Author: Robert Brockway

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?

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Finding Peak Hunk with the Fabulous Ones 🌭

From the Greeks to the Romans to probably others but mostly those two, a culture is measured by their hunks. Here in the US, we live in a declining empire and I can prove it. We reached maximum hunk saturation in 1983, and every day since then we’ve only watched the slow unraveling of society. It’s too late for us, but in the interest of saving future civilizations, we need to pinpoint the apex of American hunkiness. I propose it is a 1983 promo video featuring Stan Lane and Steve Keirn, The Fabulous Ones. Apparently they were a wrestling tag team, that couldn’t be less important. We’ll never talk about it. This is about history, hunks, and the hubris of mankind. The Triple H.

I’m told that’s also a wrestler. Please focus.

I’m not here to prove the 1983 Fabulous Ones promo was the high-water mark of the western world, when hunkiness broke and the cheeks rolled back. That’s self-evident. But the video is 135 seconds long, and only one of those seconds can save the world. We’re going to find it. Music should be swelling in your heart. Somebody should be saluting you. If you’re alone, look outside – you’ll find a squirrel with one paw over its heart in quiet tribute. This is the work of heroes, somber and dignified.

Send in the subjects, please.

Toot toot, all aboard the hunk train. It’s all caboose.

With the obligations done, let’s talk science. The promo is so effective because of two things: the rapid fire montage of alternate hunk looks, and the buns. Let’s discuss the looks first, and the buns second, third, fourth, and actually first. This video features more man mounds than Arlington National Cemetery. It is a black diamond run of sexy moguls. In France it’s punishable by six years in prison to smuggle buns like this. If these cheeks were ever to clap in unison, it would shatter all the windows in town.

Now, on to the analysis of hunk archetypes. Let’s begin with the Dandy Cowpoke, as first presented by Stan Lane.

The denim tells you he’s blue collar, the blue collar tells you it’s not all work. Shirtless, leather, cowboy boots, these are the pornhub tags of every repressed pastor. Blink and you’ll miss the saucy straw-bite, don’t blink and you’ll be lost in his hazel eyes forever. It’s a strong introduction, but not peak hunk.

Not to be outdone, Steve Keirn both combines and subverts two diametrically opposed hunk archetypes to create the Fancy Bathtime Hunk.

Countless hunks have died of shampoo poisoning trying to drink wine and bathe at the same time. Notice how he stops just shy of sipping, frozen in time. Steve’s not going out like that. That’s called experience. This isn’t Keirn’s first rodeo, Stan would laugh and show you his SK brand if you said that.

But this isn’t a competition. Stan and Steve are a team, and woe to any panties that fall under their combined gaze.

Tell your panties I’m sorry I wished them woe. I didn’t know they were about to explode.

The Barn Hunk demands a subtle but important distinction from the Dandy Cowpoke Hunk. The Barn Hunk works for a living, he earned his buns squatting haybales. The Dandy Cowpoke Hunk has buns built for gripping onto prancing horses. They’re not just different classes, they use entirely different muscle fibers and that results in wildly disparate cheek ripples.

This is not to say one hunk archetype is inferior to another. Remember, that’s not the purpose of this study. It’s about the cumulative effect. Watch this – I’m going to warn you not to get lost in Steve’s smile, but it’s not going to help.

The Barn Hunk could never pull off that pose. The jaunty lean, the casual splay, the devil’s own smirk. A Barn Hunk is a direct hunk. He’s a tool hunk, a trade hunk. A Monday Hunk. A Dandy Cowpoke Hunk is for Saturday night regrets at the mechanical bull bar. And yet even now you can see Stan and Steve playing these expectations against one another. Lured into this sort of hunk class war, we’re thrown right back out and into the tawdry opulence of the Fancy Bathtime Hunk.

The effect doesn’t fully land. Stan simply does not have Steve’s experience, he is unwilling or perhaps unable to mime a sip from his elegant bathtime wine. It might be for insurance reasons, hunk drowning coverage is wildly expensive since the Hunk Boat disaster. But still, we sense something missing from the scene. It feels like a step backward after Steve’s daredevil pose. Stan tries to make up for it with a bathtime derby and a double foamy thumbs up, but this gives less an impression of a rapacious hunk demanding your eyeline and a more of a gentleman trying to save face after falling naked through a ceiling.

That’s all down to Steve’s vast experience and classical hunk education. But youth does have advantages over years. Watch this – I’m going to warn you not to get overstimulated by the buns, but it’s not going to help.

Devastating. I should have tried to save your panties but I already failed them once earlier. I know it’s too late to walk back my mistakes.

Tear your eyes away – down here. DOWN HERE. It’s actually the transition that’s important in this scene. There they are, shirtlessly lounging in the hay to ease you into a false sense of security. This feels, if anything, postcoital. The action has already happened, just relax into the damp straw and bask in the afterglow.

Only then do they smash, for the very first time, into a full booty presentation. I know I promised we weren’t talking about wrestling, but this is like dropping to one knee to propose and then, when she’s off guard, executing a perfect suplex.

Steve is no slouch here, but look at Stan. The outline of his buns are sharper, his jeans tighter, his elbow flared more dramatically, his smirk a little more defiant. The more experienced Steve set up a textbook-perfect descending bun flash, but in breaking with classic form it’s Stan’s buns that draw us in, precisely for the rules they break.

Speaking of breaks, let’s take an Existential Hunk Break and ponder, for just one second, the bottomless hunger of time.

That’s enough, hunks cannot gaze into the void for too long. It falls in love.

Back to the study.

Stan and Steve are marvels of mankind individually, but it was always the way they set up and played off each other that escalated mere pretty boys into beautiful men. Watch this – I’m going to warn you not to get distracted by Stan’s crotch, but it’s not going to help.

You see how they did that? Stan’s face is barely in frame, yet he’s executing an Open Dangled Hay Splay. That’s so risky it’s banned in eight countries. It’s a centerpiece move. As we begin the zoom we think we know, of course, where the point of focus is going to be. We’re here to catch ourselves a greased hog. But no, a flirty last minute camera shift to Steve waylays our lust. “Oh?” He seems to say, “did you mean to look at something else?” He then gives us just a hint of Straw Suckle, not even a full-mouthed pull. He’s telling us in no uncertain terms that the Fabulous Ones know what you want, and it will be given to you only on their time.

