart, they can turn anything into a slur.

Anyway, let’s meet Mr. Crack.

He’s a black coded inner city grim reaper. What every southern youth pastor struggles not to draw when they get “the devil” in Bible Pictionary. He is wearing a hoodie that simply says “CRACK,” as though it’s his alma mater. And yet he can’t figure out why the cops keep arresting him. Here’s a hint, it’s on your body and it rhymes with “wack.”*

*(It’s because he’s black.)

Sneaky is falling behind on his crack quota like a desperate furniture salesman after Labor Day. Mr. Crack doesn’t care, he just wants results. Sneaky Snake tells him not to worry – he’s got this new dealer named Lenny the Lion who’s gonna turn this whole failing drug empire around. Lenny gets scared of the streetsweeper. He thinks it’s a monster trying to eat the road. You cannot hang a drug empire on his abilities. That’s asking SpongeBob to negotiate with Hamas. That’s hiring Mr. Bean to kill your wife. That’s giving Curious George the nuclear codes. You can’t blame him when he slaps the big red button – he thinks it’s a baboon ass, and you were the one who was supposed to vet for monkeys.

Luckily, Ruff the Dog jumps in to distract us with his rap about selling crack. Specifically, how selling crack rules and there are no downsides. There are more polished artists, but Ruff’s got something special. He pairs the jaded honesty of a Kendrick lyric with the bumbling flow of a kooky HR rep, creating a savage dichotomy that lays bare the hypocrisy of corporatized hip hop:

Sneaky Snake sang about crack dealing in abstract terms, without consequences. Ruff the Dog is out here talking about killing kids, so obviously Lenny is-

Already dancing to it.

We’re supposed to believe Lenny doesn’t understand what he’s being drawn into, but when you’re on tape breakdancing to two puppets rhyming ‘ballistic’ with ‘child mortality statistic,’ the ignorance defense doesn’t cut it. This isn’t Tupelo, where the judge is a weather-predicting rooster. This is Jackson, their roosters went to college.

Anyway, here’s a puppet holding a bag of crack.

That’s Sneaky’s actual line. He loves this brand of crack. He delivers it like crack is part of a healthy balanced breakfast.

I think that bag of crack is actually real, by the way – we’ll get to that later.

Now it’s time to meet Sheriff Goodie, who accidentally stumbles into the story while trying to solicit underage prostitutes. I’m barely reading into it. Lenny the Lion is waiting for Sneaky Snake in an alley in the middle of the night when a middle-aged southern man wanders up to a fresh-faced young punk and offers him a place to stay and “some money.”

His exact phrasing:

I’ve never seen a cop trying so hard not to say “suck you,” and I’ve seen Joe Arpaio karaoke “Sussudio.”

Maybe that’s a natural flub, but nobody else fucks up their lines. It’s weird to leave only that one mistake, unless we’re trying to establish that Sheriff Goodie gets nervous around hot young uncut superpredators. Lenny does not pick up the vibe. He isn’t hip to 1980s Jackson hooker slang, or he’d know a “wrong crowd” is when three or more lions jack off on a sheriff.

Goodie eventually leaves disappointed, and Sneaky slides in to hand Lenny a crack pipe.

Oh right, here’s a puppet with a crack pipe.

Despite participating in two song and dance numbers about smoking crack, collecting crack profits, and reinvesting those crack profits into the youth community to ensure a future customer base for crack and crack-adjacent products, Lenny has no idea what crack might be. It makes sense, there are limits to how hard an educational sock puppet show for second graders can go. They can’t show a puppet actually smoking-

Lenny the Lion smokes crack.

Dwayne Stevens is a coward. He wants plausible deniability. He says Lenny the Lion ALMOST smoked crack, but he put the pipe in the puppet’s mouth, reared back like it was inhaling, then turned it to the camera with its mouth shut like it’s holding a hit.

I’ve seen puppets smoke crack before. I’m from Portland. That’s how shy junkies deal with an addiction they’re not willing to confront face to face. But whatever, Welcome to the Streets wants us to think Ruff ran up just in time to interrupt the process with dire news about Cool Cat, who just overdosed from a single hit of this new crack.

Did… did Lenny the Lion predict the fentanyl epidemic?

We should have listened to the puppets. God, how many times have I said that?

