Author: Alex Schmidt

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: EiEi Yoga 1996🌭

EiEi Yoga is a 1996 yoga instructional video for children. Does it feel like a yoga class? No. It feels like a malevolent spirit tricking a limber Californian into preying on kids. Also, that malevolent spirit hates Jamaicans. The malevolent spirit’s twin passions are turning a decent man into a pedophile, and promoting Jamaican stereotypes.

EiEi Yoga shocked me. When our Hotdoggery comrade GnomePickles brought this up on the Discord, I expected Hee Haw-flavored framing for generic yoga content. I also worried the instructor would feel up little kids. Bad news: that’s all kind of happening here. Good news: I don’t think the main adult in this video is a predator. I think he’s opting into a scenario that makes him look like a predator. He micro-fondles throughout. He’s somehow oblivious to the ramifications. Did no one let him see the footage? If someone showed you tape of you doing this, you’d smash every appliance in that editing suite with your bare fists. “Push it back Kristin” he intones. “Kiss your tree trunks” he coos. “That’s a beautiful looking downward dog” he whispers, while touching a child in a way that would adjust posture if any adjustment were needed but hold on he made clear they did a beautiful looking downward dog so if he’s touching them while they need no adjustment he’s just touching them because he likes touching them I guess wow I forgot when I’m concerned about a guy doing you-know-what I lose the ability to end a sentence in a timely fashion looks like my hands will keep typing until I head-butt one finger into the period key.

Who is that? Also why does he have the exact bone structure of the guy who plays “Doctor Heiter” in Human Centipede? Ha. Human Centipede. Ha ha! Watching that was a silly little dare we all gave each other back when it seemed like the 2008 Presidential Election fixed everything forever. Forgot about that era. Now I’m remembering the name of the “Doctor Heiter” actor. His name is Klaus Dieter Laser. That’s fun. That should’ve been the movie. Some kind of Teutonic Little Miss Sunshine where KDL makes his kooky family road-trip in a too-small Panzer. But no. Instead, we got Human Centipede, which was a whole thing fifteen years ago. Meanwhile, thirty years ago, a fella called Max Thomas hosted this yoga video.

The tape begins with a production card for “Mystic Fire”, followed by several legal disclaimers warning you not to break your neck in your living room. Then we see Max Thomas do some getting-in-character actor stuff before the yoga. What stuff does he do? Max Thomas’s tight, lean body manipulates hay with a pitchfork, for two small scoops and no more. Max does this in the sinuous way a stripper does any clothed pretend job. It feels like a pornography preamble. Later, this choice becomes hilarious. It’s clear Max had no salacious reasons to fork that hay.

Max gave this video a Farm Theme to make yoga approachable. He’s trying to convince mainstream 1996 Americans to see yoga as more than a Frasier punchline. In pursuit of that positive goal, Max aims for a character of “Healthy Farmer”. Unfortunately, Max is bad at acting and good at evoking coastal elite lifestyles. Max ends up Leaves Of Grass-ing his way into a body-electric pansexual vibe. He looks like he’s gearing himself up to pleasure whichever organism next crosses his path. I didn’t want that. It was a huge relief when Max stopped flexing his groin at the horizon, and started flexing his groin in the context of yoga moves. By the time his second vinyasa starts, we’re in the clear. Until then, the vibe screams “Hot Twink-On-Twink Action As Soon As Second Twink Finds Parking.”

Vinyasas abound. Max continues doing yoga poses on that goofy sun mat. Max loves yoga! As the video goes on, we’ll learn Max also loves digressions. In between ham-fisting rustic metaphors and trading repartee with demonic puppets, Max wiggle-dances as often as possible. Max dances differently than you’re thinking he will. It’s not old fashioned, or new fashioned, or any other enjoyable style. It’s like Max’s body needs to make sine waves in every direction. Max thinks “dancing” is when you move, by yourself, with the affect of Voldo from SoulCalibur. Even stranger, he calls himself “Yogi Oki Doki.”

Pandering! How do you do, fellow Baseball And Apple Pie enjoyers? Yogi Oki Doki is as American as any horrifying space alien imitating our whole deal. He’s like if David Bowie got onto green juice, never got off cocaine, and devoted his next persona to humiliating Kansas. For example, I never knew you could do that corny/repulsive “sportsball” phrasing when discussing yoga. Did you know Yogi Oki Doki “plays yoga”? That’s the syntax he chooses every single time he needs a verb for doing yoga. Hey kids: do you play baseball, or play football? Yogi Oki Doki plays yoga. Wow: that’s normal! Your parents should leave you alone with this yoga player! Even the video’s legal disclaimers say it’s fine to let him PLAY YOGA with you!

The videotape’s legal disclaimers slip into suburban rumor. They lead with a bunch of normal advice about the neck and spine. By the end, they’re warning against playing yoga until a full hour after you’ve eaten. I love this advice because it’s a pretty good tip that’s also 100% based on a fear America’s moms told each other about swimming. When I was a kid, I was led to believe I’d die in a horrific [vague muttering] if I swam 59 minutes after consuming one fruit snack. This is not true. You don’t have to wait an hour after eating to swim. You can go swimming (or play yoga) as soon as you want, as long as you don’t mind risking an upset stomach and maybe even puking. I wish the 1990s warnings had a normal tone. Maybe wait an hour? It’s a normal good idea and not life or death. When I do yoga I follow this advice, for the same reason I don’t chase a meatball sub with a cartwheel. EiEi Yoga got to this same advice the dumbest way. It’s like if an urban legend accidentally helped everyone do their taxes on time.

Back to the farm: Yogi Oki Doki is our main character. Children are his students. Two horrific animal simulacra are his sidekicks.

“Rasta The Rooster” is what you hope he’s not. He is a man in a rooster costume
with dreadlocks and a Rastacap and a stereotypical accent.

With the caveat that you should never ever watch this video, watch this video. You’ll hear the voice you don’t want to hear. Rasta The Rooster is one spliff short of your worst and least creative expectations. It’s so racist, I found myself wondering if roosters can have dark brown feathers in real life. They can. I knew they can. But I lost track of that knowledge, because in this video the plumage feels less like a feather color and more like a Feather Tone.

Here is another question I ended up asking: does Jamaica have any relationship to yoga? Something to explain this characterization? In short, no. Also Max allegedly learned yoga from B.K.S. Iyengar himself. Exciting if true. But that has so little to do with Jamaica, I can’t even get Google’s A.I. bot to hallucinate a connection. So EiEi Yoga melds Indian hatha yoga with American rural stereotypes, while making sure Jamaica catches nonstop strays. It derails the whole video. Rasta The Rooster never explains his deal. Yogi Oki Doki chats him up without explaining it. They seem to be friends? Also it feels like the producers realized Rasta The Rooster has no reason to be in the video if he just preens racistly. So Rasta also encourages the kids to play yoga. Rasta even corrects a few yoga postures. I wish I made that up. This video lets a Jamaican caricature bird-furry adjust kids’ butts.

The other sidekick is a cow. “How Now The Moo Cow” turns out to be a boilerplate heifer character. She’s a head sticking out of a Dutch door, because they only bothered to provide one operator for that puppet.