I think it’s in here. The one perfect second to save a future’s hunks. I think this Open Dangled Hay Splay Hog Zoom Fakeout to Partial Straw Suckle is the peak of the form. This is two hunks at the top of their game, at the height of the art, working in perfect sync to both define and shatter the conventional rules of hunking. If there is but a single moment to point to as the ultimate-

Oh. Oh my god.

Once again, when it comes to hunks, I’ve been premature.

Somewhere in this clip is our one perfect second of apex hunk. But where?

Is it Steve reading a hotel pamphlet in a slutty kimono? Maybe. That’s such a perfect example of the dignity and grace a hunk can bring to a scene that, were it given to a woman, might come across trashy and obscene. Picture a small Asian babe up there in her micro-robe. It’s sexy, but it’s vulgar. It’s exploitative. When Steve strolls across the room in a child’s kimono, there’s an intentionality to it. It’s controlled, it’s subversive, there’s only the hint of a package that is never delivered.

Or is it Stan, just giving us the pure and simple American buns we deserve? That moment could be seen as pandering, but watch Stan set it up. The split-second look he gives us before the reveal. Looking straight at the camera through his own reflection, telling us we’re not leering at him. He’s leering at us. Then the sudden snap zoom to full bun presentation as he casually does his hair – the opposite of buns both in location and symbolism. “Oh these?” He seems to say. “These old buns? I just threw these on. The hair, on the other hand, now that takes effort.”

It’s neither of these moments, and it is both. Black-pantied buns and slutty kimonos do not make the hunk. A hunk plays in the spaces between ham presentations. Great music happens between notes, powerful books live in the subtext, master chefs will tell you – it’s all about the food you don’t eat.

I believe I’ve found the Peak Hunk Instant. Now, at first it seems tame, stuffy, maybe even prude – but I think the summit of western hunking happens exactly here. I’ve slowed it down for you to study:

Nothing is an accident. Steve begins his maneuver in partial profile, dropping his knees apart as he settles into a low chair in his slutty kimono. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we understand this is the moment before the moment. The expectation before climax. The silent triangle twisting gently in a musician’s grip, just before the ding. The finger hovering over a doorbell, just before the dong.

If he sinks one more inch into that chair, that’s the end of the circus. We’ll meet the elephant. And in that exact fraction of a second we throw to a closeup of Stan doing his hair. Before our frustration can even register, a bakery van flips. It’s an unexpected bun delivery.

That’s it. That’s where the western hunk stood astride the summit and realized there were no more mountains to climb. Future civilizations, I don’t know if you’re reading this. I don’t know if our dialect survived long enough to speak to you. I don’t know if these words are capable of conveying my sorrow for what we lost, my hope for what you’ve gained, and my gratitude at being part of it all. Luckily I do speak one universal language.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: OrneryWeevil, who died of a urethral straw infection attempting the Open Dangled Hay Splay. We hope you’re heaving meat in heaven now.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Kidz Water Hydrators 🌭

Children love comic books and also need water to live. Maybe that’s a controversial stance, but it’s one I’m willing to stand behind. Hi, I’m Robert Brockway and I’m here to talk to you about proper hydration and unleashed capitalism. It’s a ringing endorsement from me on both! Here’s my favorite comic book.

Kidz Water is exactly what it sounds like, water for kids. Now with extra fluoride! A bold twist in 1999, when the main market for bottled water was conspiracy-brained survivalists prepping bunkers for Y2K. It’s like booking flights to Orlando with the promise of extra colorful chem trails. Your demographic ain’t gonna love it.

But at first glance, the Kidz Water Hydrators comic book isn’t too crazy. Branded content and comic books go together like The Incredible Hulk and delicious Hostess Fruit Pies. Some maniac has already documented those extensively, it took most of his life and all of his sanity. I’m just saying that if this was an established practice – and Captain Citrus promises me it was – why then did Kidz Water Hydrators have to be launched under its own line: Marvel Custom Comics?

No other sponsored content title had to be distinguished from the Marvel brand, much less quarantined in its own publishing line. Marvel Custom Comics never published a single title before Kidz Water Hydrators, and never published one after. A whole separate imprint that existed just to clarify “this Kidz Water piece of shit does not represent us.” In an alternate timeline where Marvel never took that step, Kevin Feige is kicking off Phase Six of the Brandedverse by announcing Jojo Siwa as Crystal and Michael B Jordan as Tooth Decay.

“Haha,” you’re saying. “Classic Crystal burn from Brockway. I love this guy. He’s my best friend, I’m going to trust him with my house for the weekend.” Most of you are saying that, but I’m sure there are a few younger readers who don’t get our off the cuff Kidz Water Hydrators references. Let’s fix that.

MEET THE HYDRATORS!

Hydro! He can shoot water and is strong, like water is!

Crystal! She can turn invisible and has a crystal shield! She protects teeth! Any teeth!

Misty! She creates mist! Let’s check the next sentence for the rest of her powers! Thanks, Misty!

Ice! Ice!

Vapor! He can shoot water and is strong, like water is! Whoops that’s Hydro, thank god I caught that error in time, unlike Michael Stewart, the writer of Kidz Water Hydrators!

X-Stream! He can shoot various forms of water and is strong, like water is! Haha, you’re fired Michael Stewart!

Together they are the Hydrators, here to promote proper childhood hydration on their gleaming hovercycles, the sales of which could provide clean drinking water to all of Africa for the rest of time!

I have worked in branded content. It’s part of the only reason I’m so filled with crippling hate. I can tell you this: You do not put your A Team on Kidz Water Hydrators. Trust me, I’m a B Team Motherfucker. Yet those Hydrators bylines are not all struggling interns about to wash out of the comic industry. All of them are seasoned pros with big titles under their belts, and Al Milgrom was an actual editor at Marvel during this time. Not a well liked one, we can deduce from this job. But still, it’s wild how much money and effort was put into this. I’m only lying about one of those things.

Ha, “wash out.” I just got it. That’s why they pay me that B Team money.

The first issue – I’ll repeat that, the first issue – of Hydrators is about a villain named Chill who’s here to ruin a child’s snowboard race. In terms our younger reader can understand, in the ‘90s this was akin to inciting a violent political coup to overthrow a democratic election. It was a big deal, very frowned upon, but ultimately not punished.

