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Upsetting Day: Get Swank’d
Author: Lydia Bugg
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Nerding Day: BeenadođźŚ
About three months ago I kicked in the doors of the Hotdog office and announced to the room. “I will be covering the Beenado. Nobody else even looks at the Beenado. IT’S MINE.” Usually, contested articles are decided by Kumite, but weirdly, no one fought me for 9-1-1’s three-episode season 8 premiere event. Weird, but ok.
If you’re unaware of the show 9-1-1, you, like me a mere matter of months ago, are in the minority. The season eight premiere was heavily promoted by the network. They had billboards all over Chicago that I assumed were an elaborate bit. The show was created by Ryan Murphy as sort of a Law & Order meets ER with a pinch of MacGyver. The main characters include a 911 operator, played by Jenniffer Love Hewitt, LAPD police officer Athena Grant, played by Angela Bassett, and a whole squadron of firefighters, including Peter Krause and Lou Ferrigno Jr.
Ryan Murphy won a couple of Emmys, and people forgot that he is a deeply unserious man. I don’t mean that as an insult. I think if you asked the man who wrote an episode of Glee called “Grilled Cheesus” to frame a discussion about grief and religion, he would agree that he’s just a little clown like the rest of us. Here are some medical emergencies that the cast of 9-1-1 and its spin-off 9-1-1 Lone Star have rescued people from: woman with harmonica stuck in mouth, man sucked up into the brushes at car wash, woman strangled by snake, woman strangled by octopus, woman stalked by tiger, man who swallowed live frog, baby rescued from pipe after being flushed down toilet, and man in a porta potty sucked up by storm and dropped into lake.
All of these emergencies are played dead seriously. There’s a human life involved in this objectively hilarious porta potty accident, you guys. A man just wanted to have diarrhea at a fair like an American, and now he’s drowning in the dunk tank. It’s not funny!
I think the gimmick with 9-1-1 is to try and draw people in with a big goofy promise like “explosion at the bull semen factory” (a real premise for 9-1-1 Lone Star) and then get you to stick around for some pretty intense drama. When the season 8 premiere trailer dropped, and it was just a 15 second clip of a woman screaming the word bees, I thought I knew what to expect. It was bees.
Episode one was, in fact, wall-to-wall bee hijinks. We begin with a man flying a small aircraft who explains to the air traffic control operator that he’s just sold his ad agency after 30 years, and the plane is his reward! He’s also kind of a dick. I’m sure things will end well for him; oh no, he hit a swarm of bees with his plane. The bees come in through the vents and sting him, causing him to swerve up and into another, larger airplane. That’s right; two planes and beenado have collided before the title card. We are one minute and thirty seconds into the show.
We cut to some scenes that recap important information from previous seasons. It’s pretty clear that the network intended to bring in new viewers with the Beenado. They don’t want this show to die after a mere eight seasons. This could be their Grey’s Anatomy. It’s eight years young. LAPD police officer Athena Grant looks right into the camera and says, “Dennis Jenkins murdered my fiance, and he got away with it for 30 years until I brought him to justice, and now he has made some kind of deal with the federal government?” Really giving us her entire previous seven-season arc in one sentence.
Athena Grant escorting her former fiance’s killer to trial is weirdly the main plotline of the Beenado story arc, and it is disappointingly beeless. It feels like Angela Bassett has a line item in her contract about never saying the word bee. She is a smart woman. Where was I? Ah, yes, the bees.
The youngest member of the cast is forced to deliver the title line, “It’s a bee-nado,” and he does it without an ounce of joy. A truly criminal line reading. He might as well be saying, “It’s my dentist, Larry Bee-nado.” No one in the cast was even one tenth as psyched for the bees as I was.
We’ll come back to that plane crash from the intro later. First, we have to rewind to the initial bee release. A truck transporting 22 million bees…somewhere? A bee farm? Has overturned on the highway. The bees are free and they’re pissed off about it.
The truck driver is spectacularly killed by bees immediately. They surround the car of a young mother with her daughter who happens to be allergic to bees. Since we saw the opening scene, we know bees can come in through the vents, and they do. After the girl gets stung, her mom is able to use an EpiPen to stop the allergic reaction, but then she reveals that she, too, is allergic to bees and has also been stung. Jenniffer Love Hewitt does her best to face-react to this. It doesn’t go well.
LAFD Truck 118 responds to the initial 911 call and finds a second driver in the truck unconscious and covered in stings. They try to revive him, but there’s something obstructing his airway. Can you guess what it is?
A) Bees
B) Bees!
C) BeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!!!
It’s bees. His throat is stuffed with living bees. The firefighters suction the bees out with a vacuum, and when he regains consciousness, the truck driver says, “Why do I taste honey?” Everyone has a fun little chuckle at this poor man’s near death experience while the remaining 21,000,981 bees happily try to claw their way inside the firetruck.