How Now’s job is to say “moo”-based puns like “moognificent”, plus one “significant udders”. Her voice actor only slips into a little of Rasta’s Jamaican accent several times. Also her head stops moving or doing anything in between most of her lines. I wish it stopped between all of her lines. It’s so much creepier the few times she does background-act.

Our other other character is The Kids. They are unfortunately One Character. This educational video suffers from too many rehearsals before taping. The kids know how to do every yoga pose. This means Yogi Oki Doki never goes over any basics or tips for how to do this stuff. This video’s viewers must’ve had to hit “pause” and “play” on the physical front of their VCR so many times. Also you’d have to pause and play from the VCR box’s interface because the kids whose families can afford channel changers can also afford yoga classes. Meanwhile, on this hell farm taped for poors, our over-drilled Kids speak and behave in hive mind-esque unison. After I watched this video, I relaxed and dialed down the alienation by catching up on Plur1bus.

After the first few poses, Max sings a song about farming. Max’s voice sounds like George Strait, in a good way, because masculinity holds manifold mysteries. The Kids perform the classic yoga technique of abandoning The Breath so they can do a manic dance to the farm song. Then Max provides a framing device for the next several poses. He will describe “a day on the farm”, with each pose acting as a metaphor for a farming activity. Wipe transition to all the children imitating sleep. Therefore, is time for the children to wake up. Good thing this video features a character who is a rooster. Bad thing he will crow in the accent a white person chose for him.

As I understand it, farmers wake up like the rest of us. Maybe their alarm rings a bit earlier. Maybe the pants they put on one leg at a time are overalls. Still, they wake up and get on with the day. Yogi Oki Doki does things a little differently:

After that anodyne exchange with a False God, the kids get their flow on. Everyone does yoga. Yogi Oki Doki makes sure to describe the poses in a way that is not compatible with any other yoga class on Earth. Sometimes that’s only a little confusing, like when he calls the Lizard pose “Linguini The Lizard Pose”. Other times he makes the kids do an elaborate metaphor about bridges, and partner up to do a shape he says is a bridge, without clarifying that there’s a separate “Bridge pose” in every normal yoga class. He also calls Eagle pose “a twisting pea vine”, because he decided to do a vegetable theme for a while, and forgot eagles are compatible with the rest of the video’s American Animals theme. I disliked this choice. Then I despised it when Yogi Oki Doki kept the crop metaphors going, and compared a writhing mass of children’s bodies to a sensual cornfield.

As the tape winds down, the viewer thinks they’re safe. They think Yogi Ned-Flanders-Noise is bad at boundaries and taste, and otherwise harmless-ish. Then the foot stuff begins. The foot stuff’s theme is “flowers.”

Yoga classes usually end with a few minutes of what the experts call “lying down.” EiEi Yoga gives How Now The Moo Cow a prominent role in this chapter, because “Ask any cow / she’ll show you how / to lie down / on the ground.” This makes no sense because the children are on their backs. Meanwhile, Yogi Oki Doki touches The Kids’ necks and heads a lot. Meanwhile, How Now The Moo Cow tries to liven up the song by shifting into a guttural vocal style for no reason. The song ends with noises that are less like human vocal lyrics and more like a cow climaxing. “How Now” indeed! In hindsight, the cow character’s name is perfect, because the human voice actor for that stiff puppet always made me say the phrase “How? Now??”

Finally, the kids dance and hop around the “farm”. Yogi Oki Doki says “I hope you’ll come back and play yoga with us soon!” He probably says other things, but that’s all I could make out. At this late stage of the tape there’s sudden massive audio interference. Maybe the internal plastic ribbon decayed. Maybe the tape was fine and the digital transfer goofed? Or maybe, just maybe, that sonic torment was intended to drive me away. I now believe this tape’s end credits hold a secret none of us were supposed to know.

That’s not the secret part. As you can see, Yogi Oki Doki (Max Thomas) and How Now The Moo Cow (two talentless people) and every other person even tangentially involved in this production is thanked by name. But then, there’s this credit:

No! No!! I cannot accept this lie. Surely there was a human inside the Rasta suit.

There just had to be a human. Surely! Unless


Perhaps this one inexplicable credit makes the entire rest of the video explicable. Despite everything I’ve shown you, I get the sense Max Thomas is a decent guy. Maybe even a guy trying to make American life better. When Max Thomas made this 1996 videotape, he was one of thousands of U.S. yogis. Not a big deal. But when he first got certified as a yogi in the 1970s, he was going against the grain of American culture. (Its 1970s “grain” was wood grain on the sides of station wagons, and straight grain alcohol in lieu of mental healthcare.)

Max Thomas teaches a good habit. Max Thomas takes pride in running restorative yoga programs for schizophrenia-suffering young people. And unlike basically every other subject of our Hotdoggeries, Max Thomas doesn’t seem profit-motivated. Max Thomas is alive. He teaches yoga to this day. And according to his website, Max Thomas charges shockingly reasonable rates for an all-weekend yoga retreat plus lodging plus home cooked meals with easy access to Joshua Tree. That seems good. I could be wrong. He might skin you after. But Max Thomas seems like yoga’s equivalent of the actor Dylan Baker. A good guy with a big heart, who only seems like a pedophile when the camera’s running. This dopey yogi didn’t know he’d end up doing that last bit. He thought he was just teaching yoga to a nation needing its benefits. So he was powerless to not clarify his personal goodness on camera, due to the baleful powers of the malevolent spirit named Rasta The Rooster.

In a just world, Max Thomas might’ve still failed at making a yoga-for-kids videotape. But he might’ve made the tape without a vile hell-fowl possessing him, puppeting him, and tricking him into looking like a pervert for the tape’s entire runtime. There is no earthly reason to not credit the guy in the rooster suit. There are only unearthly reasons. Rasta The Rooster plays himself because there is no “guy” in that “suit”. Only that nightmare could explain this tape’s curse. From its handsiness to its anti-Jamaicanness, Max Thomas must’ve signed off on the final edit under duress. Only by stamping out EiEi Yoga tapes for the unsuspecting public could Max free his loved ones from Rasta’s racist rapier talons. So I hope Max proceeded to find peace. Or at least find an escape. Perhaps Max Thomas does not just run desert yoga retreats. Perhaps he retreated to the desert to elude his tormentor. And if you’re reading this, Max Thomas, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry about what you went through. I’m sorry yoga became huge in America thanks to basically everyone except you. And I’m sorry Rasta is also reading this, and learned your location, and is banshee-ing through Palm Springs to your doorstep. When you hear his demonic peck on your lintel, start stretching.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mercenary Sysadmin, the only one you can count on when there is a sentient rasta rooster on your tail and you have nowhere else to turn.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Casey Bats Again

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Pitts🌭

The Pitts is a family sitcom from 2003. It’s also a failed dark comedy, written by failing comedians, surrounded by grimmer real life horrors.