I’m not going to sit here and spend my day spotting errors in the plot of Hydrators, because I have self respect but it is not unshakeable. I just want to point out that in the beginning, our heroes don’t know Chill’s sinister plan. They only know Nicole crashed one time in an active snowboard race, which made them bummed, so they gave her a flying hoverbike ride all the way back to the lead position. In terms our younger readers can understand, it’s like that election thing again.

That’s it. That’s all Crystal needs to hear. Nicole, a teenage snowboarder in the 1990s, is feeling a bit dizzy and flushed. To super-detective Crystal that’s evidence of a sinister plot, and not a Jetta full of half-crushed Sprite cans with little holes poked in them.

Ice, with his Bachelor’s degree in ice, knows that children’s water bottles do not naturally freeze in a perfect rectangle. Vapor, with his Associate’s degree in HVAC, knows the best solution is to fire scalding water at it. The kids replenish their bodies with warm water in heat compromised plastic. AHHH!

Real quick note: Can we find a way for the teens to drink water without saying the words “the kids replenish their bodies?” No? Kidz Water isn’t paying enough for a second pass? There’s barely enough money in the world to pay for this first pass? Human dignity does have a price, but you can’t buy it twice? That’s fair. B Team solidarity, Kidz Water Hydrators writer Micheal Stewart.

If we were accepting notes, I’d say it’s a little weird that the villain also loves water, but it worked for Hostess Fruit Pies and Nestle so let’s roll with it.

Hey, Michael Higgins, you’re the letterer of this issue. We need you to figure out a good sound effect for a snowboarder wiping out. It’s basically your one job.

You’re right, Michael Higgins: little rebellions keep the soul alive.

But look at that! Nicole is back in the race! With only substantial hoverbike assistance from a billion dollar superteam. We’d root against her for that back in the ‘90s. She was decades ahead of her time.

Chill isn’t out of the running yet, he’s come to this child’s snowboard competition armed with a high tech freeze-ray because he really, really wants that Personal Pan Pizza.

Whoops, you blinked and you missed it. The only thing X-Stream did in this, the team’s debut issue. He missed a flying dive tackle. Not a superpowered one at hyper speed. A normal dive tackle aimed at a teenage snowboarder off his board. At a kid wearing clunky snowboard boots in deep snow, who has just been knocked totally off guard by an invisible karate kick. I know I said I wasn’t here to poke holes in the plot of a sponsored content comic book for dehydrated children, but I also said I have self respect. We tell all sorts of lies to get through life. Right, Michael Higgins?

Holy shit, Ice. You should not be on this novelty corporate water team. You just flew in on an ice slide you made by flash freezing the ambient water in the air, then shaped a ski resort’s powder into a perfect loop to paralyze a snowboarding cheater. Even Chill could only freeze small blocks of water, and he needed a special gun to do it. This is a wild escalation, Ice. The person who did second most on your team high kicked a wrist.

Shit like this is why we needed Affirmative Action. Those are Iceman level powers. He’s an Omega threat now. Ice, you turned in a resume explaining how you’re the master of one of the fundamental elements of life and they put you on a team with the dipshit failcousin of every voting board member. That’s pure injustice. The only minority done dirtier in these pages is Misty (not pictured).

This is the whole comic so far, every page. Misty is not in it. The one panel where she helps a snowboarder stand up doesn’t count. She could’ve been replaced by a sturdy branch. Maybe “makes fog banks” isn’t exactly a universal screwdriver, but low visibility is famously the enemy of mountain sports. Ask Sonny Bono’s ghost, and while you’re at it, have him explain who he is to the younger readers. I don’t have a cynical analogy for that.

Wait, he’s like if Paul Walker was K-Fed.

Wait, that’s somehow even older.

Hold on, is that supposed to be a twist? That Chill brought a freeze ray AND a trick snowboard? And THE SNOWBOARD is why he was disqualified? Is this an Air Bud situation, there’s nothing in the rules about freeze-blasting teens and weaponizing dehydration?

Actually, let me check the handbook for the Mountain Creek Winter Fundays Downhill Play Race (Junior Division), yep it definitely says here you can’t be ferried down the mountain on the hovercycles of corporate shills. Actually, let me check the penal code of the United States of America, yep says here you can’t paralyze a teenager for cheating at snowboarding.

I can’t believe Chill brought the GDP of Indonesia in high tech weaponry and he’s not even going to get those two free passes to Snow Problem: Vernon, New Jersey’s hottest and only snowboard halfpipe for ages 18 and under. Those were the only stakes of this issue!

This is such a failure on every level that I can only assume it bankrupted the company. But there’s so little evidence Kidz Water even existed I can’t be sure of that. Hold on, there’s a website address here in the back. Let’s check Kidzwater.com on the Wayback Machine.

Huh, that was the same month the comics released. Even back in 1999, companies knew not to print their website address if they didn’t have a website. Let’s check back a year later.

Oh, man. Construction.jpg was the digital tombstone of the 1990s. So it never existed and skipped straight to limbo. Just an unbaptized baby of a business. RIP Kidz Water, the only unflavored fluoridated drinking water for children, aside from tap.

Special thanks to Mo for the Hot Hot Dog Tip!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Brian Seiler, also known as Fluorider! He can shoot water and is strong, like water is!

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The (Devil’s) Workshop 🌭

Blue Comet Press was an independent comic book publisher founded, staffed, and terrorized by Craig Stormon. Craig has a tough vibe to pin down, he’s kind of like a child granted a Zoltar wish to be big, and then sent six hundred years into the future to fight in a time war he had no chance of understanding. Now he’s back, and he has PTSD from robot attacks that haven’t happened yet. He is a madman standing at the edge of infinity, and instead of therapy he slowly burned down a comic book imprint over the course of a decade. He started BCP in 1986 and ran it until the mid ‘90s, and he never published a title that went beyond three issues. Craig Stormon himself was BCP’s most prolific and most canceled creator, and he was in charge of cancellations. They say if you hate yourself you’re probably not alone, but only Craig Stormon has a choir of alternate universe Stormons heckling his every move.

