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Upsetting Day: Flirt Squirts
Author: Lydia Bugg
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It’s time to stop paying for healthcare, everybody! What, you haven’t been? Great! The secret to healing has finally been revealed and it is shapes. Why didn’t we think of shapes sooner? Here, have some healing shapes; they’re based on crop circles and come in a crop circle resonance pack of 49 cards:
I know what you’re thinking: these high-quality, hand-assembled squiggles must be so expensive! Not so, my friend. It’s only $44.50 for 49 artisanal cards. That’s practically a steal when you consider they have to pay ET’s astronomical residual price for the IP.
The History Channel show Ancient Aliens featured a variety of “Alien Experts” who consider themselves an authority on stuff like crop circles. You’ve probably seen clips of the main Ancient Aliens guys like Giorgio A. Tsoukalos and Ariel Bar Tzadok, you know, the famous ones, but if you go deep, deep into the Ancient Aliens bench, you’ll find B-list alien expert Freddy Silva, creator of the crop circle resonance cards.
I don’t know if I trust a guy who looks like if cigarettes were a person to tell me how to heal myself. That’s probably why Freddy doesn’t heavily advertise his connection to the crop circle resonance cards. I only figured out they were his product because the instruction booklet directed me to cropcirclesecrets.org for additional information and most of the additional information was how to purchase Freddy Silva’s books. He primarily writes about aliens, but he also wrote one book about how dogs are cute.
On the section of his website where he sheepishly admits to creating the crop circle resonance cards, he says that while he was sharing his knowledge on detecting subtle energies at sacred temples, his audience of thousands was clamoring for a way to get some of that BHE (Big Healing Energy) without traveling to their local crop circle. Finding your local UFO landing site can be a hassle. Now you get all of the benefits of being abducted without all the surplus cow carcasses!
So, how exactly is a picture of a rejected spider man logo supposed to cure your IBS? Well, you see, the answer is DNA shapes, and so are these; therefore, it works. It’s just science, you guys. Here I’ll let the instruction booklet explain in far less detail.
This scientific word salad works for me. The ancient cultures did it, so it must be good for you! Back in the day, when a splinter could kill you, they really understood healing better than we do now. That logic is always solid.
Great news, you don’t need a medical degree to use these cards. You don’t even need to understand what an organism is. Imagine a doctor saying, “Unfortunately, you have measles but don’t worry, I have the cure; it’s three dots. Oh, those aren’t working for you? Try four dots; one has a weird little hand coming out of it. If that doesn’t cure you, we’re going to have to pull out the big guns. Yeah, that’s right, one dot.”
Using these cards is so easy you literally don’t have to do anything. The obligation to heal is placed on, as Freddy Silva so kindly phrases it, “the diseased person.” The aliens that made these crop circles want you to pull yourself up by your bootstrings and heal yourself. You have to choose the shape that will heal you the best. Pick a card, any card, but do it quickly before your appendix bursts!
So essentially, these cards are a medical Rorschach test meets Russian Roulette. You have to look at them, guess which disease you think they should heal, then hope you guessed correctly, or die. This might come out wrong, but if you’re one of those people who think every obscure blob looks a little bit like a penis or vagina, I hope you’re blessed with only genital diseases.
Again, if the healing doesn’t work, it is the diseased person’s fault. Don’t forget healing is a personal choice, and what does healing even mean anyway? Defining a healed person as someone who is alive is actually a little close-minded. Woke people understand that aliens consider death a form of healing. In fact, the Predator considers it the most efficient form of healing, and it made at least two-thirds of these crops circles for you.
If the Predator’s intent doesn’t come through the cards correctly and heal your bunions, that might not be what you actually need. According to these cards, the universe might think you need to die to learn your lesson. Wow, crop circle cards. That’s the darkest thought a one page pamphlet has ever conveyed to me. I bet Freddy Silva saw Final Destination and rooted for the inevitability of death.
Should you decide that you’re not happy with the universe teaching you a lesson by not healing you, there is a customer service email for the cards. You can just email your private medical information to the man from Ancient Aliens, and it will help you heal…somehow. Probably by adding you to his mailing list for future cute dog books as he hard pivots away from alien healing.
The thing that really gets me about these cards is we know crop circles aren’t real, even more than we know how most psychic phenomena aren’t real. Two British men named Doug and Dave admitted to producing over 200 crop circles starting when they were teenagers in the 1970s. They lived in a small town with not much else to do, and they decided to spend their weekends pranking the entire world for two full decades. That’s right, one of the greatest mysteries of the modern era was solved, and the solution was “Doug did it while he was trashed.”
