Author: Alex Schmidt

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Recipe for a Perfect Cartoon

“The Recipe For A Perfect Cartoon” is a “how to toon!” guide, posted on a conservative political cartoonist’s janky personal website. It’s even worse than that sounds.

Michael P. Ramirez is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I don’t know why. Best guess: the general badness of political cartooning. That genre is a howling void of anti-comedy. Bad political cartoons have none of the upsides, and all the downsides, of humor and art and politics and information and editorials and a sixth thing I’m probably forgetting. With rare exceptions (Jen Sorensen and Gerald Scarfe and (RIP) TheNib.com), political cartoons are the work of an old crank with nothing interesting to say and C-minus art skills. Also, no one wants them! No one ever asks for them! Political cartoons are just kind of *there* in the newspaper. The last time somebody bought a paper to read the political cartoon was at least a hundred years ago. And folks, I have terrible news: some of those readers demanded political cartoons because cartoons are a good medium for pretending other races are space aliens. Seriously: cartoons used to be Racial Hatred Confirmation Doodles. The invention of photography was a somewhat-effective antidote to the overwhelming racism of most illustrations. Photos indicate the truth that every human is human. A lot of cartoonists depicted the opposite, on purpose, and got paid for it.

Anyway, that’s political cartooning for you. It’s bad today. But I’m glad we’re past that racist era of–

Hoo boy. I wasn’t aware Black Americans’ ears sprout from their lymph nodes. Unless…this drawing is racist? You would think Michael P. Ramirez – an artist of color – would be less weird about drawing a President of color. If you make Obama’s ears Masai-ish, you’re basically doing a Birtherism. Michael P. Ramirez is doing a Birtherism, and I’m confident it’s on purpose. Tragically, he is excellent at art. He represents anything accurately. Even in his exaggerated caricatures, his Trump and Biden and various Dummycrats look like people. Look for yourself! Michael P. Ramirez draws things humorously or picture-perfectly. But when it came time for Michael P. Ramirez to draw two-term U.S. President Barack Obama, he pretty much drew Klan fan art.

That carelessness isn’t discussed or illuminated in “The Recipe For A Perfect Cartoon”. Which is bonkers! It’s my first question. Also, I shouldn’t even know this cartoon exists. It should be deep in the Mariana Trench of Michael P. Ramirez’s archives, like some kind of bottom-feeding hate-fish. Michael could’ve featured anything else here. He’s drawn hundreds if not thousands of cartoons. But when it came time to pick one cartoon, to represent his entire process, Mikey highlighted this one. That’s even more racist than drawing it. Also, I’m far from the only person who’s seen this thing. Michael P. Ramirez is the full time political cartoonist for Las Vegas’s main newspaper, and previously Los Angeles’s main newspaper, and previously Memphis’s main newspaper, and simultaneously a star ‘toonist for USA Today. Mikey’s been the main political cartoonist for…what, a quarter of the United States? More if you count chain hotels? So he’s not just proud of this cartoon. He’s earning a mint from it. Again, this:

Anyway, on to the message here. This political cartoon delivers so much clever criticism of…some kind of accounting fraud or numbers fraud? Accounting fraud involving terrorism intelligence? Terror attack risks are numerical, I guess, because every element of life can be made numbers. Therefore: Mikey got ‘em. It’s perfect. You could only describe this political cartoon as “perfect.” It has me thinking and laughing at the same time. It’s hard to both think and laugh this much, all at once! Ow, my face and brain, ow! I looked at this cartoon, and now I’m bent in a twisted rictus of mouth-chaos, struggling to “wow” and “ha” simultaneously. Wow/ha: my jaw fell off. Worth it. Wow! Ha!

Okay I’m back from Urgent Care. Setting aside my ha-ha hole, let me express something with my wow-hole: wow, there is a lot here. Theoretically this cartoon accomplishes wise political thought, acerbic comedy jokes, and quality visual art. All three tasks must be hard to juggle. That creative process would be interesting to explore. Which element is the initial germ leading to the final cartoon? How do you balance those three goals as you draft a complete cartoon? Do you ever bail on a cartoon that’s funny artistically but weak politically, or vice versa? I would like to know that stuff. Michael P. Ramirez says he is here to walk us through the answers. “The Recipe For A Perfect Cartoon” is a painstaking, seven step breakdown of how Mister Ramirez got from “blank page” to “cartoon blurring accountant metaphors and chef metaphors.” We get off to a breathtaking start, because it turns out Michael’s blank page was a napkin.