The (Devil’s) Workshop was one of many Blue Comet Press titles that didn’t make it past the first issue. That makes it lucky – some titles didn’t make it beyond issue zero. He canceled them before they started, because his child-brain has been tragically shattered and spread across the chronoverse. The (Devil’s) Workshop was Stormon’s response to the ‘90s edgy comics craze which, like all of human existence, Craig Stormon both despised and desperately wanted to be a part of, but couldn’t figure out how.

You might remember the main character, Windraven, from Blue Comet’s flagship title, L.I.F.E. Brigade – a team of bewildered superheroes fighting every comic book plot at once. Windraven was the Indian psychic magician who got her powers twice, once from the fact that all Indians are magic, and twice from a living comet who’d never met her and didn’t realize it was granting her the exact same set of powers again. Her primary personality trait was bikini, and she lost half of it for The (Devil’s) Workshop. Windraven is an embodiment of the saddest thing that can happen in comic books: When a nerd falls in love with a sexy lady he made up. She shows up in multiple titles, surviving several cancellations. She’s the one thing Craig Stormon can’t let go of – well, her and the pinless handgrenade he carries everywhere for arguments.

Like all Blue Comet Press titles, The (Devil’s) Workshop opens with a completely insane frothing manifesto from the editor, Craig Stormon, ranting against the very artists he’s working with in this issue, often including himself.

Craig Stormon writes like the moment after a child falls into an ape enclosure. Just pure shrieking chaos. Every Stormon editorial feels like a man in a dynamite vest is screaming over your shoulder while using you as a human shield against a wary SWAT team. The opening sentences of this comic book blame you, the reader, for assuming Craig Stormon was selling out to the edgy comics craze. He invented the concept of bad girls in 1991, maybe 1992, you idiot! They didn’t exist before that! Also the penciler for this issue was a son of a bitch whose ghost almost certainly haunts the trunk of Craig Stormon’s 1981 Buick Electra. It’s a good thing we’re not even naming that son of a bitch or this would be libel.

Craig Stormon’s mortal enemy this week is a cowardly penciller named Dick Bonk. There’s no way that man exists outside of Craig’s own quivering brain. This is definitely a Split situation. When co-writer Paul Birch walked into the office one day to find the walls smeared in shit and Craig Stormon introducing himself as Dick Bonk Pencilman, he knew better than to question it. That’s how you get a Stormon Bite, and those always get infected.

It gets overshadowed by the mad fury reserved for his own pencilsona, but Craig also throws digs at the painter of this issue’s cover, promising that all future issues will be MUCH better than this shitty one. That’s the kind of burn that doesn’t fully land until Craig Stormon cancels the whole title, ensuring there will be no future issues.

Hold on, Craig Stormon is not done clawing at the walls and cursing at the unrelenting sun.

Craig knows what you’re worried about: You think he’s too afraid to say “FUCK.” Well, you little dick bonk, he’s not! He’ll say it, plus any other word. Butt! That’s just an example. BUTT AGAIN.

I’m not sure what he means by listing other books he’s worked on before they got “too scared of competition.” Wait, I am sure: He got fired for hunting the other artists like Lance Henriksen in Hard Target.

The (Devil’s) Workshop is a comic book for ADULTS… who are also children brain-zapped into huge bodies and doing their best in a society full of loud noises. It’s about hardcore stuff like sex, drugs, and satan worship! It’s all so pure and naive. By sex Craig means looking at a butt, by drugs he means the stuff he learned about in elementary school puppet shows, and by satan worship he means the stuff he learned about in home school after he attacked the puppets.

Let’s meet our first character, a drug addict, handled with all the skill and sensitivity of a man who shoots nutria for sport.

Finally, Craig Stormon has found his voice, and its a hollow-eyed Maine fisherman’s suicide note. Hey Craig, real quick, why are all the dogs slaughtered at sunrise? Does that happen every sunrise, is it one of those brutal English aristocrat things, like fox-hunting or Royal Knockout? Since you felt the need to specify, I have to ask: Craig Stormon, do you think dogs howl in salute to you? Is that why you always howl back, you slavering fucking madman?

We’re looking for a live child in an apehouse if we’re looking for empathy and understanding in a Craig Stormon title. Maybe he does better with the female characters-

Most of the women in Craig’s comics are horny extroverts who get what they deserve. But that’s only to show us how the special one, Windraven, isn’t like the other girls. She’s not overtly sexual. She doesn’t want to be the center of attention. Yes, she has her whole butt out the first time we meet her, yes it’s in the same panel where she explains she’s not making an exhibition of herself, but contradiction and exposed asses are how you create deep characters.

Now that we’ve established our primary themes – junkies, dog slaughter, Indian butt – it’s time to break the whole comic for a three page flashback to the events of L.I.F.E. Brigade, which are not relevant to this story and will not come up again.

Here’s the only important new development in those pages:

In a two panel yadda, all of Craig Stormon’s “sexy women” get chrono-blasted across time, just like his own fragile child brain. This accomplishes three things: It lets him set the story in a more relatable modern-day world, it gets rid of all the gross unsexy men, and more butt.

What a butt! Like all the best butts, it’s two water balloons hanging from a back. Like only the greatest butts, it looks like Gleep and Glorp doing the Bump. Like only the most sensual of ladybutts, it’s a top down view of two pachycephalosaurs fighting.

This being the mid-90s, Craig has to strike a delicate balance. Every edgy female character has to be super horny for sex, but she also has to attack any man trying to have it with her.

The physical storytelling here is so bad I’m not sure what’s happening. I guess Shandazar magnetized that man’s cock so his best friend’s wedding ring was inexorably drawn to it? Otherwise I have no idea why that man took a plasma blast to the junk and his buddy started juggling his balls while quipping “what a quaint old British custom.” It might be a Monty Python reference. Wait, this is the art’s fault – that means this is Dick Bonk’s doing. The son of a bitch! Dick Bonk slipped a dick bonk in here!

So far we are missing the trademark Craig Stormon dyslexia blitz, but don’t worry- it’s coming.

He crowded that last word bubble so hard it overran its borders, only to spell the word he screwed it all up for wrong. He spelled “damn” with a B, then basically called his main characters a couple of cubts.

It’s worth pointing out Craig’s one attempt at a running joke – he named this team of all sexy lady warriors the Iron Cupcakes, then decided they hated it. That’s actually pretty funny until you realize it’s a tragic metaphor for Craig Stormon’s entire comic book career.