Lenny is furious with Sneaky Snake, but not for the reason you think-

He’s pissed off that Sneaky would give a light-colored “good” cat the same poor quality drugs as a black cat from the city. I used to work at a country club. I’ve seen this meltdown before, everytime a Kennedy tried to dump an OD’ing catalog model on the tennis courts.

Anyway, here’s a sock puppet going through crack withdrawals.

Lenny the Lion thinks the power of positive thinking can overcome any crack addiction, meanwhile Ruff the Dog is over here like “J-Jesus Christ, I will give you a wrong crowd just to lick your pipe resin.” Before things get too explicit, Sheriff Goodie breaks the fourth wall to explain that if you, watching this, are addicted to crack like Ruff, there are programs at the local hospitals that can help. This is a fucking sock puppet show cool seven year-olds would roll their eyes at. The audience tops out before puberty. The usual approach is to teach them how to say no to drugs early, not assume they’ve been on crack since pre-K and now that the big one-oh is coming up, they’re looking for a path back to normal.

Anyway, one of the puppets dies from a crack overdose.

That’s Momma Cat, who interrupts this juice-time crack intervention to wail about her dead child. It goes WAY too hard. She is shooting for an Oscar in a biopic about a promising grunge musician. I never would’ve called that Welcome to the Streets with Lenny the Lion had a fucking body count. Holy shit.

In her grief, Momma Cat demands Sheriff Goodie explain how the police let this kind of thing happen. Goodie delivers a long rant about the broken legal system letting drug dealers run free, the heavy implication being that if he had his way all black cats would die from police-issue 9s instead. Momma Cat gets it, she drops the matter before he flicks the bodycam off.

Lenny the Lion has been inspired. He’s taken the personal tragedy of a family he’s known for a few hours and spun it for his own attention.

Did… did Welcome to the Streets with Lenny the Lion predict influencer culture?

The puppets could have saved us all.

Lenny’s two days in the city are enough for him to land a lucrative anti-drug speaking gig, based on his experiences somewhat near crack for an afternoon. Sheriff Goodie once again addresses all the second graders burning glass at naptime, and promises that if they seek help from the authorities, charges will not be pressed. They don’t want you – they want the kingpins. The fourth graders.

One final time jump sees Lenny the Lion and Ruff the Dog, all cleaned up now, going on a fishing trip together. Then Ruff, taunting the universe, says this:

They hard cut to credits on that line, but I promise you there’s a deleted scene of Ruff the Dog getting his SAT results and then running down an alley in slow motion.

That’s the end, unless you count several minutes of drug talk from a hungover Tupelo police officer doing shit-shift for mouthing off to the captain. He tells the sock puppet demographic exactly what drugs are, where to find them, and how to do them. Officer Feelgood not only shows the kids a pile of cocaine, he lines up a rail and explains-

It’s a myth that one nostril gets you higher than the other, kids. Both nostrils are fine. No, there is no “gay nostril,” that’s an urban legend.

He’s very clear that this pile of cocaine is real. And presumably where Sneaky’s supply came from. I’m also pretty sure Officer Feelgood hosed that rail because he does the most coked-out thing I can imagine:

Fuck yeah! Man, ain’t no party like a Tupelo party, cuz a Tupelo party don’t stop until you make a cocaine devil and demolish it with some sock puppets.

I know that sounds like fun, kids, but remember-

A Mississippi second grader in 1989, tearfully dialing 1-800-Cocaine after learning they have a problem from a rapping sock puppet is a daydream many youth pastors have, but few dare to reach for. Bravo, Dwayne Stevens, wherever you are. Probably dead. Who gives a shit.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: ToastyGod, the breakcore fentanyl alpaca.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Magic of MOOOO

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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: The Martial Artists Book of the Occult 🌭

Magic grifters sell spells and potions to frustrated men in vests, the kind of men who consider themselves poly but don’t have a girlfriend. Karate grifters sell pokes and death touches to men in American flag shorts, the kind of men who are overcome by bloodthirst but unwilling to do a pushup. Because I’m laughably naive, I assume both kinds of men are too mentally unwell to purchase a firearm, which would solve all of their problems. Where are they to turn?

My motorcycle jacket came with concealed carry pockets that are exactly the size and shape of this book. I’d say it’s a coincidence, but I believe in internet magic. The fact that lightbulbs are lightbulb-socket shaped is all I need to know that reality is a simulation, and therefore you can hack it.