The Pitts ran for one season. One season, lasting seven episodes. Also only five episodes aired before cancellation. These are not the counting stats of a hit television show. But how could The Pitts have failed? Look at that poster. Smiles!? Even though it’s raining? Directly raining on them specifically?? Wow. Ha ha, wow, ha ha. I’m starting to think this family is NOT your TYPICAL television FAMILY!!!! Can you even imagine a family sitcom where the nuclear family is not the all-American ideal? And where outlandish things happen? What would that even look like–

Oops. My computer uploaded an image from 1987. Sixteen years later, The Pitts broke bold new ground, in the sense that its creators were finished working on The Simpsons. The Pitts came to us FROM THE TWISTED MINDS OF television writers Mike Scully (The Simpsons) and Julie Thacker-Scully (Mike Scully’s Wife, Mike Scully’s Plus-One, Mike Scully’s Pointless Hanger-On, I Wish I Didn’t Think That But Her IMDb Indicates I’m Not Being Nearly As Sexist As I Fear). These co-creators asked a thrilling question: what if a family sitcom was wackier than The Simpsons, less grounded than The Simpsons, and packed with the EDGIEST JOKES ever conceived by a comfortable white collar couple? For example, they did the “personal rain cloud” joke from the year 1940. What a wild choice in 2003. Look out, George W. Bush’s America. There’s a new comedic tone in town – and it’s from George H. W. Bush’s childhood.

I tolerated two episodes of The Pitts. Many thanks to HotDogger “Ozzie” for providing them to me for free. The show’s theme song opens with a happy family photo, followed by the four nuclear family members fleeing an oncoming locomotive.

I take back what I said about this being comedy from the 1940s. It might be from the 1890s? Setting timelines aside, you can tell The Pitts is what qualifies as “hardcore” to a well-off couple raising five daughters. These writers are fresh off a tea party attended by dolls. They’re not gonna write television characters who do bad things or hate each other or question where society is headed. Instead, The Pitts asks what would happen if the corny family sitcoms of the past incorporated the corny joke-book version of “danger”.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more insulted by a sitcom. It’s like watching your least interesting aunt and uncle make a teevee show. If you wandered into a side room of your family’s holiday gathering, and picked up a loose Mad Libs product, you could generate the concept “then the TEENAGER saw a WEREWOLF.” The Scully family wrote that concept on a studio lot, in exchange for enough money to fund five faildaughter tuitions.

Beyond daughter enrichment, this Scully show feels written for their daughters’ enjoyment. Or written for children in general? But too much so. Even a Nickelodeon executive would surprise themselves as they dictated studio notes of “less dinosaurs, less slime.”

Screenshots-wise, we are a mere twenty seconds into this show. Moving forward: The Pitts is about a suburban family whose members all know the family is cursed to experience constant disasters. They talk about that fact much more than we see it happen. “Tell don’t show”, as the pros say after a head injury. All the family members know they are cursed. The parents are upbeat about the curse. The kids are sad about the curse. Both perspectives are tedious. For example, the pilot begins (IN FOX WIDESCREEN) with the family performing an exorcism on their son.

The parents thank the priests for doing this kind of thing for them, again. The son snaps out of his demonic possession, in shock that he’s been possessed, again. Then the daughter and an altar boy have a meet cute while cleaning up the vomit from the demonic possession, which is something Daughter is doing again because those darn Pitts can’t seem to avoid a bland comedy writer’s first idea of bad luck.

The Pitts opposite-of-builds on this formula with a weaker beginning for their second episode. It opens with Mister Pitt eating a snack food that has “Peanut” in the name. He eats this snack because he forgot about his lethal peanut allergy. Then the family gives him a hokey version of the chestal adrenaline shot from Pulp Fiction. Wow: an emergency medical intervention
 in a sitcom! Can you even imagine seeing that on TV? In the year 2003?? A year when your soul was still a little deadened by fresh memories of using your TV screen to see 9/11???

The Scullys ask a lot of us. They ask us to be awed by a sitcom with one joke, the opposite of edge, and no other elements. The entire rest of the pilot is a few mild disagreements, a villain plot that almost works, and the 1980s stand-up comedy premise of “Mail Boxes Et Cetera is a business model without obvious profitability”.

Both parents operate a Mail Boxes Etc type store. The show thinks this is hilarious. Who would even use such a store? Doesn’t your house have a mailbox? Anyway, this setting leads to one joke about the store not having many customers. “No customers” leads to zero further jokes, because you can’t get humor out of putting your character in an empty room. It’s not funny for the same reasons it’s not funny to put your main character in solitary confinement, or a coffin. Still: you have to appreciate the incisive dig at Mail Boxes Etc. What a dumb, pointless business that actually made money if you look it up. Mail Boxes Etc. made so much money, UPS muscled it out of their turf in exchange for nine figures. The show’s creators don’t know this, and not just because they are incurious. The show’s creators would never go to such a silly business, because ever since Mike became showrunner of The Simpsons he had assistants and gofers handle the Scully household’s personal errands on top of their actual job. Those flunkies’ labor freed Mike to write brilliant jokes about Korean restaurants having discarded cats in their back alley trash cans. I’m not riffing. The Pitts makes this joke more than once, within the two episodes I watched. I assume Mike “thought of this joke” in the sense that his pre-Simpsons boss was Yakov Smirnoff, and one of Yakov’s mid-sized city’s comedy club’s weeknight opener comics said something along those lines in Mike’s earshot. This recycled racist joke made me angry in a way that took the edge off the rest of The Pitts. Later, Mike writes scenes where a teenage girl grabs her brother’s nose with kitchen tongs, because she is upset with him. Relatable? Extreme? Hilarious? At least it’s not the cat thing!

Episode One almost pulls off an edgy villain plotline. The dad reveals he is a terrible person, who stood up his prom date two decades ago. This prom date turns out to be obsessed with stealing Mister Pitt from his family, by worming her way in as their creepy nanny. That’s a plot! It is sort of a Simpsons plot but it’s enough of a different idea for me to be fine with it. Bring on “Sideshow Shelly”.

After becoming the Pitts’ nanny, Shelly locks the mother and kids and dog in one of those big steamer trunks from 1935. With them out of the way, Shelly tries to romance Mister Pitt. Then the family breaks out and the mother kicks Shelly into a bathtub along with an electrical appliance. This event could kill Shelly but doesn’t. It’s both darker than the average sitcom, and less gritty than anything Tom And Jerry ever did.

The second episode’s story is more random. It’s also a cop-out on the edge front. Daughter gets her first car. The car is haunted. The car speaks about being hot for Daughter. The car also speaks in a Black voice that sounds like it’s voiced by a White guy? It’s not clear which element is supposed to be scariest. Either way, on an edgy surreal sitcom, the car would go for it. The car would proceed to take her virginity or pimp her out or make her suck an item sold by Pep Boys. On this sitcom, the car does not go for it. On this sitcom written by the doting parents of five daughters, the evil car’s evil plot is to marry Daughter. Admittedly the car tries to marry her at the least reputable church type (Las Vegas wedding chapel). But matrimony is not evil. Matrimony is only worrisome in the context of racist Black Boyfriend panic. The Pitts does that in the tone of Disney Channel magic hijinks movies, right down to the car’s Herbie The Love Bug (1968) make and model.

Three short years after this episode aired, vast audiences of children wondered if Lightning McQueen feels romantic love for Sally Carrera. Modern America finds that question so tame, they demanded airplane spinoffs on top of the car sequels. Meanwhile, this theoretically hardcore Fox sitcom made a car fall in love with a beautiful teenager, and paid that off with a chase sequence tamer than the Beverly Hillbillies intro.