If I find out one day that Doug and Dave did Stonehenge, too, I am going to be so pissed off. Of course, hardcore UFOlogists didn’t really care that Doug and Dave admitted to the crop circle hoax, even though several crop circle experts recognized them as two of the first on the scene at most crop circles – almost as if they knew where they were because they were WORKING WITH THE ALIENS. Caught you, Doug, and Dave.
Doug and Dave showed reporters old design drawings and photographs of themselves making the circles. They presented a truly overwhelming amount of proof, but some people just weren’t willing to let the crop circle dream die because they were making big crop circle money by that point. Again, it’s nearly $50 for some cards that aren’t even laminated! There’s a whole section in the instructions on caring for the cards that basically says, “Look, these are not very well made, so don’t touch them a bunch with your greasy little fingers while they’re healing you.” If you do, call me for wet card advice, I’m so alone.
So, when you use these cards to request healing from the subtle energies of the universe, you’re not actually relying on the intelligence of a high race of beings. You’re asking two elderly dudes from rural England. Granted, they seem like smart, chill guys who would probably heal you if they could. They had a bunch of people publicly claiming no human technology could produce crop circles for two decades before they came out and said, “lol we just used a board with a piece of string tied to it.”
By the way, if anyone is spontaneously healed by these circles (or killed if that’s what healing means to you), you owe 1900HOTDOG payment in the form of one of our approved currencies. We accept Hulk Hogan hats, your deepest secrets, or Malibu Comics.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Craig Lemoine, who is also a form of healing not approved by the government or recommended by any doctor.
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Fucking Day: Labor of Love 🌭
Sometimes I think there aren’t enough reality TV shows about people so desperate to mate they make you a bit worried they might be aliens trying to trick someone into letting their offspring explode from their chest. Luckily, in the magical year of 2020, Fox took a former bachelor contestant and put her into a horror movie scenario for my entertainment. Not many reality TV shows are willing to say, “Welcome to television, gentleman, please jerk off immediately,” but Labor of Love did, and I respect it.
Labor of Love stars former Bachelor contestant Kristy Katzmann who is 41 and wants to have a baby within the same year the show is being filmed. They pair her up with a terrifying series of older bachelors who are desperate to impregnate a human woman. It has to be a mortal human woman. They are very specific about that. Most of them also repeatedly mention they would prefer the offspring to be male. Kristy, for her part, is also seeking the most genetically perfect human man to reproduce with, which is why they made the first challenge of the show delivering a sperm sample, and they have a trophy to the man with the highest sperm count. It is all very normal for she is human, like you Earth monsters, now fill her with the sperm we have counted.
It’s a little too real that this show has doctors and lawyers on it, but the man with the most sperm was an unemployed actor whose biggest role was a guest spot on a single episode of Franklin and Bash. There are a few contestants on this show who’ve found fun new ways to spell unemployed, my favorite of which is “former professional wrestler,” no current job listed.
I can’t blame the show’s producers for not picking the best potential fathers. It must have been hard to find a group of successful adult men who were willing to immediately dive into the medical grade bang bus with paper-thin walls where all of the men they will be living with for the next month are also masturbating.
Labor Of Love feels like it was made as revenge for the Bachelor. Its only goal seems to be humiliating the men willing to compete to impregnate Kristy. I love it. Before they ask the men to submit their sperm samples in the first episode, the host, Kristin Davis, asks them to raise their hand if they’ve masturbated in the last five days because that can affect your sperm count. Some of them did, and the rest were liars.
Instead of the extravagant dates and over-the-top romance of The Bachelor, Labor Of Love maintains a very clinical vibe. Kristy is referred to as “The Mother To Be,” and the men are called Dadchelors. The men chosen to stay each week get to go to the “Fatherhood Room,” which is not a metaphor; it’s a room with an enormous lit sign that says FATHER HOOD on it. That’s the level of metaphor this show is working with.
I don’t understand why romance is a factor at all in this show. Goal one is humiliating the Dadchelors; goal two is for Kristy to achieve sperm. If they had ditched any implication of romance and had Kristy fully on the hunt for that genetically perfect white gold, it would have been so much better. They should have simply given the men sharp sticks and let them battle to the death, is what I’m saying. This whole thing could have been a one episode kumite.
Instead, we get these challenges loosely based on the theme of fatherhood, which are also sort of pranks on the men. In the second episode, they all go camping. The production facility puts up a bunch of bear warning signs and has a fake park ranger give them a talk about how to be safe in the event of a bear attack. Then they put a terrible bear costume on a PA and faked a bear attack during each man’s one on one time with Kristy to see if he would protect her. One guy curled up into a ball around her. His response to a bear was to make himself snack-sized with a gooey lady center.