The author, S Rob, is a self-taught British Kindle wizard who writes the first 10% of scam books that promise to teach you magic for everything from male modeling to anal sex. Both real examples!

I say he writes the first 10%, because that’s the default sample size for an Amazon Kindle book. It’s an old grift: You fill the first 10% of an ebook with quality writing plagiarized from another source, and stuff the rest with random text, or nothing. In S Rob’s case, he fills the first 10% with genuine original madness, then once he thinks he’s got you hooked, he stuffs the other 90% with repeating paragraphs of copy/paste mystical nonsense. It has never worked on anybody but me. He has done it 700 times and I own four of his books. He’s made 40 cents, total, for 12 years of work. He considers it a rousing success, and will never stop.

But this time is different! The Martial Arts Book of the Occult is a physical book, published through an actual, real life, non-vanity press. Solar Vision Publishing is an occult press for magic loons and their supportive parent audience, but it still counts as a book deal! S Rob had to bring his A-game for this one, by which I mean he self-plagiarized the find/replace magic spam from several of his other books, but did not repeat the same gibberish in this book more than once. In these very strange, very specific circumstances, that’s high effort!

Let’s dig in, but first, a warning:

This book on how to voodoo curse your fists for maximum lethal spell-punching is never to be used for maximum lethal spell-punching. “YOU SHOULD, OBVIOUSLY, NEVER UTILIZE LETHAL FORCE AGAINST ANOTHER PERSON UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES,” I yell at my wife. “SPEAK THE WORDS IN BOLD OUT LOUD,” I scream at my dog.

Weren’t things better in the old days, when you and your mystical fraternity of karate wizards ruled the earth with an iron chop, or pinch? Look what woke has cost us: it’s like a man can’t even bless his fists with all-father Odin before uppercutting the mailman anymore. This book is going to fix all that. And don’t worry: you don’t need to master martial arts to use it, or even take one of the real ones. You only need a single point in any martial arts tree to unlock kicking, and then you can dump the rest into British foot magic. Let’s see who Sensei Doug thinks is “too fat to jumpkick” after you win a K-6 Taekwondo Exhibition with the help of Catubodua Battle Crow!

The problem isn’t whether or not you’ll win martial arts tournaments with S Rob magick, but that you should actually get two medals: the first for axe-kicking a fourth grader in half, and the second for summoning Papa Legba to turbocharge your kicks without even offering him his traditional hat full of rum. “It is difficult to be a good victorious fighter without fighting,” you should say, up there on the podium. That’s the kind of shit that gets you a high five from a Steven Seagal impersonator.

I know what you, the prime demographic for The Martial Arts Book of the Occult, are thinking: “Giant head in the sky who yells all my sexual thoughts at me, isn’t it cheating to use arcane hexes in a Junior Point Karate Championship? I mean, yeah, I get it – ‘PUT MY DICK ON THE ESCALATOR HANDRAIL SO EVERYONE TOUCHES IT BY PROXY’ – but are these spells ethical?”

“Ah, I see. If I simply win, and keep winning, then I will find that success, which is a form of winning, shall be mine. Thank you, giant head in the sky who yells all my sexual thoughts at me. I think I will FUCK THE GUMBALL MACHINE.”

Now that we’ve decided it would be silly not to channel the spirits of berkserker ghosts into our fists, let’s channel the spirits of berkserker ghosts into our fists!

I wish I had this book when I was a kid. Pausing a playground fight to rip long-dead hallucinating viking souls from their warrior’s heaven just to aid my wild windmilling punches wouldn’t have won me any fights, but it would have made me look exactly crazy enough not to mess with anymore.

Actually, that’s a common misconception. You can’t just trap a god in your fist and start wailing. You need to be careful which moves you enchant with internet grifter magic:

For example, only all blows with the hands, plus many others which the author of this martial arts grimoire can’t name, may be used. BEWARE: blows that affect how someone looks are extra dangerous. If you ask Santa Muerte to karate chop a man’s nose off, he may not take this well if you don’t kill him! So be extra sure to kill him. “YOU SHOULD, OBVIOUSLY, NEVER UTILIZE LETHAL FORCE AGAINST ANY PERSON UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES,” you should yell at your deformed, dying opponent. “SPEAK THE WORDS IN BOLD OUT LOUD,” are the last words he should hear.