I’m skimming these plots because I don’t have new ways to say “they did the one joke again.” The one joke is wacky disasters befalling a family who dress like whitebread sitcom characters. As Mike Scully’s betters once wrote, “that’s the joke.” The joke is suffocating. The Pitts feels like a version of The Simpsons where all the family members lament living in the world of the television show The Simpsons, and say that so often they can’t get around to doing Simpsons stuff. That’s a bad show no matter what. It’s a nightmare to receive that show from the showrunner of The Simpsons. The Pitts was Mike Scully’s blank check of a next TV project after running Simpsons seasons nine through twelve. He turned that opportunity into such a bad show, it overshadows his Simpsons achievements. In a bizarre way, it makes me feel better about Scully’s time running that show. Fans debate whether showrunner Mike Scully sparked the entire decline of The Simpsons. When you watch The Pitts, it’s hard to imagine him understanding the basic concept of The Simpsons, let alone playing an active role in making it. He’s so useless at comedy, I think the other Simpsons writers firewalled Scully off from doing anything. If he actively ran The Simpsons it would’ve died in a sudden blaze of failure. Instead The Simpsons (arguably) slipped a little, while a heroic staff juggled writing the show and nerfing a middle manager.

Greater curses abound in the lives of The Pitts’ main actors. The luckiest performer is the family’s daughter, played by Lizzy Caplan. She did The Pitts before she was famous, and after she did the much better show Freaks And Geeks. Lizzy Caplan’s doing great. Lizzy Caplan also might be why this show never vanishes. If one thing protects The Pitts (2003) from disappearing beneath the SEO of The Pitt (2025), it’s a Vichy late night TV host bothering their guest Lizzy Caplan about it in the 2030s.

Her TV sibling didn’t get off much better. David Henrie plays her tweenage brother. Professionally, he never escaped making this face.

David Henrie might play the role of “tweenage brother” until he is 100 years old. With one baffling Reaganesque exception, his entire IMDb is irritating boys. On the plus side, Looking Like That meant The Pitts could not derail this lucrative destiny. After The Pitts, he got his real start on Wizards Of Waverly Place. If his follow-up role of the exact same role is any indication, Henrie’s start is a flat circle.

The teens are fine. The teens are not why this show is unwatchably cursed. Greater curses spring from the actors playing the parents. The less chilling curse is that the father is arguably the most famous actor in Hollywood Pedophile Dad Characters history.

The only clever thing about The Pitts is this casting choice. Dylan Baker is the perfect pick for its dad. His face is like a caricature of “wholesome.” He’s also a good guy in real life, according to this news story about him risking his life to try to save his neighbor from a fire. We should all be nice to Dylan Baker. And yet
 that face. It’s creepy. It’s so creepy, Google claims this is his headshot:

That face is best-known for playing a pedo in a Todd Solondz movie. Second-most famous role: an evil S&M freak who’s the least-goodest client of The Good Wife. Whoever cast The Pitts filled the dad role too well. People either saw Dylan Baker and thought “that pedophile!!!” or saw him and thought “I wonder if that guy = pedophile?”.

Worst of all: Kellie Waymire. She’s the gal playing the mom in this sitcom. Throughout her work on The Pitts, as her showrunner yukked it up about how funny it would be if bad things happened to a family, Kellie Waymire teetered on the precipice of garden variety untimely death.

Life is hard. Existence is a gift. Your chosen philosopher or faith says that better than I can. Their wisdom must carry you through the sad truth of 2003 Kellie Waymire’s imminent fame. In the same year or so when Waymire played Mrs. Pitt, she guest-starred on Friends and Star Trek Enterprise and NYPD Blue and Six Feet Under. She also broke into Hollywood the legit way (as a theater actor), by playing a role far darker than anything The Pitts would dare (a dog whose human adopter might want to have sex with her). I wish I didn’t learn what a bangable dog she played by reading her obituary.

When you watch The Pitts, you don’t watch a TV show. You watch a live feed of Kellie Waymire’s bum ticker bumming out. You also watch a show’s crappiness win a race against that coronary. Fox ended production long before bereavement could derail production. And when I think about that fact, I discover a profound missed opportunity. I progress from sadness about Waymire’s fate, to a renewed disgust with the Scullys. If The Pitts were a watchable show, it could’ve become Hollywood’s funniest sincere tribute to a performer’s untimely passing. Imagine it. Think about it. The premise is that the family is cursed. Their actor died in real life. That’s a unique opportunity. Spin that into an endless monument to her memory! Kellie Waymire’s death should’ve sparked a Simpsons length run for a sitcom where every character dies, and gets swapped out for a different actor, into eternity. Huge stars could sign up for a short run as the latest, greatest family member who’ll kick the bucket. We should be watching Season 22 of The Pitts, where Matt LeBlanc marries into this charnel house, because Ray Romano got devoured by hellspawn on his bizarre combo honeymoon with Erinn Hayes / tropical funeral for Kirsten Dunst. Meanwhile, the bluish Star Wars Force Ghost of Lizzy Caplan cackles in the corner. I want to live in that artistic universe. I want America to have a brilliant sitcom that’s brave about death, honest about the inevitability of change, and an intrinsic celebration of the life of its first lead actress. Instead, we got cosseted boomers reheating 1980s stand-up and wasting a CGI budget. Go to hell, Mike Scully – and write your Hell Fare off your taxes as a research trip for a Pitts revival on Peacock.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ozzie Olin. Like actually this time! Alex said so in the article. What a cool person. Thanks Ozzie! Also he knows spider-man but is cool about it and almost never name drops.

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Hot Dog Appreciation Day

Best Hot Dogs of 2025 – Alex Schmidt 🌭

Just like we do every year, 1-900-HOTDOG is taking the very best articles by the very best people and making them free. Just like every year, this is our holiday gift to you and the world. And just like every year, you and the world got us jack fucking shit. So make it up to us by spreading some of these free articles around, or sharing the entire free category of the site to your friends, family, and enemies you still kind of want to bang.

Alex Schmidt is easily our kindest hot dog, and so it has been our mission to break him since day one. We threw everything we had at Schmidty – soulless sports lotteries, new age slop, the novelization of a movie based on an emoji that doesn’t exist! We’ve hurled Brosnan after Brosnan after Brosnan at Schmidty, and he greets every single one with gentle eye contact and a firm handshake. The rotten motherfucker.

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The Seeders 🌭

Do you know your blood type? You should. Not for emergencies or anything, but because if you have the right kind of blood you might be descended from handsome aliens, overdue to have your world rocked by psychic orgasms. Yes, that mystical blood is your ticket to a powerful sexual wonderland. Let’s not talk about the wrong kinds of blood.

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Physics! Conspiracies! The devil! Soup! Truly, this article has it all. You will ask for less.

Rave MacBeth 🌭

The movie is actually called Rave MacBeth. It seems like something we’d say to make fun of Strange Days. No, this is a rave-based retelling of MacBeth. Starring Lex Luthor. Not that one. No, not that one either. But Pierce Brosnan shows up! In the article. As a reference. Schmidty makes a Pierce Brosnan reference. No, Pierce Brosnan wouldn’t be in something called Rave MacBeth. Don’t be stupid.

Emoji Movie Book of the Film 🌭

We, as a culture, are all responsible for The Emoji Movie. It’s exactly what it sounds like, a full-length, big budget Hollywood film about emojis. We cast Patrick Stewart as a pile of shit. Our sins were already unforgivable. And then we turned it into a book. If you’re going to hell anyway, you may as well make an entrance.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Emoji Movie Book Of The Film 🌭

I read The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film. The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film is an insult to films and books and emojis and the idea that we owe each other anything as human beings 
 with one exception.