Michael P. Ramirez is telling us he stinks four different ways, on a post on his own website. Also, I am skipping “this stinks because the hanging skillets look like testicles.” They do, but he fixes that in the final version. Setting aside this draft’s heaving nut-woks, this thing is four varieties of mess. The messes are:

🌭Michael P. Ramirez is a full-time newspaper cartoonist with two Pulitzer Prizes, and he sketches out his cartoons on napkins. Why? Art supplies exist. Paper exists. A hasty iPhone note documenting the Only-Words Version of this idea would be less embarrassing.

🌭The napkin is specifically a cocktail napkin. You know: the Official Napkin Of Getting Drunk. He says it’s his main drafting medium, for his constant full-time cartooning. Is he compulsively broadcasting his alcoholism? Is he The Onion’s “Kelly” but real? Or, alternative theory: is he a sober guy pretending to be a Glamorously Drunk Artist? Is he faking Ernest Hemingway-style Booze-Brilliance for Cool Points?

🌭“I sketch out ideas on napkins mostly so I won’t forget them.” Yikes! Here is the thing about tales of jotting inspirations down on cocktail napkins: everybody celebrates the genius entrepreneur who hatches something brilliant in the midst of a drunken night. “Our Founding Cocktail Napkin” is the Hemingway Booze-Think Archetype for businessmen/inventors. However, we only celebrate the initial note. Nobody celebrates the next step, where you must pocket-tuck or purse-tuck a scribbled-on bar napkin. It’s awkward. It’s why you only use cocktail napkins for one brief note about one idea, and then use anything else on Earth for the real work. What kind of barfly and/or Hemingstan uses cocktail napkins for daily ongoing creativity? Does Michael P. Ramirez have a soggy heap of gin joint napkins in a file cabinet? And good lord: what about keeping ideas for later? How do you archive them? Would you stick the napkins in one of those binders/wallets for Pokemon cards? Or use Kraft Singles wrappers like they’re comic book sleeves? And imagine the scale of this! This guy isn’t saying he knocks out one idea on a napkin. He says he logs TEN TO FIFTEEN ENTIRE CARTOONS, PER DOODLE SESH, on cocktail napkins. How big are his pockets? Or is he now my hero, because he’s fanny-packing? You can’t pocket that many booze-scribbles. You cannot keep ten to fifteen pen-ravaged napkins into your pants pocket. In that night’s performance of The Brilliance Stowed In Your Slacks Pockets, your house keys will be playing the role of Wolverine.

🌭Number four could’ve been number one through one million. What is Michael P. Ramirez’s writing process? Or art process? He’s telling us Step 1 is an entire finished cartoon, on a napkin. I remember reading that and thinking “are the other steps just transferring this napkin art to paper?” My dearest Hotdogger: those are the other steps. But they’re so much dumber than that.

There are a total of seven steps here. Step 2 is my dumb question, answered. Step 3? “INKING.” Basically Step 2 with another pen. Step 4: a pretty long write-up of the specific DPI he uses for document-scanning paper. That’s hilarious if you know what DPI is. Don’t feel dumb if you don’t know. The gist is an easy to explain image resolution thing. It’s not “creative process” stuff. The gist is one machine setting at Kinko’s. That’s followed by Step 5 (“COLOR BASE”) and Step 6 (“COLOR BASE CLEANED”).

Step 5 is Michael P. Ramirez coloring in his own drawing, without staying inside the lines. Step 6 is Michael P. Ramirez using his computer to make it look like he did stay inside the lines. Two whole steps here are “kindergarten art class but digital.”

As Michael says, welcome to “the color realm”. We remain there for Step 7. The final step. Which is a tiny amount of further shading, and…that’s all! Those were the steps. “The Recipe For A Perfect Cartoon” is an almost-finished cartoon, followed by an old man listing his Adobe software presets. It is…not enlightening. I wonder if Michael P. Ramirez is proud of that? Maybe he refused to do the namby-pamby handholding they do in art schools, or in any form of teaching where a student learns something. Guys who make this kind of anti-Obama art are the same guys crankin’ off to the legend of their own self-reliance. It’s sad! Self-reliance is good, to a point. There’s something to be said for a “draw the rest of the owl” mentality. But there’s a reason I got that owl art from Reddit’s r/funny section, and not from a place that charges tuition or helps anybody. It’s a joke – and Michael P. Ramirez would know that if he weren’t such a HUSTLE clod.

