Author: Lydia Bugg
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Learning Day: The Bathroom Oscars 🌭
Kids these days… everyone’s got to get a trophy. Even bathrooms are winning awards. That’s right; there’s an Oscars for Toilets. I was at the Nashville Zoo recently and saw a prominently displayed plaque declaring their bathroom the 2019 Best Restroom Award Winner. Of course, I immediately went to bestrestroom.com to check out the other nominees to determine if this really was the Meryl Streep of bathrooms.
Here’s a very hotdog sentence for you: the bathroom had monkeys in it. It was, in fact, a very cool bathroom. Is having a special zoo exhibit only viewable if you have to piss a little weird? Yes. However, monkeys are cute, and I will never turn down a show while I wait for the bathroom. I do feel a little bit bad for the bathroom monkeys, mainly because they look like they’re aware they are the bathroom monkeys.
I feel like all of the other zoo animals make fun of them. It’s bad enough that their hair naturally grows in the shape of David Bowie’s Labyrinth mullet, but we’re also going to make them live in a bathroom? Give them some dignity, Nashville zoo.
The Nashville Zoo wasn’t the first to relegate an animal to a lifetime job as a bathroom attendant. They got the idea from the 2017 recipient of the Best Bathroom Award, OdySea Aquarium, who pulled the same move with sharks. Apparently, filling a bathroom with sharks is something either a bad James Bond villain or a good bathroom designer will suggest.
It may be controversial to say sharks deserve it, but they seem like creepy little guys. They can smell your leavings from four leagues away and they like it. But their enclosure seems more humane to me because it’s only a portion of the aquarium’s largest exhibit. It’s an interesting little window for the sharks to peek into every once in a while and see a bunch of humans standing in a line looking uncomfortable, unlike the monkeys who spend 100% of their public facing time in a bathroom.
Stuffing your bathroom full of wild animals is not the only way to get the bathroom award academy’s attention. They also seem to be interested in bathrooms decorated like a nightclub in the Lord Of The Rings universe. At least that appears to be the vibe of 2013 winner, The Varsity Theater in Minneapolis. Here’s a photo of it, taken by someone who takes pictures inside bathrooms:
I personally vote this bathroom Most Likely to Remind Me I Haven’t Been to an Olive Garden in a While. What I mean by that is it looks like someone who has never been to Italy describing Italy to you, which is exactly what the best bathroom awards were looking for that year. Its entry in the bathroom hall of fame describes it as “one part old fashioned powder room, one part lounge.” Which they say “allows concertgoers to take a break in an area from which one can still view and hear the stage. Bartenders even serve drinks over the back counter into the restroom area, offering a VIP experience to every guest.” Fucking gross, those VIPs probably think.
Even though several outlets covered The Varsity winning Best Bathroom, they didn’t include a lot of pictures. It’s sloppy journalism.
So until I have to pee in Minnesota, I can’t quite get the orientation of the place. But it seems from the description that the bathroom is far too much of a social experience. I get that sometimes women congregate in there, and that’s fine, but it seems weird to make it a social hub of your venue. Where are introverts supposed to hide in this place? Where can they learn they’re lactose intolerant now with dignity?
The more you look at the bathrooms in the hall of fame, the more it starts to sink in that there’s no specific design aesthetic the judges are looking for. Sure, if you put a David Bowie monkey in your bathroom, you will win. That’s a great general rule for life. All other past winners are seemingly chosen at random. Last year’s winner was the Tampa International Airport, which won for a very normal airport bathroom. Look at this ordinary ass line of urinals. This is the default setting of bathroom:
There’s not even a whiff of New Jersey mansion decorator style to liven this place up. You can tell the bathroom judges knew it was a real dud of a year, too, because the language they use to describe it in its restroom hall of fame entry is so flowery. “Boasting large graphics and a natural, deep blue stone, the undulating veining is reminiscent of waves crashing along the shore.” I’m pretty sure you can’t do undulating veining in a public bathroom. At least not with monkeys watching. Plenty of other entries got way slimmer descriptions. Wendell’s restaurant only got two sentences, but they hired Herman Melville to take us on a word journey through the Tampa International Airport’s men’s room.
Probably the most depressing section of the bathroom hall of fame is the area where you can pursue the bathrooms that were nominated but didn’t win. I’m sure 2010 was a controversial year in the competitive bathrooming world. Somehow vintage St. Louis ice cream parlor, The Fountain on Locust, narrowly beat out The Muse Hotel in New York, the most indulgent bathroom on this list. Look at how they defecate there:
I’ve never seen a bathroom and said, “This is trying too hard,” before, but The Muse bathroom is thirsty. There’s a common lounge area and then individual stalls with cool words painted on the door like glam, envy, rebel, vain, and my personal favorite, macHo. I know there’s a guy who waits for the macHo stall when the glam one is open.