My dearest Hotdogger: I have a promise. I promise my exploration of this book reveals a hero. There is one (1) hero. However, we have villains and scavengers and one (1) madman to sift through first. I did not expect that much material and depth to come out of reading The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film. I never expected to go up my own asshole with big questions about the value of art, and the way culture reflects our social contract, and I could keep blathering but I’m telling myself to tighten up. Keep it on the rails Alex. Hi, I’m Alex. It turns out The Emoji Movie’s main character is named “Alex”.

We have several layers of crappification to explore. Starting on the surface, I’ve never seen The Emoji Movie. I never will. This book is my new additional reason for shunning the film. The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film reads like someone putting The Emoji Movie on their second-best laptop screen, typing a description of what happens without pausing or caring, and then e-mailing that along with an invoice. The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film is bare descriptions of the events in the movie. The movie is apparently mostly lazy sight gags. For example, the characters escape a situation by hiding behind trees. Because this is The Emoji Movie, the trees are the emojis for trees. That’s the entire gag. The book is those sorts of non-gags, rendered in plain text as bare facts.

This single pointless gag style repeats throughout the book. Two emoji kiss, therefore they sprout heart eyes. An emoji receives a judicial sentence, therefore the sentence comes from a gavel emoji. One character says their mood is dour, therefore the Flamenco Dancer emoji appears out of nowhere to do flamenco. The logic of this joke is that Flamenco is the opposite of dour, and one emoji is a lady dancing in a red dress. What I’m writing out, right here, is exactly as lively as this book. It’s also a book starring an emoji who is the emoji for “meh.” The book is somehow more meh than its protagomeh.

We’ve reached a fork in the road. You may wonder whether the book is bad because of the movie’s script, or the author’s choices. You may answer this question by watching The Emoji Movie in its entirety. I chose another path. I decided to not care. I refused to watch the movie even though in this situation it’s arguably my job. The makers of The Emoji Movie should be crushed to learn Alex Schmidt won’t stream their film, for pay. The Emoji Movie should be geared toward me. I’m a curious person. I love animated movies. And I’m so interested in emoji, I proposed the creation of the bison emoji that is now on your device keyboard. I am the reason I can type a bison in this line of text right here: 🩬. And then another bison: 🩬. And another bison: 🩬. “Let there be bison!” is my fingertips’ godlike cry: 🩬🩬🩬🩬🩬. Also, should I have punctuated any of those bison emoji with a period? Or should I let the bison stand tall as the end of each sentence? I don’t know. We’re all making up emoji culture as we go. That freshness is yet another reason The Emoji Movie did not have to suck. It could’ve approached the level of The LEGO Movie. It did not, for many reasons. One reason is The Emoji Movie’s total disinterest in emoji, texting, or reality. It’s like they unfroze a guy from the 1980s to script this. He lacks any concept of which emoji people use. For example, his main character is an emoji that does not exist:

It gets worse. They pair “Meh” with a best friend named Hi-5. Hi-5 is a high five emoji, apparently, even though high fives are a muddled concept in the actual emoji keyboard. Hi-5 is also alienating, because this movie makes it a hand with a face in the middle of the palm. Then they add a distracting bandage on one finger. But the big problem is the palm-face. Zero emoji are a hand with an internal palm-face. If that existed, no one would use it, except for weirdos, which is everyone, so now I’m thinking that needs to be an emoji. Anyway as of the Emoji Movie era it didn’t exist in life or in anyone’s mind. Beyond Meh and Hi-5, our remaining main character is a girlfriend slash quest prize for Meh. She is a Princess emoji, disguised as a brown-skinned skater/hacker. Her name is Jailbreak. She lives in a phone app named Piracy. This makes her something no one could ever type, inside an app no one’s ever created. Also in the world of this book/movie/blur, the Princess emoji is a supreme ideal that other emoji respect to the point of worship. The various Princess emoji are some kind of deified pharaonic god-queens, within Textopolis. Stop me if any word I just typed reflects emoji in reality. Thanks for not stopping me.

Here is the plot of the stenographer’s summary of The Emoji Movie: Alex is a teenage boy who likes a girl named Addie. Alex is too bashful to share his feelings for Addie. Luckily, Addie initiates a text conversation with Alex while he sits around. Addie leads with a text message of a lone smile emoji. That’s her entire text. One smile emoji, out of the blue. Horrifying. This girl has the emoji habits of a stalker/murderer. She texts like she’s masturbating [negative connotation] behind your hydrangeas.

When Alex replies to just-a-Smile with the question “Hey, going to Spring Fling?”, Addie replies “You?”, because that’s barely cogent. It either implies she is going or not going, which is super clear


 [Activating Wayne’s World Impression] … not. Then Alex’s friend Travis intervenes. Travis claims emojis can only achieve one vibe, because that’s what Unfrozen Boomer Screenwriter presumes about the world.

Alex follows this advice, and tries to type a single pointless “Meh” emoji. No audience would ever care about this or understand it because, again, the “Meh” emoji does not exist. That means the storytellers need the audience to Mandela Effect themselves into this scenario being realistic. The storytellers also count on this to pay off oceans of previous setup. For entire book chapters before this, we’re led through the whole deal of our protagemoji. His name is “Gene”. Gene is the son of a male Meh named Mel and a female Meh named Mary. This is the first of three instances where the canon of this book spells out emoji sexual reproduction. The other examples are more carnal. Later on, this book describes a sight gag where emoji flee through a private room inside Alex’s cell phone, and disturb a “Couple In Love” emoji who were about to smash.

Then at the end of the story, Hi-5 gets handed a Wacky Girlfriend For Best Friend Character out of nowhere. That plot device is regular rom-com stuff. In the hands of Richard Curtis or Nora Ephron, it works fine. In the hands of The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film, it’s an anatomical boondoggle. Hi-5’s instant mating opportunity is a female (?) Peace Sign emoji. Peace Sign implies she wants all five of them Hi-5 fingies up in her gaps. She also almost rules out fisting.

Gene is the son of two Mehs. According to what I can only describe as Eu-moji-genics, Gene must match his parents’ exact “Meh” output whenever he is texted by Alex’s phone. Turns out this emoji world is a police state with a planned economy and a caste system. Mehs must Meh. If Gene fails, a domineering emoji named Smiler will delete him. Also Smiler self-describes as the first emoji ever created. However, she is a yellow smile emoji with lots of lipstick and a giant blonde coif. The movie claims a blonde bombshell gal’s face is the first emoji ever generated. Get the hell out of here with that random canon. If we all lived in an alternate universe with an oppressive Stepford matriarchy, its typical emoji would still be a plain round smiley face. Also probably white. Totaling up these failures, I award this book one bonus point for making the blonde woman emoji Nazi-coded, and zero regular points for everything else.