The remaining fire fighters manage to calm the bees by redirecting smoke from the burning truck over the car. They get the mother and daughter out of the car and to safety, but there’s still the small issue of the remaining swarm of pissed off bees that flies away. Now you might be asking yourself: couldn’t people simply go inside to avoid the bees? Yes. After the initial accident the game of the show is finding reasons that people absolutely cannot avoid a swarm of bees.
We cut to a rich woman and her assistant planning a launch party for her new perfume, T by Tori. The assistant assures her that everything is ready for the launch party tomorrow, except what is that they’re standing in front of? It’s a flower wall. The Jaws theme begins to play in my mind. The camera pans up over the flower wall to the top of a nearby tent, absolutely covered in bees. This rich woman is bee food.
The next day, the bees swarm the perfume launch. The perfume contains floral scents that attract the bees, but also banana which apparently makes them angry. Luckily, most of the party guests simply take cover indoors and are fine, but the assistant, the only person actually wearing the perfume, jumps into the pool and ends up having to stay underwater using a hose to breathe, so vicious is the bees’ hatred of her.
The firefighters put their fastest runner in a beekeeping suit, cover him in the perfume, and have him sprint past the pool to attract the bees. He leads the bees to a tent where a professional beekeeper can vacuum them into a little container. It’s wild how something so scary can be continuously defeated by a vacuum cleaner.
The beekeeper says there are 1-2 hundred thousand bees captured by his vacuuming powers, which the fire chief points out leaves 14.8 million killer bees still free in Los Angeles. This is terrible news. Whatever will happen to the rest of the swarm? How will humanity defeat them? That must be why there are two more full episodes in this three part bee story arc, right? WRONG. The bees are GONE NOW. You won’t see another bee for the rest of the damn show. There are so few bees in the remaining two whole episodes that Tim Minear, the co-producer and showrunner of 9-1-1 had to make a public statement about the lack of bees:
Basically, 9/11 made it so that 9-1-1 couldn’t do the plane crash episode they wanted to open with. Remember that plane crash at the beginning of the episode? Athena Grant ends up landing the plane successfully, forgiving her fiance’s murderer, and putting a whole bunch of pedophiles in jail, and that’s nice and everything, but you know what it’s not? Relevant to a friggin bee-nado. If you tell me I’m going to get three full episodes of bee-nado, and then you give me a bunch of plane crash stuff, instead, I’m as pissed off as all 14.8 million unaccounted-for bees in the bee-nado. This is not what I tuned in for.
So, the bee-nado was a friggin lie. The bee-nado lied to me, and then it made me a liar because I told you I would write about three episodes of Beenado, and I was only given one episode of content. On behalf of the liars at ABC, I would like to apologize to you. Is this why no one would Kumite me for this? Did they all know?
Maybe they shut the whole thing down because it would simply bee too awesome. They had to cancel 9-1-1 Lone Star after the explosion at the bull semen factory because there’s simply nowhere else to go from there. It’s possible that 9-1-1 couldn’t recover from a full bee-nado, so they simply had to give the public only a taste of what we truly wanted. I hope they open season nine with 14.8 million bees descending from the sky and everyone going, “Oh yeah, the bees.”
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Aaron Croston.
There was a dark time in the 1980s when pantyhose mania struck the nation. We’d just learned that apparently we have a climate? And that climate might be changing? The nation reacted to this traumatic news in the most ’80s way possible. They made horrific pantyhose goblins:
I don’t know why this frightful era of pantyhose crafting befell humanity, but it might be our darkest period since the Crusades. Pantyhose are underwear. We’re all on the same page about that, right? They’re sold in the underwear section. They come into direct, intimate contact with feet, butts, genitals, and thighs. Sure, people could sacrifice new pantyhose to the pantyhose golems, but they weren’t doing that. Pantyhose are fragile garments; women had to wear them every day until we won our God-given right to rock jeggings, and they had so, so many extra pairs of pantyhose they were desperate to get rid of… desperate enough to do anything. From that desperation, a book was born:
Sara Lavieri Hunter is Marie Condo’s Antipope. She claims to be a home organization guru. She’s written other books like 10 Minute Tiny Home: Hundreds Of Easy Tips To Straighten And Clean Every Room In Your House, and 10 Minute Organizing: 400 Fabulous Tips To Organize Every Room Of Your House – In Spite Of Your Family. With each one, she tweaked her name a little to Sara L. Hunter, and then Sara Hunter, almost as if there was something she wanted to distance her name from, some shameful past secret like, I don’t know, the fact that her book on how to reuse pantyhose has a full section on cooking with used pantyhose!
Apparently, Sara never worked in a kitchen and saw those horrifying food safety videos about the dangers of using underwear as a juice strainer. In this chapter, there are so many ways that pantyhose comes into direct contact with food that I may look with suspicion at every meal I eat for the rest of my life. This book suggests you season your food with pantyhose!
