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Upsetting Day: Anne Geddes
Author: Lydia Bugg
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Learning Day: Is Your Pet Psychic?
At this point in my 🌠career, I’ve read a lot of books about psychics. The common thing I’ve found about all of them is that they’re written to convince people they are unique and magical, but one brave psychic author has broken the mold because he wants you to believe that your pet hamster is more special and magical than you!
The author of this book, Richard Webster, has written several others related to psychic phenomena, including Pendulum Magic, Write Your Own Magic, and Astral Travel for Beginners, which I imagine is the best and only way to skip the line at Disney World. Although he is presumably a psychic, the idea of this book isn’t so much that you develop a psychic power; it’s that you can become aware of the immense psychic energy radiating from your pet iguana.
The book begins how every great story should, by immediately making me question everything. From its very dedication, this book is looking to make you spiral out of control.
Is Ken Ring an animal or a person? If he’s a person, why the paw print underneath? If he’s a dog, why does it have a last name, and why is that last name different from Richard Webster’s? My good friend is something I would call a person or a dog. Did this man dedicate the book to a dog that wasn’t his? Did he give his dog a full Christian name? Is this just a signature? Gasp, could Richard Webster be the dog?
I googled Ken Ring, which is apparently the name of a Swedish rapper with a popular album called Mitt Hem Är Blir Ditt Hem, obviously named after what the Swedish Chef says when a chicken is escaping. So, is Richard Webster good friends with a famous Swedish rapper? Or does he have an extremely formal dog? I don’t know which of those options is more likely OR funnier.
After its confusing dedication, Is Your Pet Psychic opens up by immediately answering its own question: yes, your pet is probably psychic. It turns out most pets are psychic unless you got a real dud. Richard Webster proves this through a series of anecdotes about animals with psychic and even precognitive abilities. For instance, a dog named Hector was once observed in Vancouver boarding and inspecting four different ships. A ship on the way to Japan eventually found him stowed away. When they docked, Hector immediately exited and ran to a Dutch ship his owner was departing from! What a magical story that a sailor from the 1800s insane from eating nothing but whisky and beef jerky didn’t make up!
Let me stop you right there, Richard. This man has way too much faith in dogs. Sure, maybe some dogs are brilliant. Maybe they’re noble beasts of great intellect, but some dogs are this dog, my dog:
This dog has never had a thought in her entire life, let alone a psychic premonition. This man thinks my dog, who doesn’t always remember she has a neck, has precognitive abilities? Sir, she doesn’t have cognitive abilities. I decided to try one of the tests from the book with her.
She got nervous because I was sitting on the floor with her but not letting her climb into my lap because she can’t practice her psychic powers if she falls asleep, and she falls asleep the instant she sits on my lap. She started to shake, got distracted by a fly, tried to kill the fly, failed, hit her head on a door frame, then cried. I guess that’s what she wanted to do? Fail at murder, then get upset by it? If so, maybe my dog is psychic? I’m so sorry I misjudged her. She can do whatever she puts her mind to.
The book isn’t just dog-centric, though. Even though we obviously start by talking about dogs, there are also chapters devoted to cats, horses, and “animals tall and small.” The cat section is one of my favorites because it proves historically how magical cats are because Persians used them as shields against their enemies.
Were they running into battle holding the cats in front of them, or was duct tape already invented in ancient Persia? Also, I don’t know if being pushed to the front of a battle for slaughter proves incredible power. It seems like if cats were so powerful, they wouldn’t have to worry about getting forced to the front of the murder parade. Also, how many times did this Persian king try Operation: Cat Shield before it worked?
Normally, when I verbally ask my cat to come to me, she telepathically responds that I can eat a dick and snuggles into whatever dark, dusty corner of my home is currently her tyrannically ruled territory. However, when I tried this, she did show up about ten minutes after I stopped asking her to. It actually spooked the hell out of me because showing up ten minutes late and looking annoyed as hell is the most respectful thing she’s ever done to me. My cat is boring, so here’s a picture of one with her spiritual energy for reference.