This bathroom is begging people to fuck in it. There’s a large illuminated moose antler on one wall. There’s red neon lighting and gold mosaic tile. They were campaigning for this award, and the committee could sense it. In fact, they wanted to win so badly that they resubmitted for consideration in 2020 with better pictures and got snubbed again! The judges hate this tacky, desperate bathroom.
Another big controversial loss was the year Great American Bank BallPark in Cincinnati brought some actual innovation to the awards and got fully rejected. How can you innovate in bathrooms? They added a full nursing suite for new mothers with tons of amenities like comfortable gliders and a kitchenette with a refrigerator for storing and heating milk. They put a full dishwasher in their bathroom and still lost to what the town of Minturn, Colorado, says is a bathroom, but I don’t understand how it could work from its photo. I am afraid of it and angry at it, and I’ll pee right in front of monkeys.
Bathrooms should not be confusing. People need to understand bathrooms. We’ve made them very simple for that exact reason. The design team behind this calls it “functional art.” I call it an excuse for a lot of drunk people to just pee in the woods instead. I don’t want to pee in art, but the best bathroom judges are all about it; peeing as art, however, they hate.
The judges were not impressed with the “urinal gaming system” Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania entered in 2016. The hands-free game was activated by motion sensors, and after finishing, the player got a unique code to report their score to a leaderboard via their smartphone and see the scores on real time displays throughout the stadium. They made a literal pissing contest and lost to another boring airport bathroom!
I have noticed one recurring theme at the bathroom awards. Aside from the gamification of peeing in a urinal, most of the entries are women’s restrooms. Not because men are disgusting but because monkeys attack when they see a penis, and none of you are brave enough to prove I’m lying. So for every beautiful bathroom winning this award, I have to wonder if there’s a men’s restroom that’s just a rusty metal trough and a pile of damp paper towels.
By the way, if you want to nominate a bathroom, you can submit an online form on bestrestroom.com. All you have to do is fill out some contact info, send a couple of pictures, and answer the question, “What makes this restroom special.” Caution, they don’t like it if you put “my daughter Courtney was conceived in here!” I heard that’s why Muse keeps losing.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neku104, the only bathroom monkey we need in our lives.
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Learning Day: How to Party 🌭
In this article, I will attempt to answer the age-old question of who would throw a better party: Regis Philbin & Kathie Lee Gifford… or Garfield. Both have released books on how to throw a party, something I wasn’t sure you could not know how to do. A party is just a bunch of people getting together, taking their shirts off, and beating each other up. It is impossible to fuck up. And yet from reading these books, I’ve learned that the definition of “party” is very fluid. Sometimes it means eating caviar pie, and sometimes it means gaslighting your friends to the point of insanity. Which of those things is more fun? Only my objective opinion as an expert party attendee will decide!
Entertaining With Regis & Kathie Lee is mainly a recipe book with a bit of advice, anecdotes, and photographs from their TV show scattered throughout. It’s for explaining the concept of parties to the poors. They thought the name Halloween was either a little too Pagan or not nearly Pagan enough, so their chapter on it is called “Harvest Moon Celebration.” And like wild birds, they seem to think that Halloween is largely about filling your house and food with leaves.
This is such a boring interpretation of Halloween I can only give it half a party hat. Regis and Kathie Lee only get Birthday. They don’t deserve the Happy. There’s nothing happy about letting a leaf touch your cookie, even pre-baking. A squirrel probably peed on that. Celebrating Halloween without a single drop of fake blood, or even half of a Dracula, is sad. It’s not a holiday about fashionable gourds. It’s about death and candy. You have to try pretty hard to make that lame.
You would think that Garfield would have this one in the bag. His book describes the basic concept of a party to children, right? Except while Regis and Kathie Lee ruin Halloween by trying to make it adorable, Garfield tries to make his party goers experience genuine terror.
“Have you ever read Edgar Allen Poe’s story ‘The Masque Of The Red Death?'” No, I have not, Garfield, but this party idea sounds pretty fucked up. I don’t know how many silent strangers Garfield would let into his home before calling the police, but apparently, it’s more than me. I don’t know if this counts as an idea for a party, so much as an idea for usurping someone else’s party, which is honestly kind of cool. I do like that they at least have costumes, but I don’t like the implication of lasting psychological damage— two and a half party hats for Garfield’s “Masque Of The Red Death” Party.