After wearing us all out with an enormous amount of uncanny world-building, The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film pays it all off with one text message. Alex wants to reply affirmatively to Addie, without seeming too excited. So he chooses Meh. The phone summons Gene as that Meh even though Gene is known to be [shudder] “multi-expressional.” Therefore, Alex’s text reply to Addie is not Meh. Instead, he texts a Gene face that cycles through endless different expressions. The result of this error is a lot of chase-around faff inside of Alex’s phone. Gene flees genocidal execution bots. Meanwhile, in the Teen World, none of it matters whatsoever. After about 100 book pages of Tron-moji stuff happening inside of Alex’s phone, the story reveals a next exchange between Alex and Addie, initiated by Addie, where she still likes him and everything is fine and she’s the one pushing for a relationship. Despite Alex’s faux pas, despite Alex being inert, Addie craves cone.

Alex is at the mall to visit its phone store (thrilling!) to reset his phone. He does this because the phone is being weird, in the sense that a bunch of inside-the-phone events made the phone play a disco song out loud in Alex’s science class. Cringe!!!! Also, one of those inside-the-phone set pieces features the statement “Holy deleto!” Re-reading “Holy deleto!” interfered with my dreams last night. I bolted upright in a cold sweat, while thinking the phrase “Holy deleto”, because my middle school principal said that to me in my dreams. If you read that phrase one more time you too are doomed to my fate. You’re also doomed to see the joke written right before “Holy deleto.” It’s a joke where someone says “No dice”, and then a Dice emoji bursts in to say “No me.”

Finally, Addie hunts down Alex while they’re both at the same shopping mall, to thank him for sending the same multi-expressional Gene emoji he’d sent before. It’s the same text message from before, again. The book explains why this is a powerful expression of Themes Such As Love.

Alex asks out Addie. Gene convinces Jailbreak to not depart for The Cloud after sneaking through The Firewall because if she stays in Textopolis they can make sweet (interracial?) emoji love. Smiler receives no punishments and announces Gene is the world’s first omni-emoji representing all things. That’s great news. We all want one emoji that means everything in a way that means nothing. That way? Individuality.

Is this book crap because the movie is crap? Yes. Is this book also crap because the author didn’t try? Yes. Most novelizations make at least a little of an effort to flesh out the movie, or at least describe the events of the movie in the way that fits the page. This novelization refuses to novelize anything. It doesn’t even call itself a novelization. It calls itself The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film, in a savage act of exploiting the broad way dictionaries define the word “book”. This is such a non-book, the publisher doesn’t know how to print the spine. The dominant spine text is “BOOK OF THE FILM”. Who makes that mistake? You might convince a kid to buy a book called “The Emoji Movie.” You’ll never convince them to buy a book whose spine looks like a Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide re-titled by Borat.

How did that spine mistake happen? This is not a book from a book publisher who handles words. My new frenemy “Ruckus Causer” suggested this book to us on the Discord. Ruckus Causer gets a “fren” on the front of my classification because they provided more than a basic tip. They revealed that the publisher of The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film is a company specializing in sticker books. Sticker books have value. For example, when I get my future hardcopy of Brockway’s wonderful next book, I’ll have to DIY the promotional tie-in imaginary friend stickers on my own damn Cricut. Dammit! A sticker book would save me that labor. However, sticker books are not what I would call “books”. The “sticker” part invalidates the rest. If sticker books are books, clown cars are roomy. Books are made of words. Sticker books are made when a machine shits and collates clip art.

For these reasons, the publisher of The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film shows their ass throughout the product. There’s a middle section of glossy pages that are definitely single sticker designs sized up like splash panels. There’s screwy margins on the back cover text. Also the insides of the front cover and back cover feature stolen art. There’s two whole pages of the on-screen arrows from Dance Dance Revolution. Stunning stuff. Even your most out-of-touch uncle understands “Dance Game Robloxlution” is different from emoji.

Does the book plug in extra character images, to make up for its lack of everything else? Yes it does. They also stuck a little drawing of Gene or Jailbreak on every upper page corner. However, it’s the same drawing throughout the entire book. So nothing happens when you flip-book the corners. These damn sticker jockeys have no respect for the legacy of Animorphs.

Let’s meet further villains. This is a failed novelization of a failed movie because the idea is a bone-deep cash grab. The Emoji Movie was a hot idea in 2010s Hollyweird. Sony Pictures paid more than a million dollars for this movie pitch, to win a three way bidding war. Perhaps that lavish price would make sense if the emoji concept belonged to anybody. However, emoji do not belong to anybody. A nonprofit called Unicode organizes the emoji keyboard, for free, for everybody. The only element anybody owns is the specific art commissioned by device platforms and tech companies. The art is IP in the same way fonts are IP. But emoji belong to everybody, in the same way letters and numbers and punctuation belong to everybody. So the idea for an Emoji Movie is FREE. Sony did not need to buy the rights. They didn’t get bilked out of the Smiley Face I.P. by a rent-seeking jerk like John Q. Emoji, or Emoji Comics, or the failson inheritor of the artistic estate of Stan Leemoji. Sony simply turned a guy who pitched “an emoji movie” into an overnight literal millionaire. They did that even though “an emoji movie” was all the guy fleshed out. I swear I’m not kidding. The genesis of The Emoji Movie concept was a C-tier animation writer receiving a text message while thinking about how much money Toy Story made.

This is why every emoji in The Emoji Movie is unrecognizable. The studio wanted to merchandise the Emoji Movie characters. But the characters are something they did not own (emoji). They couldn’t turn public emoji into different ownable characters without making them unrecognizable. So they centered the movie around new unique “emoji”, which don’t exist, which ruins the entire “relatable” hook of an Emoji Movie. Then Sony hurried every step of making the movie, because they worried emoji might flame out as a fad before they finished animating. Extra problem: shortly after the film’s release, it turned out their lead voice actor is a violent sex criminal or a victim of botched brain surgery or both. Oops! That dents the ol’ DVD sales a bit. It also fits T.J. Miller’s decision to do The Emoji Movie in the first place. Miller bolted a stable AND beloved AND easy television acting job so he could voice a character in The Emoji Movie, as if there is not time in his year to do both things. He did that with no further work lined up. He lost his one other job when His Crimes came to light. So, uh, wow! Hard to imagine how T.J. Miller found his voice for this emoji character. How did T.J. Miller find a way to perform the Emoji Movie character of “can’t stop toggling between all sorts of different emotions”? Insert grimmest emoji here.

So there you have it: the most commercially driven movie concept of this century, and the bleakest comedian who’s not quite famous, teamed up to make a crap movie. Then a sticker company cranked out its not-a-novelization. Everyone involved is a monster or a glorified photo printer. Yuck. Awful. But wait: Alex (the writer, not the flat CGI homuncu-boy from Emoji Movie) promised you a hero in this story. Alex (the writer, not the hideous work of outsider art satirizing America’s low standards for its white men) is not a liar. So there must be a hero here. Who could that hero be?

I know what you’re thinking: how could the writer of The Emoji Movie: Book Of The Film be a positive figure? Answer: she did this gig exactly how a moral and ethical person should. Tracey West couldn’t prevent The Emoji Movie from existing. She’s also the author of more than 200 children’s books. She professionalized long before a sticker company needed two warm hands to type something. Surely the sticker people pitched Tracey, not the other way around. Therefore she could demand the highest reasonable rate. She’s a professional. She even snagged a credit of “adapted by”, instead of “written by”, because that protects her real books from this paycheck. So I’m a Tracey West supporter. I say all that without knowing Tracey West personally. All I know is her main passion is writing books, containing original stories. Her biggest hit series is books about dragons for young readers. She’s writing the exact kind of fun books for home reading that paper over the holes in our local education budgets. Tracey also maintains a rigorous multi-state schedule of live bookstore appearances, where grateful children bring her their dragon book fan art. They show Tracey their art. Tracey makes them glad they drew it. Tracey also runs a roving book wagon for her rural Catskills region. Wow! She’s New York State’s Dolly Parton? And maybe most honorable of all, her website link to her X dot com account is busted.