Another dadchelor threatened to quit the show when he heard they were camping. Most of these men were not only not ready to father a human child, they weren’t prepared to survive on their own without Kristy’s protection. The dates the winner of these challenges got varied widely in quality. Sometimes they have Kristy straddle Kyle during an aerial yoga class. Sometimes they pump twenty kids full of monster energy drinks and unleash them on Gary and Kristy at a pretend birthday party to very predictable results.
The men who endured the first two challenges, which were again, jerk off, and avoid a bear, had to undergo a birth simulator, which is basically an actual torture device, and those fake babies they give to high schoolers to annoy them into using condoms. Then at the end of each episode was the weirdly impersonal elimination process where Kristy used an iPad to move them into one of two columns in a PowerPoint presentation– either “Let’s keep dating” or “We need to talk.”
She made her decision in the house right across the street from the men while they watched her deliberate, which meant a bunch of shots of them pacing while Kristy stared at an iPad. There was an overly ambitious contestant who tried to intimidate Kristy into picking him by perching on the window sill like a puppet that wants to become a real boy.
Other strategies men employed to capture Kristy’s attention included being 6’8. Kyle introduced himself to the show by saying, “Hi, I’m Kyle; I’m six foot eight,” and honestly, they should have shut down production then and there because Kyle won. Kristy’s lizard brain simply measured all of the men and chose the largest. Tall was Kyle’s only personality trait, and it was all he needed to dominate this show.
To be fair to Kristy, it was pretty difficult to narrow down the men based on the information she was given. No reality show has ever made it harder to pick out the weirdos because agreeing to participate in the challenges was the most freakish thing anyone on this show could possibly do.
When it was time for Kristy to visit the homes of the final three men, she learned that Marcus, a doctor and former Survivor cast member, had what he called a “house mother.” He was an adult man with a full-time nanny, and he made it to the final three. The Bachelorette would have rung that information out of him by episode three and kicked his ass to the curb. Not that it mattered because Kristy immediately chose Kyle anyway, the longest human, so she was never in any danger of becoming Marcus’s new house mom.
So, you’re probably wondering how things worked out for Kristy and her tall impregnator. Sadly, like most stories where you win a person, they broke up three months after the show ended. Kristy said that when she really thought about it, they only got to go on two real dates, and she didn’t actually know him very well, which is true. The show was never date-focused, and even when things started to get remotely romantic, the producers would send in a child with a wiffle ball bat to remind everyone this is not supposed to be sexy; this is serious!
I would love to see Kyle return from Labor Of Love season 2. This time it’s all ladies competing to be impregnated by the large man. How will America like it when it’s the women going into the jerk off bus? What? I’m being told they would love that? Oh no, I’m now the showrunner of Labor Of Love Season 2: Compete To Pork Tall Kyle!
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, who has never cranked it in a medical cranking bus for the purposes of American reality television released in the summer of 2020.
Sometimes when a grifter grifts, it’s actually our fault. They were simply putting a product on the market, and it was the public who fell for it so hard it became a grift. For instance, I know art is subjective, but there was a time in the ’90s when everyone flipped their shit for pictures of haunted dogs dressed as people. Everyone was so willing to pay big money for high fashion nightmare dog photos that newer work from the artist is currently selling for around twenty thousand U.S. dollars.
William Wegman’s dog with people’s body photos suddenly appeared one day in every midwestern grandmother’s bathroom at once. I get that placement– that is clearly where these dogs belong, but they’re also somehow considered high-fashion works of art. The dogs were in Vogue magazine multiple times. Anna Wintour let them into the Met Gala before Kim Kardashian, probably. I find it hilarious that the first man with a fancy degree in art to come up with putting a hat on a dog was able to make a billion dollars.
Wegman did commercial stuff like the Honda commercial where dogs with human hands love Honda. Honestly, not a selling point if you ask me. If Honda attracts dogs with people’s bodies, I’m staying the fuck away from that brand. I guess I’m the only sane person looking to purchase an affordable, family-friendly vehicle that mutants won’t attack. I just want a car that self-destructs when it detects dog minotaurs. The William Wegman stuff that I find funniest is when he gets very serious and turns his critical artist’s eye on the dog hats, like in his coffee table book of fashion photographs.
To make sure they’re as artistic as possible, William took all of the photographs on the most inconvenient device possible, a 240-pound Polaroid 20X24 camera. It had to be rented from Polaroid and hauled around along with lighting equipment, drying racks, and generators in a rented box truck. Wegman said the camera was “unforgiving,” and he would take around 30-50 prints at a time, resulting in 2-3 photos he considered worth showing. All of this for something available 900 times a second on Tiktok today. I’m glad I was born in an era where silly dog photos are so accessible and don’t have the tone of a lich welcoming adventurers into its tomb.