There are two plotlines running parallel in The (Devil’s) Workshop. One is this: sexy ‘90s women with prehensile butts lusting for and then attacking dong, and the other is a junkie for satan learning the cons of buying smack from the devil.

Yes, the drug dealers here are literal zombies and demons, obviously led by-

A woman’s crotch.

This is our main villain, and if I told you anything about her before posting the proof, you’d never know if I was joking. For example, if I said she deals drugs brought up from hell to save enough money to post the devil’s bail and her name is some fedora-tipping shit like M’Lady Doom, you would laugh, but part of you would secretly think Craig Stormon could actually write that.

Sometimes a pearl-clutching Satanic Panic scare goes so hard it comes back around to awesome again. M’Lady Doom rules. She’s just, she’s the baddest.

It turns out Murphy, the junkie every dog salutes as they die, has been skimming the devil’s hell heroin. M’Lady is a ride or die gal for Satan, so it’s good that Murphy is incredibly ready to die. He was practically bursting with mortality.

M’Lady injects him with battery acid and he curses her, vows zombie revenge, demands euthanasia, and then untucks his shirt to fire his guts at her like a lizard – all within the span of three panels. There’s no way her entourage was prepared for this dude speedrunning death like that. If they didn’t inject him with battery acid he would’ve died two seconds later spitting vile curses at a nearby rusty nail. He was a shaken-up bottle of Diet Flesh Coke just waiting for his Acid Mentos.

Meanwhile, across town at the sexy ‘90s butt rave for chaste women, Windraven’s barely named friend made the mistake of going out for a cigarette. Because Craig Stormon’s brain is a whirlwind of howling ghosts he can never escape, this means she deserves to get kidnapped by a satanic cyborg drug dealer.

There’s a lot to deal with here: The reiteration of “damb,” which means that wasn’t a typo earlier – Craig Stormon really thinks that’s how you spell it. Do you think he pronounces the B? There’s the slutty cutouts on her already short skirt that make it look like she has a spare butt. The fact that she reacts to killer cyborgs like Helen Keller walking into a sprinkler. But I like the little details: Hell’s Robocop is so bad he bought a Bic with a little skeleton on it. I think I had a hackeysack with that exact logo on it, and ironically enough I traded it for cigarettes.

Whoever this lady is, she’s so irrelevant that her friends, the main characters, never actually realize she’s been abducted. Even after her kidnappers nearly run them over. Man, I’m starting to get Stormon’s enmity. Penciller and Enemy of the People Dick Bonk’s only reference for “big tittied woman diving” is a vampire lunge-

He really bonked this dick up.

Finally we see the titular workshop (devil’s). It’s the vicious dungeon where the blood of 13 innocent victims must be spilled to free Saragar!

From jail! Hell jail! The demon judge set Saragar’s blood bail at 13 victims! And he’s almost free. He’s so close! Saragar is trying to spend the last of his commissary fund on erasers and tic tacs, because he’ll be damned if the hell prison is keeping a penny of his baby momma’s paycheck!

The barely named friend is sacrificed nude and upside down, forced to stare up the very cooch of her captor as she dies. In fact, she’s beheaded at that exact moment – so the last sight her brain imprints as she spins up eternity is a pap smear of the devil’s girlfriend.

Across town, her best friends sleep as all women do – full makeup, same bed, tits out – totally unaware of the satanic drug orgy being held in honor of her death. The devil’s cyborg uses her skull for a gag to a non-existent camera while a caped man spit takes through a handjob. Everyone’s college roommate, a guy named something like AJ, gets head from one of the devil’s concubines, just happy to be gettin’ some.

Fucking AJ, man. He’s not even a satanist. He’s a registered pastafarian, he has the bumper sticker and everything. You could call him out on his hypocrisy but you know he’d just say “head’s head, man!” and spill bong water on the carpet while going for a high five.

And that’s it, somehow that’s everything that happens in this comic. It’s way too much and not nearly enough. A woman gets beheaded by a Chick tract while her friends sass up a ‘90s rave, and every single one of them shows their whole ass, especially Craig Stormon.

I’m pretty sure Craig even writes the ads in the back, because if not, he has found his people:

RAW Comics is so anti-establishment they’ll shun Valiant, which I think was an MLM knife scam that got out of hand and accidentally turned into a comic book press. RAW’s tagline is “COMICS THAT BITE BACK!” which sounds edgy until you think about it, and then it just implies they’re so stupid they eat comic books.

And then there’s this full page splash for GEOFFREY’S COMICS, where Craig Stormon drew a custom character named Captain Greed shaking and then punching the head off a child for shopping at a rival comic book store.

So are we rooting FOR Captain Greed here, Craig? It’s good and right that he’s rocketing the faces off children for capitalism? Oh hey everybody it’s Bone Daddy, the contextless janitor hermit! Tell your local comic book clerk Bone Daddy sent you, and get a free kidnapping! It’s how you tell a total stranger “I have no family to care if I’m found in a bathtub full of ice later.”

There’s no way Geoffrey Comic knew what he was getting into when he took out this ad space. Craig Stormon promised him something tasteful and then sent him this page covered in barbecue sauce and ants. I don’t know if Geoffrey complained, but we’ll find out in the next unhinged editorial starring Craig Stormon’s brain mites.

Craig’s final note is one of baseless optimism undulled by ten straight years of self-inflicted failures and invented enemies. It’s a teaser page for issue 2 of The (Devil’s) Workshop.

“12 women, no blood, no heads. Who’s 13th? The future at stake,” Craig Stormon writes.

“That’s great!” His neurologist says, “we’re getting some fine motor coordination back. The words will start making sense eventually when we teach your speech center to reconnect with your hands. Trust the process, you were lucky to survive that tractor accident.”

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Craig Lemoine, the original Bone Daddy, now a proud Bone Granddaddy to two little Bone Daddies and one Bone Mommy.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Carnival Towel Creations with Freddy 🌭

You are 12 years old. Your grandmother just returned from a three month cruise. She’s been to Lisbon, Malta, Istanbul. She’s traveled the world, visited exotic places rich in culture and history. She has gifts for you. I want you to close your eyes and picture the worst thing she could possibly give you.