We’re all sinners. I feel Tracey West balances her sins out with these good works. And she did a good work for me without even knowing it. The Emoji Movie sent me into a tailspin of wondering whether the final gasps of American culture will be a bucket o’ crabs. I wondered if the last works we fart out will come from vandals and scavengers on the fringes of entertainment’s machines. And as I wobbled on despair’s edge, Tracey West steadied me. She reminded me good people exist. She cashed this paycheck, after a maximum of half a day of labor. Then she converted those dollars into the lovelier currencies of “original concepts” and “tangible joy.” So thank you, Tracey. You’ve given me the strength to pick myself up, gear myself up, and hunt down the Homunculus CGI Character Alex who may step into our reality out of a technological hell gate. Alternatively, I’ll go have a snack. Either way: 🙏.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John Dean, the kinda guy that’d đŸ†đŸ˜łđŸ‘‰đŸ‘ŒđŸ˜”â€đŸ’«đŸ’ŠđŸ«ŁđŸ§»but đŸ’đŸ˜đŸ„šđŸ’§đŸŒđŸ«ŁđŸŻđŸ˜ŹđŸžđŸ«—đŸŒđŸ˜¶â€đŸŒ«ïžđŸ§‚đŸ˜”đŸ«Ą if you know what I mean.

 

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: CERN Satan’s Playground 🌭

CERN: Satan’s Playground is boilerplate conspiracy crap by a man whose brain is soup.

It’s also less fun than the title suggests. I wanted descriptions of Satan having a lovely time running physics experiments. Satan chatting around the Perrier cooler with his Franco-Swiss work friends. Instead, this book is crank crap. Crank crap
from my library???

My dearest Hotdoggers: I am processing a betrayal. CERN: Satan’s Playground is my local library’s top search result for the search term “cern”. It appears they e-shelved CERN: Satan’s Playground without checking the subtitle, cover art, or any other aspect. That stinks! If I know how library e-book licensing works, they’re spending my tax dollars on significant recurring fees. And I discovered this while researching an episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. I researched the topic of “http www”. What is its deal? Why is it the strange set of characters on the front of the normal words “1900hotdog”? Partial answer: CERN. So I wanted to know more about that. My SIFpod prep depends on library resources. I searched “cern” in my library’s catalog. Their top suggestion is misinformation. How dare my beloved library betray me like this? When I want to read something horrendous, I turn to the Hot Dog Discord tip line. Dennard puts together fun summaries of what’s in there. Curses abound, in a good way. That’s not what I seek at my library. CERN: Satan’s Playground belongs in its author’s thick file folder at the asylum, not the giant combined library system serving five counties in a blue state. The Mid-Hudson Library System pools the resources of 66 libraries. Those 66 libraries fell one digit short of the funniest possible reason to e-stock this crap.

Speaking of e-stuff: e-books are a wild medium for fearmongering about the Internet. I read all of CERN: Satan’s Playground. It never achieves self-awareness. There’s not one word along the lines of “using the devil’s own hypertext to debug him.” Writing an anti-Internet e-book is like writing an environmentalist manifesto by drilling Alaskan nature preserve oil to make pen ink. Or sourcing a fresh writing quill by plucking a condor. I guess I can’t criticize too much, because I post things on TikTok that I hope make TikTok contain a few more vitamins and minerals. This is of course a fool’s errand. I am a fool, and so is author Nick Huntley. Gaze in grim fascination at his bio page.

What a long-winded way of saying “No actual qualifications to claim CERN = Cenobites.”

This author bio is at the end of the book. You’re coming at it without a key piece of context. That context: every sentence in the book lacks any awareness of what came before it. Nick Huntley exquisite corps’d himself. He writes like something degenerative is bouillabaissing his brain.

If you know that, you see tragedy in this bio’s repeated invocation of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Without context, you might guess this guy loves Fort Wayne. Or you might think he learned the grade school maneuvers for padding out an essay, and never learned he’s allowed to stop doing that. Or you might think he’s touting himself as from THE REAL AMERICA, in the sense people use when their location lacks value and they can’t sit with knowing it. All these guesses make sense. They also fit one of Nick Huntley’s sins. That sin: the same sin as most American adults. Nick Huntley is so confident he’s the main character of life, he thinks every aspect of his life is an important, magical, hero’s journey step. Did you know Nick Huntley grew up in the early 1970s? To most humans, that would be a plain fact. To Nick Huntley, that is a building block of Nick Huntley’s centrality in the universe. He was forged in the crucible of a better time, before THE ALMIGHTY CELL PHONE took over. Being a child in the 1970s is amazing about him, and boring about other people, and the same goes for bagging groceries at a Kroger. That’s Nick Huntley’s entire deal: combining a major fault with a major rail spike through the noggin. Almost every chapter rehashes introductory information about CERN being a research facility with a particle accelerator, and pitches that information as if it’s a glorious revelation from an author who’s the greatest man of history. He’s too big of an asshole for me to feel sorry for him. Also it’s annoying as a reading experience. Several pages made me feel like my e-reader glitched and jumped back ten chapters. Every line reads as if it was written after its bearded bleary author demanded to know what year this is.

I also describe Nick Huntley’s brain as a soup, because he brings up literal soup a lot more often than you’d expect. Have you ever heard the phrase “primordial soup”? A lot of science communicators throw that out there one time, before using actual science words to describe the beginning of the universe. Nick Huntley is built different. “Soup” is the alpha and omega of Nick Huntley’s understanding of existence. In this way, CERN: Satan’s Playground gives new meaning to the name “alphabet soup”.

There you have it: the universe is soup, and that universal soup is a kind of soup-iverse. Also “Hot Quark Soup” is phenomenal. “Hot Quark Soup” is the Feeld query you’ve all tried. And come on, Nick. You can’t let “soup” be your entire description of how the universe began. No scientist would do that. By the way, Nick, how would you describe the scientific research process?

So if CERN is a soup kitchen, is Satan Ratatouille-ing them inside their berets? Nick claims this is so. He also claims CERN has one of the only two particle accelerators on the face of the Earth, before providing a list of many more accelerators a few chapters later.

I’m almost interested in tracking down Nick Huntley’s closest kin, to ask them to get him help. He’s a danger to yourself and others. We’ve gotta rescind the driver license of any fella who’s this much of a bisque-for-brains. However, I fell short of that humanitarian act, because I despise Nick Huntley. As I did the moral calculus of whether to aid him, I realized I have a rule: everybody’s allowed to freestyle one crappy book. If you do that, reread it, and never write again, you get a mulligan. This Goodreads page is more of a triple bogey.

Even worse, Nick Huntley dedicated this book to an evil dream. When you begin reading the dedication page, you think he’s celebrating his daughter. By the end, you learn Nick wants to make his daughter our planetary God-Emperor.