Put raw chicken in the foot of your old pantyhose and fill that bad boy up with breadcrumbs. Yes, the bread crumbs will fall out everywhere, covering your kitchen with salmonella and foot germs, but if you do it over a baking dish, it won’t be that messy. Then why not just use the baking dish? Removing the pantyhose makes this tip five times less messy and ninety-six percent more sanitary!
Since there are nowhere near 500 acceptable ways to use pantyhose in the kitchen—in fact, I would say there are 0 ways—this chapter utilizes the same one tip thirteen separate times. Number 41 is to use pantyhose to store lettuce, which almost counts as a useful tip because storing lettuce in plastic does make it wilt faster, so storing it in something other than plastic is mostly a good idea. Sara tasted that brief flash of genuine helpfulness and decided she couldn’t get enough of it.
Tip number 59: Store parsley, 61: Store carrots, 62: Store hot cocoa packets, 63: Store apples, 64: Store potatoes, 66: Store lemons and limes, 67: Store tea bags… basically, in this woman’s kitchen it’s impossible to escape eating something that has touched hosiery. Not even the birthday cake is safe.
Let’s think about this for a second. You can use pantyhose as a juice strainer because it’s full of tiny holes. Why would something full of tiny holes work as a pastry bag? This tip will leave your hands covered in frosting and leg sweat. Are we cooking for a pervert, Sara? Oh, we are? We have been this whole time? Well, then your book makes a lot more sense, Sara!
I’m sure right now you’re asking yourself how you can avoid pantyhose freaks. Don’t worry; there are signs of this affliction, and they are not at all difficult to miss. These people are not hiding their problems. They may even openly wrap your prepared food in pantyhose and gift it to you.
This is a good way to figure out if you are leg worthy to the pantyhose lunatic in your life. If they give you the foot, know that you’re a lesser friend and someone out there got a whole leg of cookies. And I know it’s gauche to bring up money while stuffing cookies into pantyhose, but have pantyhose ever been less expensive than plastic bags? This is all very suspicious.
Stunning is definitely the perfect descriptor for this gift. I would be stunned if I got pantyhose wine anywhere but prison. Another warning sign of a pantyhose kitchen is of course, repurposed pantyhose clothing.
Yes, if people see a woman in a tube top, they will think that’s crazy, but if you sew pantyhose to that tube top, they’ll say, “There goes the most normal woman I ever saw with pantyhose slung over her shoulders.” It’s not just the clothing that can give away the pantyhose-obsessed. Look closely at their hair, and you may notice something amiss.
Remember to check a mirror! It’s the one step of building a human head out of pantyhose most people forget!
I respect a book that makes sure tip number 420 is insane. Sure, why not? Make a wig out of pantyhose. No one is going to stop you. We have free will, and we’re using it for pantyhose wigs. In fact, you can artificially enhance yourself with pantyhose in any way you see fit.
No part of the human body is safe from the pantyhose. No profession is safe from the pantyhose. There might be used pantyhose in your children’s school.
An A for effort and an F from the health department. The way this book involves children in the pantyhose is even more disturbing than the way it involves cake in the pantyhose. It does acknowledge that letting kids hang out with a cloth rope is generally a bad idea because every baby’s hobby is trying to die, but it’s also like, eh, it’s probably fine, right?
You’ll want your strip long enough they can’t swallow it but short enough they can’t wrap it around their neck. A foot? Half a shin? Whatever, you’re a pantyhose maniac, you’ll figure it out. Babies are supposed to be tough. Sometimes, they should eat a little bit of pacifier dirt. As long as it gives you a way to display your old pantyhose that baby can munch on a dirty pacifier all day.
The book does acknowledge that if you are this invested in getting rid of your old pantyhose, you might also be dumb enough to suffocate your child by sewing a Halloween costume without air holes. I have to appreciate a product that understands its audience on this level.
You might think after 400 or so incredible pantyhose crimes, the advice in this book would start to get a little thin, but you would be wrong. The most amazing advice in this book comes in the last few entries. The versatility of pantyhose really didn’t come through for me until the final tips which display the wide range of pantyhose uses. Who would have ever thought you could wipe your ass and bread chicken with the exact same thing?
Then if that wasn’t enough versatility for you, you can use that very same toilet paper material as an eternal bond with your soulmate! (Preferably white pantyhose for proposing, black or brown for poop).
Wow, this book really did it. They made pantyhose come into contact with every conceivable hole in the human body. They even found a way for pantyhose to touch your heart. To combat the evil released by this book, I will be releasing a competing novel called Exactly One Thing You Should Do With Pantyhose After You Have Worn Them. It will be short and succinct, maybe a picture book. No children will be sacrificed to pantyhose in the making of my book. I doubt the author of 500 Pantyhose Curses I Have Personally Enacted can say the same.
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