“Let’s have some fun with towels,” is a troublesome statement. In a locker room it means you didn’t tuck tight enough and now you’re about to show your dick to the coach. In a barracks it means you let down the platoon too many times and now you have to pay for it. But let’s put aside the inherent despair of this premise. Let’s focus, just for a moment, on Freddy. Freddy the Carnival Cruise Towel Monster. Freddy, whose body is formless chaos, whose eyes screech madness from the prison inside his skull. One look at Freddy and you know, reflexively, that it’s your duty to die fighting this thing so the rest of humanity might live.

If Freddy is an actual mascot present on a Carnival Cruise Ship, I promise you he gets the shit beaten out of him several times a day. That costume must be armored. Wearing it is a punishment for cabana boys who don’t wear condoms. Donning the Freddy costume is the cruise variant of putting someone in the stocks. The Freddy head doesn’t even come out of storage until the ship hits international waters. Nothing about Freddy is fun, and he is on every page of this book. Doing nothing. Bending, pointing, jumping – if you flip the pages fast enough he’ll do the dance that ends time. Freddy is such a fucking walking atrocity that he overshadows the numbing sadness of this book, which is so tragic they have to put the words “fun ships” in quotation marks.

“Create your own towel family!” is a real sentence on the first page of this book. That’s some shit Freddy says to a cruise orphan. It’s deranged. Carnival says they “received literally hundreds of requests for a new, expanded book.” A dangerous lie, just like the smile carved on Freddy’s face. But let’s pretend it’s true: That means there was a first book, they learned nothing from its failure, and they convinced a roomful of executives that kids love towels, twice. If I walked into a pitch meeting like “we all know kids love towels,” I’d watch the table carefully to see who nods, then hit them with a flamethrower and say “now that we’ve destroyed the Thing infiltrating your company, let’s do the real pitch.”

The whole premise is succinctly and perfectly engineered to make sure no human could possibly think it’s a good idea, it’s a reverse Voight-Kampff test, and yet real money has gone into bringing this to life. It’s a hardcover book with thick high gloss paper, full color photos on every page, and it is way longer than you think. Somebody saw this-

And said “yes, you’re right, kids would love to do hours of whimsical laundry – you just earned a promotion, Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles.” And this is even assuming the towel sculptures fucking kick ass. That there is a Michaelangelo for every medium, and towels have waited for millenia to find theirs.

That is not the case.

This is their opener. The hook. They hope some rich, demented grandma flips Carnival Towel Creations with Freddy open to the first page, sees a rumpled formless towel soaring through the night, and thinks of home. Family. That’s the only way they sell a book!

The next spot should be a clincher. You set the hook, now reel it in.

That’s actually pretty good, it looks sort of like a snake. Because it is a rolled up towel with sunglasses on it. If I got this back at the end of a summer camp craft session I’d tell the kid I know she played phone the whole hour and she’s getting half rations the rest of the week. Cool Cobra sucks. Cool Cobra looks like he’d be voiced by David Alan Grier in a Christian puppet show about Leviticus. You can’t just put sunglasses on a rumpled towel and call it art, I’d just assume Matthew McConaughey got vaporized.

“Maybe the kids want to fuck the towels?” Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles says in the brainstorm meeting.

There are confused mutterings, the others avoid eye contact.

“No bad ideas, am I right?” Wilford Brimely Head With Tentacles tries to laugh it off.

No one else does.

Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles frowns into his coffee.

“This is fucking soy milk,” Wilford Brimley Head With Tentacles sighs.

We all have off days.

They say every bad idea is worth trying sixteen times, and by they, I mean the Carnival Cruise executives hosting Freddy’s eggs.

“Why are the towels naughty?” is a question I’ve only asked once before, when I had the stroke. This shouldn’t have to be said, but if you’re four pages into a towel animal cheesecake pinup book for kids maybe you need a life coach. “Let’s get back on heroin,” your life coach would say. “I feel like we made better decisions with a little horse in us. NO! I didn’t mean it like that.”

Let’s move on-

I really thought we’d be moving on.

This cannot stand.

There was a step in these instructions to give a towel goat individual identifiable buttcheeks. Carnival Cruises asked a child to do that. I don’t think that’s a crime, but I think it will be if I mail this book to my congressman.

Maybe we’re approaching this whole thing from the wrong direction. Maybe it’s not that the book shouldn’t exist because no child would want it. Maybe the book is for children who shouldn’t exist. Like if you give this book to little Suzy and she flips through the pages, gasps, asks with light in her eyes: “Can we make this one?”

You know you’ve been cuckooed. You need to check around outside your house to see if the real Suzy has been pushed out a window and left to starve.

The book calls this one the Honeymoon and it’s normally filled with chocolates and lubricant. Picture anything else in that heart-shaped depression. Your mind automatically sketches in a VHS about the joys of anal. If your kid used one of the good towels to make this you would go wordlessly fight his PE teacher.

You guys did a bunny earlier! It was 114% too sexy but you did it. Why make another, worse one with its face smashed in? We don’t breed pug bunnies. This is a bunny rescue farm for glass door tragedies. And it’s still horny!

If I find either of those last two shapes in my kid’s room I’m putting filters on the internet and we’re done watching Space Jam.

I’m going to say something insane, but it’s absolutely true: These are the best ones.

Most of this book teaches kids how to burn an entire afternoon recreating forgotten laundry.

Guess what that’s supposed to be. Write it down, you’ll get points if you’re correct.

My first guess was Roadkill Duck, but if I squint now I’m seeing Birth Defect Lobster. Actually I’d like to change my guess to Crashed Concorde.

You get no points if you guessed-

Because that is not a fucking crocodile. I’ll give that beast Prone Bone Pyramid Head before I give it Crocodile. I’ll – hold on.

This is a multi-towel creation??

You want children to gather three fucking towels just to make this uncertain heap? If I came back from work to find the kid used every clean towel in the house to make a Submissive Sandworm I would report myself to child services, because clearly the fault lies with the parents.

There are only, generously, like five things you can make with a towel. Too bad this book has about sixty. Because the rest of these are just various mounds, occasionally seductive.

“I love it, Billy! It’s very obviously an Autopsied Otter, and this tells me you’re finally processing your feelings about the divorce.”