I’m so sorry, we’re not done, we need to go back several steps. This blog contains a part even funnier than “here’s how my computer colors inside the lines for me.” There’s a gem here far more glittering than “I’m a Drunk, unless I’m stealing Drunk Valor.” My favorite bit is tucked into Step 2. Let’s revisit it. It’s the closest Mikey comes to explaining his writing process:

Reread that if you’d like. Reading it once is like trying to see the Grand Canyon fast. In this step, Michael P. Ramirez says each cartoon appears perfectly in Michael P. Ramirez’s head. It arrives finished. Second drafts are for cowards. Next up: Michael P. Ramirez’s memory does not work. Oh well. Probably not an issue for a cartoonist making political arguments. You don’t need to remember past events to understand the present or select a future. Just live in the present! The present is all we’ve got, other than the past and the future! Just live in the present, because we all die sooner or later. Great news: when Michael P. Ramirez likes somebody, and they die, he writes them a loving tribute/obituary:

Anyway, back to “The Perfect Cartoon.” Michael P. Ramirez–

Just kidding. My mind is lost in the labyrinth of this whole other cartoon. Yours is trapped too, right? We both saw this, and it sucked us in, and now we’ve crashed our ABC’s Lost plane into its beach. You and I are like two hot actors, grappling with a Heaven allegory and a smoke monster. If we try to leave this cartoon without first understanding its secrets, we’ll have to go back. That’s how much this cartoon stinks. A political cartoon is one picture. It should let the reader depart. Michael doesn’t allow that. His cartoons are maximum bothersome to any thoughtful mind.

What is happening here? Rush Limbaugh is in Heaven (lol). Rush is returning a book to a bearded angel and/or God. The book says “TALENT” on the front in big letters. And Rush has to return the TALENT book because…he checked it out? I can’t really follow this. I detect an attempted message of “Rush Limbaugh was TALENTED.” But this cartoon doesn’t really say that. The whole situation’s too weird. And it suggests several layers of cosmic canon, all at once. They include:

🌭When the dead reach heaven, their primary quality substantiates into the form of a labeled book.

🌭Dead people might* be required to return those books to a heavenly library. (It’s not clear whether Rush is forced to hand his book over, and his statement suggests an active choice rather than an enforced return.)

🌭Heaven has a library. It might contain regular books too? Or maybe there’s a separate library for Cloud Nine’s beach reads.

🌭When someone dies and their Primary Quality Book substantiates into their hand, the book’s cover will feature the logo of the dead soul’s broadcasting company. It has to be printed on there. We know that because in the cartoon, the “Excellence In Broadcasting” corporate logo is presented alongside a good drawing of Rush Limbaugh and a giant caption of “RUSH LIMBAU@H”. So we know it’s Rush Limbaugh. The tiny, dark, hard-to-read logo isn’t necessary. You might assume that’s a flaw in Michael P. Ramirez’s cartooning. But as discussed by Michael P. Ramirez, Michael P. Ramirez’s cartoons alight into his brain in their perfect finished form. Therefore, Michael P. Ramirez added a broadcasting logo because Heaven is real and that’s how these books look up there.

The book return opens up bizarre cosmological possibilities:

🌭Post-book return, does the dead soul spend their eternal afterlife *lacking* their primary quality? Is life in Heaven like the middle stretch of Space Jam, where all the NBA stars regress into oafs, but for every human quality?

🌭Do the books circulate? Will another soul check out Rush’s book? Will a current person or future baby receive Rush Limbaugh’s exact talents? Will Rush’s TALENT BOOK scream across the cosmos to its next host’s location, before shelving itself into their body or mind?

🌭Younger Hotdoggers may think the furniture behind Angel/God is some kind of shelf. Nope! It is an antiquated library practice, where libraries maintain a giant wooden set of drawers containing a physical card catalog. Why does Heaven’s library have this? Is it because Rush Limbaugh is old? Is Heaven’s library kind to the dead, easing them into the afterlife with a library transmogrified to fit each soul’s generational expectations? Did Heaven’s library get its first computer when Heaven got its first dead modern guy? If Michael P. Ramirez died, would those card catalog drawers be full of his dumb-ass cartoon’d napkins?