When it comes to Thanksgiving, Regis and Kathie Lee are once again obsessed with leaves. Leaves are their answer to everything. Seriously, This book makes me feel like if you asked Kathie Lee how to bring peace to North Korea, she would say, “Spray paint some leaves! Gather them in your cheeks and baskets from nearby graves!”
You may notice that filling a pretty basket with jars of jams was also Halloween party advice; I guess that’s just a blanket thing rich people do? Somewhere out there is a frustrated neighbor who was always complaining how Regis Philbin would not stop giving them jam. Talk show hosts have two party moves: leaves and jam. One party hat Regis And Kathie Lee. At least this advice is more appropriate for the season. But fucking get it together.
I’m sure Garfield’s Thanksgiving party tips will be way more normal than his Halloween ideas. Maybe he’ll even suggest some spray painted leaves!
So close, Garfield, so close. Garfield suggests you avoid the monotony of Thanksgiving by pretending to celebrate it in the year 2400. The party doesn’t need a second theme. It’s already got a theme, and that theme is Thanksgiving. Adding a subtheme to the theme of your party is like inviting someone to play a game of basketball and then saying hey guys, just to shake things up, let’s do it on roller skates and, in addition, across tiiiiime!! Garfield also suggests you purposely ruin food in the name of a party.
Why assume our tastes will be terrible in four hundred years? Spaghetti has been around since the 12th century, with no edits needed. The suggestion for Thanksgiving is to take the best thing about it and make it terrible. That’s a half a party hat suggestion if I’ve ever heard one. I thought about giving this a full party hat because the phrase wiener pudding made me laugh, but it’s probably a real British dessert. I’m not going to Google it to check. Curse your traps, Garfield.
While the two books have a lot of crossover holidays, I’d like to also rate them on the random additional holidays they decided to cover. Garfield, for instance, doesn’t have a section on how to throw a Kentucky Derby party. This is probably because children would be horrified at the idea of attending a party serving caviar pie. That’s a fancy pile of cream cheese, mayo, and fish eggs.
The Kentucky Derby is one thing I really trust Regis and Kathie Lee to advise me on. It’s a party for people with too much money, horse girls, and the gigantic center slice of the Venn diagram of those two groups of people. That is Regis & Kathie Lee’s target demo for sure! And yet, their Kentucky derby advice is still both basic and impractical.
Someone must tell these people that dunking a vegetable in tequila does not count as food. That’s a garnish at most. Also, wow, I should use horseshoes as part of my decorations for a Kentucky Derby party? Thank God I bought this book. I might have made the fatal faux pas of forgetting to buy horse stuff for this horses-running-in-a-circle-themed soiree. “Welcome! If you’re hungry, dip some fucking tomatoes in the salt near my dining room horseshoes!”
The Kentucky Derby chapter does include a pretty incredible section on Regis and Kathie Lee’s memories of the Kentucky Derby, where they both seem to struggle to say a single memorable thing about it. They both describe it in a way that makes me think maybe they sent celebrity impersonators in their place rather than endure Kentucky. Kathie Lee says, “It’s the only place I’ve ever been where everyone wore hats.” It’s how a child would describe a weiner pudding factory.
I love the insanity pile that is this Kentucky Derby chapter. I’m giving it three hats and a bonus fascinator because Kathie Lee would be delighted by that, and no one can stop me. I’ve gone mad with party power.
Garfield’s How To Party has a robust section of made up parties, including one where you invite your friends over to smash balloons between your bodies, which sounds way more like a fetish than a party. His idea for a “birthday funeral” was probably the most shocking thing in the book, and not just because of the surprisingly grim doodle that came with it.
Over the hill parties are pretty common for a forty or fiftieth birthday. Garfield suggests it for a thirtieth birthday and from the bottom of my heart, I have never meant this more: fuck you, Garfield. The typical over the hill party is some black decorations, maybe some tombstones, but Garfield’s “one foot in the grave” party once again takes things way too far.
When I first read this, I thought, why are all of Garfield’s party tips attempts to drive his friends away? Then I realized in a perverse way, it makes sense because Garfield doesn’t really have any friends. He’s always picking on Odie. He hates Nermal. At best he pities Jon. This is legitimately the kind of fucked up thing Garfield would do if he were ever to throw a party. You should never listen to Garfield’s party advice. Garfield is trying to ruin your friendships. I am going to give this entry a solid two hats for being wrong but in touch with its material character. As opposed to Kathy Lee Gifford who, as everyone knows, never remembers a hat.
That means Garfield wins by half a party hat! As someone with extensive experience attending parties, I understand what the true essence of a party is. It’s when a bunch of people gather together around a pentagram…wait, that’s a summoning. Shit. Have I never been to a party?