Van Damme movies got into my head too early. No matter how many times it’s proven otherwise, I’m still convinced a good spin kick is the key to winning any fight and saving any marriage. Luckily, there’s a section just for me:

Webster’s Dictionary defines legs as: things you move around on, when you’re not using them to kill. I’m not going to sit here and front like caging the power of three giants in each thigh to fuel our superkicks is anything but rad as fuck. But then S Rob takes me right out of it when he says “some of us use our legs for a bewildering range of kicks.” This, coming from the man who needs a cane enchanted with the power of the spear that killed Jesus just to fight astral projections of catholics.

It’s tough to tell when I’m making things extra crazy for a joke, so here’s a tip: I’m not!

Still, I sat through the sexy child parts of many anime just for the promise of maybe one giant’s soul in a ninja’s foot or something. Three? PER leg? This spell rules. I give it 20/10 giants.

Don’t worry, grapplers. It’s not just striking magic. There’s a whole section just for choking enchantments and leglock ensorcellment.

“After all, what would life be without the ability to kill whenever you wanted?” S Rob muses, thinking he’s throwing a little relatable aside to the audience instead of exactly what some barrister needs to hear to close the Chip Shop Murders.

“Don’t worry, you can not NOT unhave the potential of negative redeadliness,” S Rob writes. “Looks good, let’s publish it,” another human being on this planet actually said.

If you’re having trouble with your choke form, might I suggest becoming possessed by the loa? Perhaps a skeleton lord. You want at least one skeleton lord and the blessings of some gravestones before attempting a Peruvian Necktie. Jiu Jitsu instructors hate this one weird trick! (It’s skeletons!)

We have killed our first opponent with black magic headlocks. That’s enough to advance to a yellow belt. We’re ready for the real stuff. Enough with Papa Legba, with ancient battle crones, with all the berserkers in Valhalla. We’re ready to summon a more powerful entity: S Rob.

You can summon S Rob as a Jojo Stand!

I know you’re tempted to use S Rob for his own mighty powers. Like maybe there’s an all you can eat shrimp buffet and the owners of the restaurant killed your father. But no, the S Rob Stand is only here as an assistant to valet Odin across worlds.

Yes, S Rob did write a book in which he required you to say “S Rob, he without limits or boundaries” out loud. If you actually did it, please check your crotch. You will find your genitals have migrated to a worthier host. Please inspect your neighbors for duplicate genitalia, S Rob will teach you how to magick them back in his next book PUSSY OR COCK THIEF MAGICK.

Now, I know what you, the prime demographic for The Martial Arts Book of the Occult, are thinking: “WOLVES HAVE MY BLOOD.” And you’re right, but also, “isn’t this a little arrogant, S Rob?”

There’s actually a good reason why we summon S Rob instead of ancient gods and all-powerful beings: ancient gods and all-powerful beings might have weaknesses.

An S Rob Stand is only weak against shrimp buffets, and even then, we’ve already shown how that can truly be a strength. It’s astonishing that when tasked with making a tulpa, an imaginary being who can take any shape, S Rob came up with: himself. But bigger.

The problem is he’s not big enough. Cenobite glasses? Magnificent. Squiggy forehead-pasted hair curl? Visibly oily? No notes. He’s gorgeous, can we blow him up to 300% and summon him to our bedroom for a three-way with Odin?

Enough foreplay. Everyone bought this book for one reason, it starts with “Dim” and ends with “Mak” and it ain’t a cat choking on a fishbone.

I promised you that by the end of this we would summon Satan himself to grant his dark boon to our death pinches, and I delivered. I actually didn’t promise that, because in my experience people tend to remove you from the work Slack if you promise that. But it was heavily implied this is where we’d end up.

Holy shit, you need to daisy chain a demon combo for like twenty minutes before you can unleash a single pinch with all the dark powers of hell. I already blew my Akuma reference for the month, so this is sort of like fighting Zangief in Street Fighter – if he’s in the corner hopping in circles for a half hour it’s kind of your fault if you walk into the spinning pile driver.

BUT BEWARE!