Wow: I despised that experience! Speaking of despicable experiences: let’s return to Step 2 of our blog/hell. You might think your life is hard, from time to time. Nobody has a harder life than the (alleged) close creative friendship circle of Michael P. Ramirez. They’re the most astonishing part of “The Recipe For A Perfect Cartoon”, Step 2, Paragraph B:

According to Michael P. Ramirez, he runs each of his ideas by a group of friends, and asks them for feedback. Then, he ignores their feedback, and says their feedback stinks on his website. And he does this every day. Michael P. Ramirez works for daily newspapers. This is not a novelist asking for manuscript notes once per two years. This is not an actor or comedian who needs one more butt in their show’s seats. This is a cartoonist busting into a group chat with a “what do u think of this but also fuck you” – and he’s doing that in service of insights that aren’t even worth thinking.

He’s right: politics is crazy! Who can say why! It’s simply crazy. Crazy as a reply text from a (former) friend who claims your idea “isn’t anything” and asks why it’s drawn on a Jack Daniels coaster. Still: one must overcome that kind of obstacle. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Michael P. Ramirez, it’s three things: the power of positive thinking about yourself, the power of negative thinking about everyone else, and the power of stubbornness about your first-‘n-final napkin-drafts. Hey, Robert. Hey, Sean. Scan these thirty-seven bar napkins I mailed you into your hot dog website. Your edits are wrong and your DPI setting had better be my favorite.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Neil Bailey, who has to return the ASS-KICKING book to God when they die. Good luck collecting if they don’t, God.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Jokes, Puns & Riddles

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Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Scam Cookbooks of Morishige Shunsen 🌭

As you know, 1900HOTDOG is a website about food (such as hot dogs). This is a food website. So like usual, like always, I’m back with another roundup of the hottest new cookbooks. This week I went to a leading online bookseller known for its ethics and well-curated stock to review three new cookbooks for all you food website cookbook review fans: Kanye West Cookbook by Morishige Shunsen, Kate Middleton Cookbook by Morishige Shunsen, and Sailor Moon CookBook by Morishige Shunsen.

Who is Morishige Shunsen? I’ll tell you who: he is the author name on Amazon listings for 29 cookbooks. He is not online otherwise. Googling “Morishige Shunsen” leads me to a “Morishige” in the Japanese manga art world and a “Shunsen” in past Japanese fine art. Wow! Morishige Shunsen is one lucky guy to have a name made of two separate famous names. Two names a Japanese art fan could know, and combine if they wanted to. Wow: Morishige Shunsen sure is a lucky, normal, real guy, who uses Amazon dot com to sell his cookbooks. Cookbooks with full titles like Kate Middleton Cookbook: 20 Fantastic Recipes For The Family Kate Middleton Perfect Homemade.

Obviously we all agree Morishige Shunsen is real. Just like we agree I am a prolific cookbook reviewer. That statement is as real as Morishige Shunsen. However, let’s goof around with a thought experiment. Perhaps Morishige Shunsen is less of a Morishige Shunsen and more of a “Morishige Shunsen”. Less of a Scam Likely and more of a Scam Definitely. Less of a Real Guy With Japanese Heritage and more of a Guy Incognippon. Okay: thought experiment complete. Ha! That sure was a kooky idea we bandied about. We all know Morishige Shunsen does not exist online, beyond 29 Amazon listings for cookbooks, because Morishige Shunsen is about the work. Morishige Shunsen is not a showboat. Morishige Shunsen is not one of these “celebrity chefs” doing image-driven fakery like making foodie content, and running a restaurant, and existing. Morishige Shunsen is a food expert, and a corporeal form-haver, focused on the hard work of publishing cookbooks. Cookbooks like Kanye West Cookbook: Delicious And Totally Compliant Recipes Kanye West Every Day. Or his other book, Kanye West Cookbook: 20 Recipes Recreated From Your Favorite Kanye West You Will Ever Want To Make. Or his other other book, Kanye West Cookbook: 20 Fantastic Recipes For The Family Kanye West Easy To Learn The Basics.

Those are three separate Amazon dot com listings…and I’m kicking myself for not buying all three! They’re each so different!!! For example, the one I purchased has a cover photo of Kanye West. But as you see above, the second cover features A Picture Of Food. And the third cover features… hmm. It features a picture of A Different Black Guy.