Can you imagine watching someone unload this enormous, complicated piece of equipment, spend hours perfecting the lighting, prepare eighteen pounds of film, and boot up a generator to create a perfect photo? Then you find out that all of that effort was to take a weirdly horny picture of some not-quite-done-Animorphing dog in a designer dress. All of that for a photo so cursed even wikifeet won’t rate it? No matter how many times William Wegman asks?
The photo above is titled “Melissa,” which is the most upsetting possible title for it. Don’t name the dog woman you’ve created! She does look like a Melissa, though. I have to give him that. Other dog women photos are titled “Miss Mythical,” “Nurse, Nurse,” and “Glamour Puss.” If I were William Wegman’s agent, I would suggest his next coffee table book be called William Wegman Just The Horny Ones because weirdly spicy dog/human hybrids are a real under-examined throughline in all of his work. At first, I thought that wasn’t William’s fault. He’s a photographer who gives people what they want, and the people were clamoring for these sexy dog pics. “Let us watch Melissa pee,” they definitely hissed.
This man walked into Saks Fifth Avenue one day and said, “I’m going to make a book full of dogs in designer outfits. Would you like me to feature the clothing you sell and thank you in the acknowledgments?” and Saks Fifth Avenue agreed to this arrangement. They handed that man a Dolce & Gabbana Bikini and told him to go nuts. It’s not his fault that the world has enabled his bad impulses in this way. We are all guilty, each of us who didn’t stop it.
Don’t worry; it’s not just the girl dogs getting this treatment. He’s also got the boy dogs looking dapper as hell. This photograph from 1999 entitled “Opening” highlights how the dog looking naturally sad is part of it. Wegman promises the dogs love putting on their freaky little outfits. That despair is just their face! Deep existential dread is part of their breeding. That’s what makes the pictures so funny!
My opinion of this whole sexy dog situation changed pretty severely after I read the introduction William Wegman wrote for his fashion book where he described his dog Battina as “sexy and girlish even in maturity and motherhood.” This would be a creepy thing to say about a woman, but if you’re saying it about a female dog, it’s, hang on, let me check, worse. Yes, that’s worse. In fact, he doesn’t seem able to describe a dog in a way that doesn’t sound like it’s a DJ introducing a burlesque dancer, a horrifying dog-headed burlesque monster.
He describes his male dog named Chundo as “the ultimate man, masculine and lordly.” Chip is “a mere boy, but a devastatingly handsome one. His precious adolescence conveys an uncomplicated look of innocence seldom seen in the pages of today’s fashion magazines. Chip is the Hellenic Golden Age, the “David” of dogs.” He could have saved a lot of time by just saying the dog was hot. We get it, dude; you think the dog is hot. Why don’t you take some erotic photos about it? Oh, wait:
I personally enjoy some of the less horny William Wegman photos. A lazy Wegman is great. If my photos sold for 20K a pop, I would relish the days that I could phone it in. I would feel like I deserved to be able to do a few lazy ones, and hey, maybe they only sell for a jet-ski price instead of a full boat. So, when I see a picture that’s just a forced perspective of a small dog standing on a regular dog, I finally understand the medium, and that makes me feel like a fancy art lady in a way that a dog in a bikini doesn’t.
There’s a finite amount of creativity the human brain is capable of. Some days the only innovation you have in you is…what if we put two hats on the dog? Could you charge twice as much for that photo? Why not try? Have the audacity, William Wegman! This is infinitely better than his other stuff. I’m sorry for what I said earlier. Let’s keep adding more hats. The hats are great, actually.
I’m sorry if I’ve ruined dogs with human bodies for you. A lot of people have fond memories of these little creeps from their segments on Sesame Street. They used to do whole sketches as fun little monsters who taught kids valuable lessons like how to steal eggs out of a bowl or how to make direct eye contact with the dark void of death on the distant horizon.
I hope that’s how you’re able to remember the Wegman dogs. Wegman’s evolution to the world of artistic, sexy, fashion dogs makes me think maybe evolution is bad after all. Laurels can be a great place to rest. If he had stopped at Sesame Street, his career wouldn’t have this haunting final footnote attached.
So many artists’ careers these days start making quality content and end selling feet pics. It’s the new circle of artistic life! Which I guess means this Patreon is about to get weird. Stay tuned!
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Hambone, the courageous WikiFeet editor who saw William Wegman’s were-dog feet and said “no, this institution will retain its dignity.”
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Upsetting Day: Church Ball