I’m starting to realize most of these tests designed by Richard Webster to prove your animals are psychic basically amount to animals doing all of the things they would normally do without psychic powers. Your cat showing up in your house doesn’t prove it’s psychic. A psychic cat is one who appears right as you’re choking on a fish to swallow your last breath, purring as the prophecy comes true. Let’s hope the tests for horses won’t be so goddamn stupid.
This test raised a very important question in my mind: could Ken Ring be a horse? It seems to follow the same naming conventions as Cork Beg. I Googled “do horses have last names” because I’ve never owned a horse, and maybe they all have last names, and I don’t know. From this research, it doesn’t seem like last names are more common for horses than any other animal. I then Googled “Ken Ring horse,” and that’s when the mystery cracked wide open for me.
Somehow Ken Ring horse led me to the Twitter account for a New Zealand weather forecaster named Ken Ring. Where did Richard Webster, author of Is Your Pet Psychic?, grow up?
Ken Ring is a person! Not a dog or a horse at all! Sorry, I’ve completely forgotten what this article was about. Luckily, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from working for 1900HOTDOG, it’s that comedy is mostly discovering and solving previously undiscovered mysteries, especially murders. Anyway, back to horses. Here’s another exciting horse telepathy test:
Can you imagine speaking telepathically to your horse for the first time only to learn that it does not love you? What if the horse says, “I see you only as a stylish little hat I sometimes wear? You are not more than a fashion accessory, a thing, a pet, now brush me, stooge, brush me and feed me treats, tiny fool!” That would be pretty cool. Now I want to know all horses’ opinions of me. What could be cooler than talking to a horse?
Oh right, there’s an entire section of this book about ghost animals. It proves ghost animals are real with an anecdote about a woman who was once Richard Webster’s secretary, and when her cat died, she still felt it curled up at the end of her bed at night. Richard’s solution to this was to invent a special animal seance that allows someone to say goodbye to a beloved pet currently haunting them. It’s a lengthy process that essentially involves thinking about the animal and seeing if it shows up. In fact, most psychic animal communication is aggressively thinking at animals.
For a book claiming to be about psychic animals, it sure requires a lot of work from me. Work, that I’m noticing none of my animals have put in. If they’re so psychic why haven’t they checked this book out from the library themselves? I’m starting to think none of this is legitimate animal science at all. Does Ken Ring even exist? And can I enter him in the Kentucky derby? I’m still not sure.
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Nerding Day: Going Bananas! đźŚ
Sometimes you run across a piece of art that’s a great reminder of how the quality of the work doesn’t matter. If it hits at the wrong time, or the wrong place, or if there’s a problem with the cast, like, maybe you shouldn’t have cast an orangutan as the main character, then even a masterpiece of a TV show like 1984’s Going Bananas isn’t going to thrive.
The show description for Going Bananas will render you completely unable to guess what the next sentence holds. It begins “Roxana Banana is an orangutan that escaped from the zoo and was adopted by the Cole family.” Ok, sounds like a pretty typical family sitcom, right? Then the second sentence is, “One night, a mysterious spaceship comes down from the sky and endows Roxanna with superpowers via a lightning bolt.” I was good with a show about a monkey being adopted into a human family, but the makers of Going Bananas went above and beyond to deliver a superior product.
I love how they don’t even cover why the aliens would give a monkey superpowers. There’s no motive explained because we already know why they did it. Because it’s hilarious. Aliens have a sense of humor too; that’s why they made Prince Charles look like that! Anyway, the description continues; “Roxanna is pursued by two crooks who want to use her superpowers for their own ill will, but Roxanna’s outdoing them by means of her powers, as well as the predicaments she created for the Coles, provide much of the comedy for the series.” The super powered monkey has a nemesis? This may be the perfect description of a show, and it definitely has a perfect origin story intro:
Yet with all of this surrounding perfection, Going Bananas only lasted for one season and twelve episodes, almost all of which are impossible to find. The two episodes uploaded to Youtube have only five thousand views between them. The show was apparently more popular in Mexico, where it was called Miss Banana. You can find a few bits and pieces of Miss Banana online with English subtitles, but I could only locate two complete episodes.