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: ND, who wrote the book on how to party and will be suing Garfield for IP infringement.
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Upsetting Day: Revelation Road 🌭
PureFlix, the Christian alternative to Netflix, has several categories of “family friendly” films for Christians to enjoy. Categories include Talking Dog, Romance in a World Where Horny Doesn’t Exist, Rip-Offs, and Rip-Offs with Kevin Sorbo (the fancy rip-offs). One of their high budget secular media rip-offs is the Revelation Road series, the lord’s answer to Mad Max.
Revelation Road is about traveling bulletproof vest salesman, Josh McManus, roaming a post-apocalyptic America and helping people in search of Christ’s redemption. That is not a joke, bulletproof vest salesman is his actual job title. In the first film, he says he’s a traveling salesman, and the only thing we ever see him try to sell is a bulletproof vest. He’s also a former government assassin of some kind because, in this day and age, everyone has to have a side hustle.
The movie seems to exist in an alternate reality where one of the ten commandments was that machine guns are bitchin’. Josh McManus struggles with whether it’s ok to keep doing so much murdering. He says he always “tries to find another way,” but often, that other way will be something like tricking a man into shooting his own brother instead of Josh. So, I guess God isn’t big on technicalities regarding murder.
Revelation Road was a huge hit for PureFlix, spawning two sequels with progressively bigger budgets and a TV Show. Part of PureFlix’s continued support of Revelation Road miiiiight have something to do with how the owner of PureFlix happened to be none other than David A.R. White, the star of Revelation Road.
He’s the guy on the back left in the above poster, behind the more famous guy with way less screen time. You know, the guy who was in Desperate Housewives and a Canadian show about witches? David A.R. White produces and stars in most of PureFlix’s original movies, which means this man is churning out D-list movies at the rate of an ’80s porn star.
It’s truly impossible to scroll through any genre on PureFlix without running into David A.R. White. Looking for a Comedy? How about David A.R. White’s HolyMan Undercover? More interested in Romance? Try Nothing Is Impossible, starring David A.R. White. Do you only watch Bollywood movies? Luckily I can’t help with that. However, if you like watching a man use Jesus as an excuse to kill people with his feet, the Revelation Road series starring David A.R. White was made for you. Because like you, they suck.
The first Revelation Road movie, The Beginning Of The End, takes place mostly before the rapture, but it’s still rapture flavored. There’s a biker gang called The Barbarians whose leader, Hawg, kills people with a big silver hammer. He rides by people on his motorcycle and polo smacks them in the head, or sometimes he stands over them and gives them a good bop.
Then, in the film’s last twenty minutes, there’s suddenly an apocalypse. It feels like someone had a sixty-minute script about a former government assassin rediscovering his faith in God and needed an extra twenty minutes to make it a movie. The description says, “Where were you when the world ended? The right man at the wrong time, Josh foiled a robbery perpetrated by The Barbarians, an outlaw biker gang. Then it happened. An unnatural flash in the sky, followed by a crippling series of earthquakes, throws the entire world into chaos. His only goal is to go home to his family, but he’ll have to fight his way through The Barbarians to do so.” All those things technically happen in the movie, but most of it is Ray Wise talking about Jesus.
All of the Revelation Road movies suffer from one annoying flaw: they have to make a lot of objectively cool stuff seem not cool. It shows teens a big greasy biker guy with a six pack, and a ton of tattoos doing hand to hand combat in front of a fire that’s accentuating the backlit silhouette of a sexy lady, and it says, “see this, kids. This is not cool!” Whacking people with a big silver hammer is not dope as shit. Don’t be like this attractive, awesome-looking guy, ok? You want to be like the guy in khakis and a tan button down collared shirt. Slowly kicking people to death on foot! That’s what’s cool!
They combat this issue by having every character, even the bad guys, tell Josh how cool and impressive he seems. Every movie is a big old compliment party for David A.R. White, who is coincidentally the guy signing the writer’s and actor’s paychecks. Every thug Josh runs into is like, “Uh oh, this guy looks so tough. He probably has a huge dick with no weird curves or veins, fully circumcised, the whole enchilada. It’s just smooth and shiny. Good at business as well, I bet. We should be careful with this one.”
Revelation Road 3 opens with a car chase scene where the henchmen say, “Wow, this guy can really drive!” as Josh steers straight down an open country road. He’s out to save a sixteen-year-old girl who’s been kidnapped, and he does, but not before she’s stabbed in the stomach. Here is where I should mention some Christians did have a small problem with this movie. It was dinged on Christian movie rating site, Dove.org, for being too sexual!