You only get that breadth of covers from Morishige Shunsen. Other lesser authors settle for one approach. They either pay significant prices to license images and names, or they risk legal ramifications by stealing those images and names, or they do not use celebrity images and names at all. Morishige Shunsen serves up a smorgasbord of all three strategies. Then Morishige Shunsen tops that off with a racist face-blindness garnish. It’s the racism version of the publishing version of The Salt Bae Maneuver. That kind of flair makes Morishige Shunsen stand out. Professionally, Morishige Shunsen must stand out! Why? Morishige Shunsen is up against many other authors of Kanye West cookbooks. Why? Because Kanye West is constantly sharing and transmitting his food wisdom to self-published Internet cookbook writers. We all know the musician, designer, name changer, National Socialist, and name rememberer Kan“Ye” West spends most of his time co-crafting food recipes. If you could see his Google Calendar, you’d see nothing but events like “write up my BBQ Yumburgers” and “try serving fish WITH fries??” and “send my Rustic Rye Bread flour ratios to my personal friend Morishige Shunsen.”

That’s the “Table Of Content” for Morishige Shunsen’s Kanye West book. “Table Of Content” is a regular thing to call that. “Content”, singular, is the word Morishige Shunsen uses, for good reasons, and not because his recipes are stolen from food blogs (i.e. stolen Content). After Morishige tables his content, he goes straight into plain instructions and medium-res photos for all twenty recipes. Finally: a Kanye West cookbook that doesn’t get bogged down with any mentions of Kanye West. After those recipes, you’ll find several handy and on-purpose blank pages, followed by a robust description of where and when the book was published. That’s the format of all three books – right down to that final page, informing me that these three books were published in wildly different regions of a country he sometimes calls “USA” and other times calls “United States.” Wow: it seems like it would be hard for me to visit Morishige Shunsen! If he’s always jetting off to a new publication location, you can’t find him to thank him, let alone serve him legal paperwork.

Are these books exactly the same? No! Across all the sixty recipes in these three cookbooks, I did not find one repeat. You can see for yourself! I’ll show you Morishige Shunsen’s other Tables Of Content Singular. They’re a fascinating window into three chefs Morishige Shunsen knows deeply. As you saw above, Kanye West And/Or Other Black Guy is a broadly American chef. Morishige Shunsen teaches us that Chef Kanye West has eaten Doritos, and has heard of the concept of Mexican food. Wow: I almost feel like I’m learning too much about Kanye West! Meanwhile, the chef Sailor Moon is a character or franchise who cooks (humongous surprise incoming) Japanese cuisine.

Then we come to Kate Middleton. As you know, she is a fancy lady. After all, she is a Princess! A Princess of the country of… okay I’m looking closely at this book’s main cover images. According to Kate Middleton’s chef jacket, she is a Princess of Québec?

Well that settles it: Kate Middleton is French-Canadian. I wonder if she’ll ever become Québec’s Quéen. Also, quick thinksperiment: does Kate Middleton usually cook in Québec-themed clothing? Or is that an image from one of those make-work PR events Britain invented for their royals to do? Hmm. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided I trust Morishige Shunsen. He probably took a regular, representative picture of Le Princéss Kate Middleton du Qúébééééc, because Kate is so close with Morishige Shunsen. You can tell she had a major hand in this book, because the Table Of Content spread runs one picture of her, full-page, twice.

That’s a great picture, huh? You’d better think so. It is embedded in the background of every page of her entire cookbook:

I’m sure that’s a design choice Kate Middleton and Morishige Shunsen made together. Perhaps whilst hanging out in Kate’s duchy of Montreal, gettin’ creative with Stolen Adobe Software over a couple glasses of poutine. You can really feel Princess Kate in this cookbook – and not just because it looks like she’s trapped inside of every page. This cookbook makes a stock photo of shrimp risotto feel like Kate Middleton’s Phantom Zone. But no: she’s doing great, and loved contributing to this cookbook. Morishige Shunsen gets the best out of every collaborator. He helped the chefs Kanye West and Sailor Moon pursue a totally different style. Sure, they each wrote a twenty recipe cookbook, published in a softer-than-soft-cover, at a price of more than one U.S. dollar per recipe. Just like Kate! However, Kanye and Sailor’s books are so different. They don’t repeat a background picture of Kate Middleton. Instead, they are rich with one geometric shape, repeated over and over again, whenever there is page space Morishige Shunsen did not fill.

Such different personalities in those Kanye West and Sailor Moon cookbooks. Hey Hotdoggers: which Filler Shape Personality are you? Are you more of a Nested Blue Quadrilaterals? Or more of a Semicircles Mutually Pleasuring? Sound off in the comments!