Now you might be asking yourself if this show faded from history because of bad acting, to which I will reply, I don’t know. Do you think Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a bad actor? That’s right, this show stars Shredder himself, James Avery, as Hank, who along with his friend Hubert tries to kidnap the superpowered monkey on a weekly basis. It works because I believe James Avery is full of enough fury to go after a superpowered monkey.
In every scene he’s in, it kind of seems like he’s begging the other actors to attempt to act, and they are all refusing. Everyone else on this TV show has gotten their lines five seconds before the camera rolled, and they can’t read. James Avery has been preparing his craft with an intensive seven month character study at the Oxford school of sitcom villains.
I’ve been trying to figure out what could make a monkey with alien superpowers better, and so far, the only thing I’ve landed on is if the monkey rode a motorcycle and wore a little leather jacket, which of course, it does! The people who made this show understood good television. We don’t need this prestige TV bullshit. We don’t need to know who the best singer on The Sopranos was or if whatever they broke bad got fixed. We need more monkeys on motorcycles that shoot psychic lightning bolts out of their skulls!
Roxana Banana doesn’t always ride a motorcycle, but in the episode this still is from, she fights a biker gang that’s terrorizing the small town her family is passing through. The whole family wears matching leather jackets with a patch that says Roxanna’s Bananas on the back. They’re somehow mistaken for a biker gang instead of a regular family with a motorcycle driving pet monkey. After they realize the town is scared of the bikers, the family encourages everyone to fight back, which is easy to suggest when you’re being backed by a monkey with alien superpowers.
The biker gang is headed by James Avery, who is playing the cousin of his usual thief character. We know this because his sidekick says to him, “Big Daddy,” sorry, his character’s name is Big Daddy and everyone in the episode loves saying it, “ain’t that the dumb, ugly ape that cousin Hank and cousin Hubie wrote us about?” Which means their destitute cousins wrote to them and said, “we keep trying to kidnap a monkey with alien superpowers, but it’s not working out,” and they just accepted it.
When they run into a monkey in a completely different town, they immediately know that it’s the monkey, and they’re also not at all intimidated. Which is a mistake because Roxana Banana immediately starts using her mind ray to mess with the bikers.
The mind ray seems to be Roxana’s only prominent power in the episodes that have survived, but since the synopsis doesn’t mention a single specific power the aliens gave her, I imagine they had her do whatever cool thing the episode called for that week which was technically legal to depict a monkey doing. For instance, in this same episode, she seems to have super strength and arm wrestles five bikers into oblivion.
Also, during the biker episode, she fires two bananas at the bikers as if they are guns? Both the strength and the banana gun strike me as powers that could come from just being a monkey? Or maybe it was the aliens riffing on things that they knew about monkeys. Can Roxanna make anything into a gun or just bananas? God, what I wouldn’t give to see those other ten episodes.
Roxanna doesn’t only use her powers for good, though. There’s an episode where she uses her mind ray to frame a black man for stealing. James Avery just wants to adopt a lost dog, and Roxanna tries to send him to Rikers Island.
In that episode, the Coles find a lost dog, and Roxanna becomes jealous of it, so she allows Hank and Hubert to kidnap the dog and then later feels guilty about it when they force the dog to perform for an audience because Rozanna Banana is very familiar with how much animals hate being forced to wear silly costumes for humans.