If you don’t finish this magic, all the devils of hell will fuck the holes left in your soul by lies and betrayal. If you’re served the wrong apps at Chili’s for the last time, you absolutely must finish this 20 minute roll call before destroying the waiter, or the devil will wear you as his condom. If anything happens to interrupt your full-afternoon lunatic’s dirge – if the waiter slaps you in the mouth, if the manager escorts you out to your mom’s Plymouth Cruiser, if you get a breakup text from your AI girlfriend while crying in a Plymouth Cruiser – you will not deliver an infernal death poke. For it is you who will be infernally poked until you are dea- ahh, you get it.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: AnAndy. AnAndy comes through the door. AnAndy visits the Red Lobster. The Red Lobster knows fear. AnAndy returns through the door. 

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Mascot Week: The Insane Tragedy of Rock’n Rollen 🌭

Do you know why people hold up JOHN 3:16 signs at sporting events? If you’re an idiot in Christ, like me, you assumed it was some Bible verse about sports. “And the Lord saw the goal, and it was good.” They’ve probably been doing it forever, holding up JON III:XVI tablets at the Colosseum right before getting demolished by a lion. But really the whole JOHN 3:16/sports thing only started in the 1980s, and it’s all thanks to this guy:

You probably recognize that guy. Even I recognize him, and I mostly think of sport as a deodorant scent. His real name is Rollen Fredrick Stewart, and he’s usually just called “Rainbow Man,” though his official mascot name is “Rock’n Rollen.”

This is a longform, information-dense article about a weird kind of cultural poison that started in the 1970s and spans to the modern day. You’ll check out of it about six paragraphs in. But at some point, I am going to write this sentence:

“Rock’n Rollen, the most prolific fan mascot and the reason you see JOHN 3:16 signs at sporting events to this day, was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences.”

Let’s earn it.

If I had one guess as to Rollen Stewart’s life story – the biography of an inspirational football clown – I would say he was raised in tragic circumstances but turned it all around thanks to the power of laughter, Jesus Christ, and balls going into the places where people want them. I’m half right: His father died when he was a kid, his mother when he was a teenager. His sister the same year, strangled to death. Lesser men would grow bitter and vow revenge on the uncaring world that let that happen. It takes a hero to endure such compounding tragedy and still get up every morning to do the electric slide at a Padres game.

Stewart and his then wife, Linda, got heavy into disco in the late ‘70s and toured the circuit with their matching rainbow-dyed hair, calling themselves “the People Pleasers.” I assume that’s late ‘70s orgy code for ambidextrous. They had one goal in life: No, not to glorify Christ. They wanted to make it on The Gong Show. Not win, just on. No illusions, they only wanted to hear a gong in person and then they could die, complete.

But all of this was hiding a dark secret…

That was not his real hair.

“The wigs got dirty,” Stewart admitted in an interview. “I told people it was my real hair.”

Betrayal. Betrayal most foul. That lie sets a dark stage for those to come.

Rollen Stewart lived a life of ease, coasting off a family inheritance. He worked, briefly, as a drag racer, a motorcycle mechanic, and a pot farmer. That’s the raddest dude at any party, right up to the moment he pulls out an acoustic guitar. Eventually, Rollen tired of doing awesome jobs, and figured he should be an actor, where he could get paid to pretend to do those same jobs. He moved to Hollywood, and as part of his effort to get noticed, he put on the rainbow wig and started dancing at sporting events. His big break in the field of ‘annoying guy briefly caught on camera’ came at the 1977 NBA Finals. He went national. Finally, the whole world knew his name: Sit Down, Asshole.

Rollen Stewart got exactly as famous as a person with a lot of persistence but no talent should be: he was in a Budweiser commercial and then nothing. A footnote briefly enjoyed and quickly forgotten. He simply lived in the wrong time. If he got his start today, he’d have 80 million followers on a social network I’ve never heard of, making bank off his own line of Chinese leggings and artisanal meat box endorsements.

So, here we have a fun-loving manic narcissist with no direction and a tenuous grip on fame. It’s time to find religion! After a long day at the buffoonery factory, Rollen left the 1980 Super Bowl “feeling sad. It was the shallowness. I was being seen all over the world, never as myself.” Tragic. Tell you what, Rollen Stewart, whenever I’m feeling sad I go to a football game and wait for the big screen to show me some dancing asshole in a rainbow afro. Always cheers me up. Hm? What’s that, you say? Oh no.

That night Stewart watched televangelist Charles Taylor on his show, Today in Bible Prophecy. Stewart was at a personal rock bottom and half insane from unfulfilled delusions of greatness – televagenlism’s prime demographic. Rollen Stewart was born again, and decided he must give his life to the lord. Such as it was.