So coquettish. So coy. You can really see its come hither stare, and by come hither, I mean it’s saying “come hither and stomp me out of this cursed existence beyond even the peripheral vision of God.”

See, the problem comes from the premise. Origami sucks anyway. It’s complicated and fiddly and your reward, at the end, is ruined paper. Flaccid origami only adds frustration and takes away both results and towels. If you use all the bath towels for crafts I am not going to dry my ass on the turkey wad. That’s an ironic trap for crafty moms, I know it’s stuffed with nails and a hand grenade. You won’t get me this time, Macrame (that’s crafty mom Jigsaw).

“That’s not a bird,” you tell the panicked burglar you caught in your cabin, now trying to convince you he’s a cabin boy.

“You haven’t seen it fly!” the burglar says, hurling it at your face and going in for the tackle.

Here’s a tip: If you have nothing to begin with, slapping some tits on nothing and launching it anyway will only make you millions of dollars. Ask Hololive.

Flipping this upside down and putting googly eyes on was a nice try, but it’s not going to get you less suspended. You think Mrs. Davis doesn’t know a soft cock when she sees it? Ask Mr. Davis.

When in doubt, put sunglasses on a heap. Call it a day.

Actually Carnival called it a turtle, but if you can see the turtle in that image that only tells me you’re still processing some kind of turtle-related trauma. I’m sorry you went to the Coming Out of Their Shells Tour and saw Raphael puking in a gutter out back, but you only get out of therapy what you put into it. You have to want to heal, and the first step is admitting this is nothing.

Absolutely nothing! There were instructions to make this? This is how I would diagnose a busted fortune cookie press. Why’s it got a sideways gash for a mouth if not for a reason, for one specific reason??

TWO large towels and fifteen steps, just to make an abstract shape that no self respecting shark would give a test nibble. If I caught my kid fucking this I would take the filters off the internet and rent Space Jam, knowing I’d gone too far.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: FancyShark, who is a shark with dignity and would never nibble on that sad towel seal.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Martini Ranch’s “Reach” 🌭

In 1988 a band named Martini Ranch released their debut album, “Holy Cow.” It’s what kids today refer to as proto-eggpunk, and what adults refer to as “what the fuck are you talking about?” It’s DEVO-esque, poppy, nerdy, punk adjacent synth pop. You can’t talk about music without sounding like an asshole, so think of it like this: You know the part of your chest that tightens anytime somebody in real life starts talking about anime? It feels like that.

It’s more fun than I make it sound, but for 1988, the band wasn’t notable. Save for one thing: Providing half of the music and vocals was professional musician Andrew Rosenthal, providing the other half plus some tetanus was sweaty, grinning, uncaged lunatic Bill Paxton.

Note the date: 1988. This is not what Bill Paxton did before he was famous. A shameful secret he’d like you to overlook, like Vin Diesel selling Street Sharks. This was after Aliens, just before Predator 2. Bill Paxton was a household name, giggling from a trash can as he lit Hollywood on fire. And right in the middle of it all he stopped to star in a video for Martini Ranch’s single “Reach.”

The video opens on a lone motorcycle drifter blasting through a desert hellscape. Its rider, Bill Paxton, slows for a broken-down cowboy pushing a baby carriage full of bomb.

Masterful filmmaking. That one scene sets the tone perfectly: The motorcycle and bomb tell us this is a post-apocalyptic nuclear cowboy world, well after society’s collapse. Bill Paxton tells us this is going to be unhinged and possibly infectious. The baby carriage tells us it’s gonna be dumb as hell.

Bill Paxton wrangles his hog through town, passing White Zombies making caskets. In this town life, and velvet top hats, are cheap.

Bill Paxton rumbles by a blacksmith shop, blasting heat from its powerful bellows and its more powerful she-hulk, who has turned her blacksmithing apron into a leather bikini. “Molten steel can’t touch my nipples” her outfit tells us, “but everywhere else is fair game.”

Bill Paxton pulls up to a raucous brothel, the only source of joy in this hopeless waste. He dismounts his motorcycle and hitches it to a post with a chain. He does not lock the chain, this is not to deter theft. It’s to keep his steel horse from wandering away to graze the gasoline plains.

A freaky little prospector goblin gambols up to molest Bill Paxton’s motorcycle. Just shoves his little kobold fingers in every gap. This is overtly sexual, Bill Paxton loves it. He tips the goblin.

Eagle-eyed Hot Doggists will notice that man is freaky little goblin Bud Cort, best known to us for playing the freaky little cyber goblin in Theodore Rex. Bud Cort was the official freaky little goblin of the 1980s. When Bud Cort auditions for a part and the casting director says “action,” Bud Cort drops into a chimp lope and dryhumps the crafts table. “That’s why he’s the best,” the casting director whispers, as Bud Cort wraps his cock in salami and spanks the ham.

Bill Paxton saunters up to the brothel. He hauls two women to him and cackles. This is about to be a party. A Bill Paxton party, so you know he’s gonna wear those girls out in a weird way. Just making them fight with butter knives all night while he swings from the chandelier.

A violent desert storm disrupts the scene. Boots march in lockstep as the beat kicks in. The music sounds like Oingo Boingo making fun of the B-52s, we will not discuss it again. But this means a new crew has arrived. A dangerous one. Silhouetted against the blinding desert sun, we can tell only one thing: Every member of this gang is a sexy lady out for revenge on Bill Paxton. Possibly nursing fresh butter knife welts.

One of the ladies, rocking a more masculine Steve Perry look, spits chaw on a scorpion.

That does nothing physical to the scorpion. It won’t kill it, or deter it. It only shames the scorpion. She spat chaw right in its face just so it can’t go home to its scorpion wife and scorpion kids with pride, knowing that it is feared as a dangerous desert predator. This scorpion will need years of therapy to separate its sense of value as a living creature from its sting. That’s really fucked up, lady.

We pan over to meet the leader of our gang: A total smokeshow.

And also Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow.

“What the fuck?” You might be asking. You’ll want to hold onto that.

Kathryn Bigelow just had her big break the year before this, when her solo directorial debut put her on the map. That debut was Near Dark, the greatest vampire movie ever made. It starred Bill Paxton at his bloodiest, greasiest, and most maniacal. His best, in other words.