Because Going Bananas seems to have based most of its plot around whatever monkey-sized hat they found that day, they could only fill up fifteen to twenty minutes of airtime with an actual show. So, the last five to ten minutes was filled with a segment called Jungle Broadcast System, where Roxanna Banana watched her favorite TV shows– animal parodies of other popular TV shows. Each skit was just an animal pun with a TV show name played over stock footage of animals quickly cut to almost, not quite, make it look like they’re talking. Some of the titles were respectable, like:
Some of them were downright amazing, like the parody of Little House On The Prairie starring ants that made the house even smaller:
And some of them were kind of a stretch. If you didn’t know that buffalo poop was called chips, this wouldn’t work at all, and also, that cow looks nothing like Erik Estrada. They could have at least put a police hat on it. I’ve become accustomed to a certain quality of silly animals at this point.
Apparently they also did Magnum P.U. with a skunk starring Tom Smelleck. So, it was a real mixed bag of puns but as you can see, fully worth remembering and archiving for future generations. This is what happens when we lose physical media: so many perfect shows are going to be lost to time. What will our generation’s Going Bananas be? Riverdale? The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina? Katy Keene? Only time will tell.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who vows not to rest until he catches the one-armed great ape that framed him for dognapping.
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Upsetting Day: Titanic 666 đźŚ
I recently visited the Titanic Museum Attraction in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, because there aren’t many options for celebrating your birthday in Tennessee that are more fun than commemorating a national tragedy. The museum was pretty cool, but my favorite part was the gift shop where you could process your grief over the loss of fifteen hundred human lives by purchasing a sparkly, teal, heart-shaped pillow with the name of their watery grave on it.
The Titanic gift shop made me think about how Americans are terrible at processing grief through any lens other than capitalism, but boy, are we good at expressing our sorrow via merch. Sure, calling someone the captain of the Titanic doesn’t come off as a compliment in our modern era, but you can purchase a Titanic captain’s hat for your Captain & Tennille cosplay and hope nobody notices the grim reference!
After September 11th, people sold so many country songs, American flags, and Never Forget t-shirts, partially because we never wanted to forget but also, more cynically, because you can’t copyright a national tragedy. So when something terrible happens and everyone is talking about it, and mourning over it, sometimes that’s great news for the makers of 9/11 tribute shirts designed to look like a rap battle between Osama Bin Laden and George H.W. Bush.
When the Titanic movie came out and was a huge hit, the U.S. copyright office was flooded with requests to attach the name to t-shirts, restaurants, perfume, and even a line of iceberg lettuce. Dark! 20th Century Fox even had to go to battle with a guy who owned an army surplus store who had filed for the use of the name Titanic on clothing. I’m not sure if they got the rights or if they had to go with their second choice, Sea Burial Swimwear.
That trademark for Titanic remains up in the air, which is why in 2010, The Asylum was able to make a terrible disaster movie called Titanic II without getting sued by James Cameron. If you’re unfamiliar with The Asylum, they’re the production company that makes “mockbusters” like the Sharknado series and Snakes On A Train. They’re movies specifically designed to suck and maybe fool your grandmother into thinking she’s buying you that silly movie where Sam Jackson says that motherfuckin’ cakes on a motherfuckin’ train line you like so much.
Titanic II performed so adequately that ten years later The Asylum decided to try it again but this time somehow even more gruesome and terrible. “We haven’t spat in the face of a national tragedy that showed the massive issues with inequality in America by drowning a bunch of poor women and children,” someone at The Asylum must have said before sucking a big ol’ loogie out of his nasal cavity and spitting out Titanic 666.
This’ll be the one that makes it!
It’s a zombie movie where the men and women who died on the Titanic are raised from the dead to seek vengeance on the people trying to ghoulishly profit from their tragic deaths, which is, you know, exactly what The Asylum is doing by making this movie. It’s as if they made a movie about how terrible it is to hunt whales and killed seventeen whales in harpoon accidents during production.
The biggest star in the movie is AnnaLynne McCord, the actress who went viral for writing a poem about how if she were Putin’s mother and had hugged him, he wouldn’t have started the war in Ukraine. She’s playing an unbearable influencer named Mia, a role she was made for, but she’s not the main character, even though the movie follows her almost exclusively for the first thirty minutes.