He started bringing that iconic JOHN 3:16 sign to games… and doing everything else exactly the same. The rainbow wig, the gyrating, it was all perfect. His only mistake was never leaving space enough for Christ to gyrate beside him.

That’s the intended narrative for this kind of story, at least: Rollen was so inspired by God, he just wrote down the first thing that occurred to him and the lord provided the rest. You’re supposed to think this is spontaneous, almost an accident, a miracle. It’s never so simple. Every step of this was carefully calculated. First, Rollen met up with his friend and fellow sports paladin, Reginald Hamman – they had to put their heads together and figure out exactly how to capitalize on this wonderful gift Rollen had, which was the ability to go to games and make an ass out of himself for four seconds of total airtime.

Hamman had it! In his words: “You only have a few seconds and if that’s all you’ve got, just a few seconds, what are you gonna say? We got it down to the fact we’re gonna say John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Because in this media immediacy world, you have a little sound bite and then you’re off.”

It’s marketing. It’s basic marketing, but this was 1980. Ad companies were still publishing full-page 800 word screeds about how tire treads are like your family. And here were two religious nutjobs inventing “Got Milk?” Not only was the message short, but its cryptic nature only helped. Hamman knew the act of getting the audience to look up what it meant, on some level, hooked them into the experience. Discovery is often mistaken for commitment. It’s why I’ve never heard of your favorite band.

So they had the perfect message, but no plan: you can’t just go out there, do something fun, and hope people enjoy your work. No, you have to devote your whole life to debasing yourself in cynical marketing ploys to stand any chance of being seen. It’s a lot like being a modern-day author.

Rollen and Hamman gamed it all out. For football, it was easy – just get a seat behind the goalposts. For basketball, it was the backboard. For baseball, home plate. If he couldn’t get those seats? He’d just invade the ticketholder’s space anyway. Rollen targeted families with young children, because then he could argue the kid wasn’t taking up much space. He could slip in there right beside them. He could even hold them!

Remember, the 1980s were a high trust society. You would often hand your children off to aggressive clowns, freeing up your hands to double-fist leaded beer.

Rollen carried around a portable television, watching where the cameras were pointing and hustling over to inject himself into frame. In his weirdly sinister words: “I had watched television, seen all the angles, and saw a person could stand in the background in all of these shots and become instantly known. I had a dream in technology. I needed a magnet. To stand there as a person would be fine, but I could do twice as good if I had a color scheme or something.”

He moneyballed sports direction. He SEO’d football attention. He hacked national television and installed a virus called Rollen Stewart. So here he was, everywhere he wanted to be. And camera operators knew a shot of a dancing rainbow doofus livened up otherwise stagnant audience pans, so they couldn’t get enough of him. Wait, no- the furious opposite of that.

“I know directors who threatened to kill the guy,” Brent Musberger said of Rollen. “Because he would get in behind very dramatic shots and the eye, as you watched the screen, would be attracted immediately to this wacko.”

TV crews fucking hated him, but Stewart was min-maxxing an exposure build. He knew camera-fu, and all televised sports were helpless against it. In our collective memory, Rock’n Rollen the rainbow wig guy comes across as some fun spontaneous thing, but it was all a cynical, joyless battle for attention that made everyone involved miserable.

Rollen expanded. You saw him at golf games, at the Indy 500, he was next to the fucking medal stands at the Olympics. He became the Ever Dream This Man? of the 1980s – an involuntary, unwelcome, wholly manufactured tumor in the cultural consciousness. But fame works on the same rules as assassination: if somebody is willing to give their entire life over to this one goal, it becomes very difficult to stop them.

Luckily, during this dark spiral, Rollen found love and it healed the holes in his worm-addled brain. He met Margaret Hockridge in 1984, and they were married ten months later.

…

And then he brought her on tour with him. Living out of his van, spending every penny traveling to every televised event possible just to be seen for four seconds. For Christ. Of course, all this for Christ.

Well, at least he found a kindred spirit, right? Everyone needs that. Male blobfish are real sexy to lady blobfish. It’s nice that Rollen Stewart found a partner in lunacy, and maybe somebody to love more than his own bizarre obsession. I sure hope the next sentence doesn’t make me look like an asshole.