Listen pal: you’re not allowed to be mad at CERN for trying to end the world if you think your CERN book will help your seed conquer that world. Also if you believe what you’re writing, you are literally failing the entire world. As the book’s title and cover indicates, Nick Huntley thinks he is on a mission to prevent CERN from opening a demonic portal. In an astonishing act of selfishness, Nick sees this “hellmouth devouring the Alps” situation, and thinks it’s his kid’s time to shine.

Tragically, Nick Huntley’s CERN concerns (“CERNcerns”?) are tedious. He spent three years writing a book breaking zero new ground. Nick begins where you think he will. In the previous decade, CERN discovered stuff about particle physics that led the media to put the term “God particle” in headlines. When you dig into what a “God particle” is, it’s new theories that raise more questions. When Nick Huntley digs into that, he assumes scientists are doing the evil he already assumed they do. Then he steals space pictures and stock illustrations from the Internet.

Sure, Nick. Many believe many things. That’s beliefs for ya. And did you know some beliefs come from [gasp] pagans? Nick fixates on this too much. His next piece of the puzzle is one statue of the god Shiva, gifted to CERN after decades of collaboration with scholars in India. To Nick, its mere presence on a European campus he’s never visited SAYS IT ALL.

Swing through a Hindu community sometime and ask them about their Infinity Dwarf. They love that. Like how Christian churches love questions about their Trinity’s “Spooky God Fog.”

Anyway this book is not all fun and games. It’s not all soups and Shivas. Nick proceeds to reveal he cannot stop masturbating.

Why is Nick masturbating? Why is this crank cranking his crank so crankily? The culprit: the Internet. And who is the culprit behind the Internet? Tim Berners-Lee. Who was funded by CERN, which was funded by the Rockefellers, who definitely own the university the Rockefellers put their name on. That’s how endowing a university works, as sure as getting horny online is the fault of a CERN employee who organized CERN’s physics research databases in the early 1990s and then gave away a lot of his information-formatting systems for other people to enjoy.

“And the rest is history.” Did you know you don’t have to finish explaining ideas? You can pivot to the very smart yada-yada of “and the rest is history” and be all done writing. After all, history. You know history, by existing. You also know a lot about how people who read books describe the act of reading.

Good news: the Rockefellers are Protestants. Bad news: every time Nick mentions the Rockefellers, it still feels antisemitic. Worst news: Nick gets around to worrying about (((CERN’s founders))) in due time.

In between losing track of how often he’s established the basics of concepts, Nick rehashes every right wing idea that’s ever been brain-wormed. Did you know climate change isn’t a thing? It’s actually a side effect of CERN particle-collisions that are causing earthquakes, and making clouds sprout faces.

Nick also struggles to give the worm-noggin crowd what they came for. He’s inefficient. He drags out the buildup. After some appetizing paranoia about bosons and Shiva, he devotes a dozen chapters to the driest possible copy-pastes from encyclopedia type resources about physics. That’s way too slow. None of RFK Junior’s familiars are gonna stick around for the dessert courses. They’ll never reach the Promised Land of Chapter 16, and its sudden claims that Stargates are real and that “the Groundhog Day effect” is a scientific concept. Sorry Nick: you’re describing the premise of the Bill Murray movie, with a couple of Science Words grafted onto its caboose.

From that point on, the conspiracy stuff squirts thick and heavy. Nick pairs these claims with astonishing confidence in his own wisdom. He classifies four tiers of multiverses. He tosses off the basics of an ultimate weapon under the Swiss side of CERN’s accelerator. My favorite one of these Genius Insights is Nick’s section on time travel, because he paints himself into a corner. Nick can’t quite declare time travel exists, because he’d have to explain time travel. He also can’t stop himself from presenting himself as an expert on everything. “Everything” includes time travel. Therefore, Nick implies every scientist in history is dumber than Nick, because they failed where he succeeded. Does Nick recognize this, delete, and start over? Or does he dunk on the reputations of every Nobel Prize winner he’s ever heard of?

The more books I give the Hotdoggery treatment, the more I learn conspiracy theories are a one-way road to megalomania. And “road” is too journey-oriented of a word. These guys are already at their megalomania destination when they type “Chapter 1”. Nick Huntley read a headline about CERN studying a “God particle”, and decided he holds such unique knowledge of the cosmology of why that’s bad. That’s how you find yourself text-hollering about the giants who terrorized the Earth before the Biblical flood. Did you know the Nephilim did not drown while Noah threw a yacht party with exactly two giraffes? Turns out the Nephilim are alive, and well, and on a coffee break under CERN – and poindexters like Carl Sagan (which is almost “Satan”????) are keeping that secret.

Nick keeps digging. Amazingly, this turns up a few interesting things. There are a few valid “weird” CERN stories. They’d be interesting in the hands of a writer whose cerebellum wasn’t a consommĂ©. Unfortunately they’re grist for Nick Huntley’s conspiracy mill. One guy involved with the precursor of CERN really was in the Nazi armed forces. One tunnel adjacent to CERN really did have an artsy spooky dedication ceremony. A large new telescope really was called the acronym “LUCIFER” until people thought better of that. And a few CERN employees really did a (fake! prank!) human sacrifice at the facility. They did that for the (mean!) reason that it’s fun to trick people like Nick Huntley, who already insist Baphomet’s crew does that at CERN on the regular. They knew the Nick Huntleys of the world would never admit the prank is a prank. To Nick, the prank is a smokescreen. And did you know the CERN pranksters were CERN employees? If you insist the prank wasn’t a prank, that’s pretty important!

The book only gets more embarrassing. Most of its 43 chapters are brief. Nick could only sit at his keyboard so long before too much chowder leaked out of his ears. However, one chapter is longer than the rest. You will never guess the topic of the longest chapter. Would you like to write down a guess before you keep reading? Up to you. Here’s your opportunity to do that.

[Poxco musical interlude]

In this book’s longest chapter, Nick Huntley writes a detailed scene-by-scene summary of the movie Angels & Demons.

That’s all it is. Nick Huntley summarizes the movie, of the book, of Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. Also shout-out to my man Nick for not just worrying about the Jews. Nick’s out here monitoring all the faiths. Nick’s sure me and my fellow (lapsed) Catholics are UP TO SOMETHING – and Nick’s got even more of somebody else’s art to prove it.

Take Nick’s advice. Fly over Saint Peter’s Basilica. You’ll absolutely see an upside-down cross if your flight path goes one specific direction.

One grand tragedy of conspiracists is their lack of new ideas. They think they know the most. They think they’re discovering the most. Yet their knowledge is limited to passing around existing weird art, and squinting at words until they look like different words.

As I approached the end of this library book (!), I turned up one gem. Nick Huntley achieves iconic outsider art in one way. In one image, he distills everything you need to know about the conspiracy theorist mindset. He does this by not bothering to fill in the text boxes on somebody else’s template. Behold:

So congratulations, CERN. You’ve been advancing science for several decades now. As a result, your prominent successes are a mouse trap for the most tedious Americans. They’re sure you’re evil. They’re confident they’ve proven you’re evil. And they’ll stand strong against your devious mission to hypnotize humanity into obeying your demonic orders to YOUR TEXT YOUR MANIFESTO GOES HERE.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Supernaught, who can punch a black hole into existence with his FOOT, and the rest is history.