Mia and her husband decide to sneak into the scary abandoned warehouse on the Titanic for some primo content but end up stumbling upon stowaway Lydia Hearst performing what is clearly a demonic ritual. However, there wasn’t much of a script for Titanic 666. You can tell they wrote about three lines for every scene and asked the actors to improv, which they absolutely would not do, so instead, they repeat the three written lines over and over again, which in this scene means they kept saying, “is this part of the entertainment?” “Is this some kind of show?” As Lydia Hearst drank her own blood.
According to IMDB, Lydia Hearst’s character’s name is Idina, but I don’t think they came up with that until way post production. She’s playing the great granddaughter of the captain of the original Titanic, who is psychically connected to the victims of the Titanic, somehow. She gives a speech about this at one point, but it must have been added in reshoots and edited into the story way too early because everyone she meets is like, “who are you? Why are you doing this?” Even though she immediately told everyone her whole deal.
There’s an evil Indiana Jones on the ship who’s selling artifacts from the Titanic for a bunch of money. He’s even ghoulishly showing off the Captain’s wedding ring, which he presumably pulled off a frozen corpse and now wears around. He’s the only one who has something like a hero’s journey where he learns a lesson and grows as a character, but he’s also the inconsiderate evildoer who kicks off the whole problem in the first place as it’s his grave robbing that upsets the captain’s granddaughter so much. There are just no good people in this thing to root for, not a single hero in sight. Are we supposed to be rooting for the zombies? Because I am.
Thirty minutes into the movie, Mia becomes the first victim of the Titanic zombies. She’s a pretty unconvincing scream queen. Her look of terror when seeing the zombie reads more like she’s stoned at a drive-thru and desperately trying to remember her Taco Bell order.
To be fair, the zombies are pretty confusing. They appear and disappear in mist and have some sort of telekinetic powers, so I don’t know if these are actually supposed to be zombies, ghosts, or just lost members of My Chemical Romance. I’m pretty sure this movie’s special effects guy was a TikTok filter, so something might be getting lost in the CGI.
Mia is scared to death by the ghost and her husband is sucked into a cloud, so suddenly the entire movie shifts to a new protagonist– the captain of the ship. She’s more sympathetic than anyone else, but she’s also a woman who signed up to captain Titanic 3 after what happened to Titanic’s one and two. I’m sorry, but you know what they say, Titanic one shame on you, Titanic two shame on me, Titanic three, you deserve the zombie.
The rest of the movie is a series of jump scares as the crew runs around trying to stop the obviously ghost-related shenanigans. They do this as if the only direction they were given was to act like they’re on the Titanic and it’s full of ghosts! They need to stretch the run time so badly and with so little budget that there are multiple scenes where we watch a group of people watch cell phone footage of an earlier scene in its entirety.
Eventually, the Titanic III is steered into iceberg city like Titanic’s I and II before it and surprise, surprise, it sinks! The Captain tells the evil Indiana Jones guy to help load people into the lifeboats, and he does, but the lifeboat line is cut by ghosts and all of the people plunge into the water too fast, breaking the boat and killing everyone.
He ends up alone in a lifeboat. We hear a tapping on the side and just when you think he’s about to get ghosted, the captain appears. She tells him that by helping people into the lifeboats he’s “squared up with God,” and he peacefully freezes to death, then becomes a zombie ghost and lunges at the captain, ending the movie. Literally the entire cast dies, which is fine because they don’t need anyone left to make another Titanic movie. The Asylum has done a Titanic disaster movie and a Titanic zombie movie, I’m assuming their next feature will be a Bollywood musical where a dancing captain accidentally chorus lines into the throttle and causes the boat to hit an iceberg.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who is writing, directing, starring in and doing craft services for Titanic 4: Titanic Panic!