In 1986, at Shea Stadium, Margaret stood in the wrong spot with her own JOHN 3:16 sign – an unoptimized spot! She was not seen by the camera. So Rollen hunted her down and began choking her.

When your whole life is devoted solely to showing JOHN 3:16 signs at sporting events, when every waking moment becomes about that, when you’re convinced this ridiculous inconsequential thing is actually a mission from God with all of humanity on the line, when you sincerely believe all of that is true – what is a wife, but another post to hang a sign on?

Obviously, Rollen had gone completely insane. Four letters and three numbers started bouncing around his brain like shrapnel, shredding everything else in there. Things took a turn. He wrecked his van, you know – the sign transporting box? It was broken, hindering his ability to deliver signs. That was a sign of the endtimes – holy shit, “sign” of the endtimes? That has the word sign in it! It’s a sign! Holy shit! “It’s a sign” has a sign in it, too!

Rollen was certain the apocalypse was coming. It might be sign-based. Dancing was no longer enough. More drastic tactics were necessary: In the 1990 Masters Tournament, just as Jack Nicklaus was about to swing – Rollen sounded an air horn. All eyes turned that way, in fury.

JOHN 3:16.

That sucks, but it’s still playful. The Noid might do that shit, and a Domino’s pizza driver would beat him with a shovel for it.

In the early ‘90s, Rollen set off a series of “stink bomb” attacks. And when people looked around for the source of the smell?

JOHN 3:16.

Still cute, still mischievous. Bart Simpson sets off stink bombs, and we love him for it. Hey, we keep calling them stink bombs. What actually were they?

“A timer, a knife, and an acid-filled balloon.”

“Stink bombs.” You find that exact wording in every article about it. Because everyone wanted Rollen Stewart to stay fun. Even as he deployed these chemical weapons during a crowded Good Friday service in the Crystal Cathedral. Even as he bombed the Orange County newspaper with them. Especially when he detonated one of these acid balloons in the studio audience of a TBN show.

The newspapers were all “They’re just a lil’ smelly! He’s still fun. Fifteen people had to be hospitalized for severe breathing problems, but don’t come to the rink if you can’t handle the stink!”

That joke works better if this took place at a hockey rink, and if fifteen people weren’t actually hospitalized by a chemical weapon.

In September, 1992, Rollen Stewart hired two day laborers for undisclosed work. Please picture him still wearing the wig. I don’t think that’s true, but no newspaper specifically says it isn’t, so yes it is. Stewart just rock’n Rollen up to the Home Depot in a loincloth and rainbow afro, telling two immigrants he needs them for the day, and “don’t worry why.” Imagine how desperate you have to be to take that job. Watching all your friends hanging back, but still hopping in the bed of that truck with a shrug like “hey, not my first time being on a clown menu.”

Rollen drove them to the Hyatt Hotel near LAX, and booked a room on the seventh floor. Still, the day laborers did not flee. They followed him to his room, presumably ready to strip down to their underwear and beat him with pool noodles to completion. That’s called the Airport Special; it means wage-and-a-half, but it is not a dealbreaker.

They opened the door to find 29 year-old maid Paula Madera-Chan still cleaning the room. She tried to excuse herself before the noodling started, but Rollen knew that God only gives you the number of hostages you can handle. He pulled out his .45 automatic revolver. Please picture the rainbow wig, still on. No news story says it wasn’t! I checked!

Paula was a woman, and thus had heightened clown instincts. She locked herself in the bathroom immediately. Knowing that when an airport hotel maid panics, shit is about to get too real, both of the day laborers also fled. Rollen was sick of all the fleeing. He nailed the door shut. He called the media, he threatened to shoot at the nearby planes. He prepared for a standoff. He covered the windows to prevent sniper-fire.

Guess what with.

Rollen was certain the Rapture was coming in less than a week. And what messenger would Christ choose to warn his followers, if not the dancing rainbow wig guy from the football games?

Playful to a fault, Rollen frequently paused his apocalyptic rants to lob “stink bombs” at the cops below. Stink bombs which, remember, were actually acid-filled balloons. That sounds over the top for a Golden Age comic book villain-

The ensuing standoff lasted eight hours. That maid was hiding in a bathtub, listening to an armageddon clown scream and throw acid at cops for eight straight hours. You don’t even hope for survival past the first hour. By hour six, all you hope is that drinking enough hotel shampoo is fatal. She must have known, with absolute certainty, that Rollen Stewart was going to wear her out of that hotel. But no, Paula Madera-Chan survived being a hostage in a clown’s last stand. That’s the only real miracle in this article.