There is implied sex slavery and prostitution in this movie. We see a young girl in a cage at a black market, and while it’s not explicitly stated why the young girl Josh is rescuing was kidnapped, her getting stroked on the hair sensually was probably not the thing you should warn potential viewers about. Josh is forced to take her into the territory of a man named Drake for medical treatment. Drake is played by James Denton, who I was sad to see here. I knew his career wasn’t going great, but I didn’t realize it was going PureFlix not great.
Drake captures Josh at the town medic, where he’s trying to get treatment for the teen girl he rescued, and chains him up in a Christ pose. He tells Josh that there was a surgeon in town named Grace, but she left to follow a prophet called The Shepherd. Drake has been trying to track down Grace and The Shepherd to bring her back, but The Shepherd is extremely good at avoiding his men, with some people saying he can only be located by a man of faith or a man able to maintain immaculate bleach blond highlights during an apocalypse. Josh is both of these men.
Grace’s daughter, Sophia, stows away in Josh’s car, and they go on a fun little goose chase to find The Shepherd. Along the way, they run into a lot of obstacles, including a zany family of cannibals, and Kevin Sorbo, the head of the black market, who tries to steal their car.
Kevin Sorbo walked into the prop closet on this movie and said, “I’ll take it.” His look combines a fluffy pirate shirt, 1.5 IKEA rugs, AND a fedora. It’s revealed that his character was a drama teacher before the apocalypse, and honestly, I think they nailed this look. This is how a total theater nerd would dress during the rapture. It’s how you would stay warm if you were waiting out a blizzard in a Party City. He’s dressed like he’s been chasing cartoon cats through clotheslines.
Kevin Sorbo gives Josh the nickname “The Black Rider” when he forces him to fight to get his car back. It means nothing. I think the writers came up with the cool title and were desperate to find a way to fit it into their extremely uncool movie. While they’re at the black market, we learn that Drake is tracking Josh as a way to hunt down The Shepherd because a larger government-like entity (clearly run by the Antichrist) wants him captured. Sorry, this plot is dumber than Kevin Sorbo’s lil hat.
Josh and Sophia escape the black market with Kevin Sorbo and Co. hot on their tails. Josh is now sick of this shit, so he asks himself WWJD and feels like the answer is “mow all of these guys down with a very big machine gun I’ve been saving for this exact occasion.” However, Sophia has now converted to Christianity, and she convinces him that might not be what J would D, so Josh chooses the path of nonviolence. The moral of this movie is violence is bad, maybe, except when it’s not, in which case it’s awesome. Amen.
Josh choosing nonviolence, combined with Sophia’s newfound commitment to Christ, summons The Shepherd. I think this is supposed to be because only Christians can find him, and now Sophia is a Christian. Either way, he just sort of pops up behind them wearing a bed sheet because Kevin Sorbo took all of the good props.
It turns out Grace is not with The Shepherd. I feel like that makes the metaphor they were going for pretty muddled, but no one cares. The Shepherd is actually a powerful prophet who’s supposed to witness the End Times, and he has magic powers like healing and making plants grow. He wants Josh to escort him to the coast so he can go to Jerusalem. This is all, once again, the plot of a whole other movie beginning in the third act of this movie because, as we all know, a good story doesn’t really get going until the last twenty minutes or so.
Drake’s henchmen show up for The Shepherd and shoot Josh dead. You might expect Josh’s previous bulletproof vest salesman job to come in handy here, but it does not. He straight up dies and talks to God, who’s like, “you can just be dead now if you want,” but Josh decides he wants to stay on Earth and help more people, so God resurrects him, and he goes on to rescue The Shepherd from Drake and the evil devil government and I know this sounds like rambling stupidity which means they didn’t check with a single person if this plot made sense before they started filming.
That’s the conclusion of this hyper-violent, hyper-sexual episode of Drake And Josh. The Shepherd goes off to Jerusalem without Josh, who will continue to roam the world murdering, pillaging, and spreading the gospel as an undead zombie man in the TV series, which is currently shooting in South Africa. According to the Instagram account for the show, Josh has gotten even blonder since we last saw him. You have to admire the man’s dedication to haircare in a world without running water.
There are over 500 Christians following that Instagram, waiting for any scrap of information about the next leg of humble bulletproof vest salesman Josh MacManus’s journey. Will he get to kill more people in ways nearby people will call cool but sometimes abstain from killing in the name of religion? Will Kevin Sorbo’s character, let’s call him Random Debris Carl, show up again? You’ll probably have to sign up for PureFlix to find out, so, I guess we’ll never know!
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Michael Lehr, who is also called “The Black Passenger.”
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Upsetting Day: Masks for Children