They say you need to be careful of your next move after your big break. It’s not your breakthrough movie itself, but what you do afterward that decides everything. Kathryn Bigelow’s next move after Near Dark? Erotically hunting Bill Paxton through a ghost town. Why is she here? Because Bill Paxton prowls the Hollywood night, saving celebrities so they’ll owe him a favor and star in his vanity projects. The danger he saves them from is also Bill Paxton.

The nerdcore hyperpop beat gives way to a haunting western whistle as Kathryn Bigelow’s lady gang takes over the brothel. They pop in a bounty laserdisc playing a video wanted poster of Bill Paxton spinning in place like it’s hour 3 of butter knife duels.

Andrew Rosenthal, the other half of Martini Ranch, sings from the background as one member of a three piece mariachi band. He watches as Bill Paxton steals the show, somersaulting around a Tucson tourist attraction and monkey-kicking the biggest stars in the world. He knows his place is in the shadows, and he’s glad to stay there, because he also knows Bill Paxton’s exact bite force down to the decimal.

Reviewing the wanted footage, Bill Paxton spins and snarls at the camera with Gollum teeth. He’s still somehow sexy. Science doesn’t understand it. In every model this is the point where the viewer’s genitals should retreat, a natural biological response to the roar of a nearby predator. It helps preserve the next generation in the event of an attack. And yet when shown this video, all subjects rated their emotional response as “would.”

This is all intercut with scenes of Bill Paxton buried to his neck in sand, ants and tarantulas attacking his face as he desperately tongues for a martini. Okay, let’s check back in on the experiment- “would” ratings have gone up 17%! Impossible.

Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow and two of her amazons mount an old pickup and pursue Bill Paxton with lassos. We’ve had this dream before. Let’s get out of here before their breasts turn into our mother’s faces.

Their hunt is successful. Here, I have made a gif of the time two amazons and Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow hogtied a rogue Bill Paxton.

This is a watershed moment. The high tide mark of a personal fetish. In 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn, director Quentin Tarantino cast a young Salma Hayek as a stripper who pours tequila down her feet into the mouth of a waiting pervert. Then he cast himself as that pervert. At this moment he became the Forever King of Foot Perverts, and it was a mistake. He spent the rest of his life chasing and never matching that moment. Somewhere around the time two female bodybuilders truss his feet, and just before Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow brands him on the ass, the thought must have occurred to Bill Paxton: “Is it all downhill from here?”

Andrew Rosenthal’s overshadowed mariachi band are being dragged to their deaths, yet they continue to play their instruments. It’s noble, like the band on the Titanic if both the boat and the iceberg were Bill Paxton.

Andrew Rosenthal is lynched and hung. His last request? To shred.

Granted, say the gods of Chaos.

It whips ass. This is Andrew’s one and only moment to shine. When Andrew found Bill Paxton bound to the hitching post by Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow, his ass still smoking from her brand, Andrew asked him “can I have something cool to do, too?” Paxton was generous that day, shaky and spent and looking down at a lifetime of sexual coasting. Through the gag made of his own underwear, Paxton answered “Yrmf.”

Andrew got his guitar solo, and then he pushed his luck.

“Can I also be saved by one of the Amazons?”

“Yrmf.”

“And she makes out with me?”

“Yrmf!”

“While Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow watches and claps?”

“Wrrf um Herm Rogga?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think it exists yet. Can I do it?”

“YRMF!”

Clad only in a dirty pink onesie, Bill Paxton leads the men of this town into a final showdown against the powerful ladies dominating them. One of these filthy, filthy men has a spider monkey, like a pirate might have a parrot.

That man is Golden Globe winning actor Lance Henriksen. This is his entire role in the video: Be filthy and present with monkey.

“What the fuck is happening?” You ask, having politely saved that question like I asked you to earlier.

You fool, you god damn idiot. You burned it too early! Now you won’t have that question when you really need it. And you will. You will need it like Bill Paxton needs rope burns on his neck from Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow.

Abandoned by his peers, the ladies begin to shoot Bill Paxton’s clothes off. “Ok,” says nearby Andrew Rosenthal. “I think we get it, Bill.”

Bill Paxton is defeated. The post-apocalyptic nuclear amazon cowboys led by Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow tie Bll Paxton to their truck and roadhaul him by the taint until he is dead, dead, dead.

I forgot to mention one of those nuclear amazons is Jenette Goldstein – Private Vasquez from Aliens. I forgot to mention her because so did the video. She’s barely in it. I had to find a clear shot of her in the outtakes.

Kathryn Bigelow, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein – likewise both present and cut from the video is Adrian Pasdar, the lead of Near Dark. Everyone involved with the movie is here, which means that in the middle of filming Near Dark – the bleak and beautiful modern vampire western where Bill Paxton plays a bloodsoaked immortal sociopath – he stopped an intense take to ask if the entire cast and crew would like to strip and hogtie him in the desert. Of course they all said yes: Bill Paxton saved their lives that time the set got attacked by Bill Paxton.

Oh right, there are outtakes. Let’s get into them. They open with Bill Paxton the way his friends know him best: Hitting himself in the face with a motorcycle chain.

The man in the yellow shirt, just passing through the scene, laughs. “Classic Bill,” he might say. He might follow this up with “would you like to come aboard my private submarine and spend 9/11 on the deck of the sunken Titanic with me, BIll Paxton?” Because this man is Academy Award winning director of Dark Angel, James Cameron. Also because that’s where he and Bill Paxton actually were when 9/11 happened.

“What the f-”

Shut up! Not yet.

Yes, James Cameron directed this video. Hot off Terminator and Aliens, about to direct The Abyss, James Cameron took this job filming his future wife, Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow, while she rope-spanked Bill Paxton in a cowboy outfit.

Curious how they did that shot with Bill Paxton buried up to his neck in sand while ants and spiders attacked his face? You’ll kick yourself: They buried Bill Paxton up to his neck in sand while ants and spiders attacked his face.

James Cameron, in particular, thought that was fucking hilarious.

“When can I say ‘what the fuck is happening?!’” You’re wondering.

I’m so glad you asked. It’s right now, when I tell you that in the video for Martini Ranch’s “Reach,” the haunting western whistle was provided by Beverly Hills Cop’s Judge Reinhold.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Joshua Graves, who is known as “the Bill Paxton” of his local TGI Friday’s.