Finally, SWAT blew in the door with shaped explosives, and they took down the rainbow afro dancing guy from the Bud commercial with a concussion grenade. That’s true. It’s a true sentence. You can see it happen.

I love that it still looks wacky. It’s what a barrel would do in Looney Tunes after Bugs Bunny threw a stick of dynamite in it. A perfect, goofy end to our most goofball domestic terrorist.

Rollen was charged with eight felonies, one per hour, and rejected a plea deal of 12 years because he thought this was his spotlight. This trial was going to be the center of the world, because he was the center of the world, because his personal mission was the center of the world. Finally, it would all be worth it.

It wasn’t. Rollen’s trial was only ever a novelty headline, and he threw the rest of his life away for a blurb on page 8, next to a local furniture store ad for Crazy Dan’s Credenza CreDayz.

Clearly, Rollen should’ve tried for an insanity defense. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Welcome to the darkest laugh in this article about terrorist clowns:

When asked if he heard voices, Stewart said “no, I’m not hearing voices. I’ve been hearing the voice of God for years.”

We’ve finally earned it:

Rock’n Rollen, the most prolific fan mascot and the reason you see JOHN 3:16 signs at sporting events to this day, was found guilty of all charges and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences.

You know how the rest of this story goes: after years behind bars to reflect on his crimes, Rollen Stewart is a man overcome with regret. In a 2004 interview, having just served 12 years in prison, he was asked to elaborate on exactly what those regrets were. Rollen said: “That I did it at the wrong time.”

That was it! He’s mad he got the date wrong.

I didn’t photoshop that. He posed for that photo in jail, and the paper ran it with that headline. I guess I added the word balloon, but I think we can all agree it was implied.

Everyone else involved with this must be fucking shattered, though. They egged this guy on thinking he was just going to spread the love of Christ with fun dancing and kooky costumes! Let’s check in on the ex-wife he choked for unoptimized sign placement, on the day she heard about the police standoff: “It tore me up that he would go to such lengths and sacrifice his own life… when nobody’s going to listen anyway.”

She’s only upset because it didn’t work! Not about Rollen’s potential death, or the hostages, or even all the human signpost abuse – the only distressing thing about this whole situation is that nobody listened to the dancing clown with the .45.

I bet Reginald Hamman, the guy who came up with the whole JOHN 3:16 meme, is pretty fucked up about it. That quote is exclusively about the love and acceptance of Christ, there’s no way he’s happy this all ended with hucking acid balloons at the police.

That’s an exact quote! Including the choking up and the sobbing – he was so moved by how great this all turned out he couldn’t even talk about it. They were tears of joy! That’s the most terrifying part of this whole thing: everyone thought it went just great. A man tried to spread the word of Jesus Christ with acid bombs and automatic revolvers and all involved think the whole thing was not only a great idea, but inspirational.

Alright, I made up that second quote. I think we can all agree it was implied.

But it wasn’t worth it, right? Rollen Stewart left a tainted legacy, and now anyone can look him up on Google and instantly see that he’s-

Just a fun loving missionary. That’s the notable part of the story, Google. Good job.

And to think this all started with a simple passion for sports. A longing to be part of the game from a fan who just wanted to spread joy-

“I despised sports,” Rollen told the LA Times in 2008.

Sports were only ever a means. First for fame, and then for Christ. That order.

I was wrong earlier – no, not about the terrorist fan mascot and the armed standoff. Absolutely true. But I said the most terrifying part of this is how everyone thought it went just great. When really, the most terrifying part is that it all went just great.

To this day, you can find JOHN 3:16 signs at every major sporting event. You can buy a Stone Cold Steve Austin jockstrap referencing it. In 2009, Tim Tebow stenciled it on his eye black.

Tebow launched it to greater heights than ever. It was the number one Google search that day, back when Google was how you searched things instead of how you learned which domestic terrorists their AI respects.

JOHN 3:16 is now inextricably tied into every level of sports, it’s one of the world’s most persistent memes, and it’s all thanks to the efforts of a dancing clown mascot terrorist who fucking hated sports.

Happy Mascot Week, everybody!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Devon the Rogue Supreme, who has never been convicted of Clown Terrorism. Why do you ask?