Here’s where I start to have a few feelings all at once – and not just because we’re all digging what those semicircles are putting out there. As we’ve established, I am your longtime favorite cookbook reviewer for this food website. We all agree that’s a true thing about me, and you, and us. So as a cookbook reviewer, I’m here to celebrate the art of cookbooks. I’m not here to destroy the careers of very real cookbook writers like Morishige Shunsen. And I must admit I’ve reviewed a mere fraction of Morishige Shunsen’s oeuvre. I cherrypicked just one of his repeated collaborations with Kanye West, and Sailor Moon, and Québécois cuisinier Kate Meed-léh-tóhn. It also turns out I’m not the only one treating Morishige Shunsen this way. I found one of the few Amazon reviews for Morishige Shunsen’s range of 29 cookbooks, and it judges Morishige Shunsen by a single work:

Wow: give a guy a chance! Also: that second star is the kindest thing I’ve ever seen someone do online! Anyway: back to my failure. I painted Morishige Shunsen with a broad brush. I merely acquired three of his cookbooks. In my defense, three Morishige Shunsen cookbooks set me back $65.16 USD. That is meaningful money to me! My artist-owned podcast, which depends on listener support, and refuses to take ads from any company that’s creepy, is not exactly a Morishige Shunsen-esque money factory. I can’t afford to buy the Morishige Shunsen Omnibus, packed with however many recipes 29 cookbooks times 20 is. So I gave up on experiencing the full breadth of Morishige Shunsen. I’m stuck wondering if any recipes recur in Morishige Shunsen’s He Man Cookbook: 20 Recipes You Need To Know He Man You Will Ever Want To Make. I’ll never know which Marvel heroes Morishige Shunsen met when crafting Infinity War Cookbook: 20 Recipes You Need To Know Infinity War The Home Cook. And I’ll only ever enjoy the cover of Ink Master Cookbook: Easy Recipes For Families Ink Master Cooks, Eats, And Laughs Together. Only the richest Amazon users will gain the cooking secrets of Dave “Live Más” Navarro, and his two sidekicks he hired, and that time Morishige Shunsen snapped a photo of them cooking together wearing matching toques.

I assume Morishige Shunsen got that picture because of his social skills. Nobody is better at juggling awkward relationships. For example, we know Morishige Shunsen is the author of three Kanye West-ish cookbooks. But did you know Morishige Shunsen is also the author of Kardashian Cookbook: The Home Cook 20 Recipes To Know Kardashian Every Kitchen? As well as Kardashian Cookbook: Healthy Recipes To Enjoy Favorite Foods Kardashian Easy To Learn The Basics?! And also Kardashian Cookbook: More Than 20 Delectable Recipes Kardashian Wellness And Healing?!?! I can’t imagine the stress Morishige Shunsen has been under lately. He’s an inner-circle friend to both halves of a famous divorce. The emotional labor must be staggering. Yet Morishige Shunsen did what we’ve all come to expect from Morishige Shunsen: he showed up for his people, he made six cookbooks with them, and then he made three other cookbooks about a steampunk graphic novel called Lady Mechanika. I’ll never understand how he did that on top of comforting the whole West-Kardashian family, and writing Hunger Games Cookbook: The Home Cook 20 Recipes To Know Hunger Games Home Style Cookery, and also writing League Of Legends Cookbook: 20 Delicious Recipes To Get Started League Of Legends Inspired, Flexible Recipes.

We all agree: Morishige Shunsen is good. However, I am on the bad end of some financial hurt here. Moments before publishing this piece, I realized I needed to accept the $65.16 expense of these books, or else bill my editors/friends Brockway and Seanbaby for that sum. My dear Hotdogger: I chose a third option.

That’s right: I returned the books. I basically stole a heap of money that was my money originally. Such an act is an unforgivable betrayal in the cookbook community. So I’m afraid I must resign my post as Your Favorite Reviewer Of Professional Cookbooks. What happens to me next, I do not know. For now, I wander the lonely wilderness of finding something else to write about. Perhaps I will suffer the indignity of covering topics no one cares about. Such as baseball, or the actor Pierce Brosnan. If that hellish existence is fated, it is a fate I deserve, because I might’ve torpedoed the career of the striving, real, non-scammer Morishige Shunsen. Seriously: my Amazon return might ping somebody to look into this guy. My return would cause that if Amazon does any quality control whatsoever. Which they…don’t? Or do? I honestly don’t know. So I don’t know if the store pages I linked here will still be online when this publishes. No one can predict who will win the battle between Amazon dot com’s monolithic heartlessness and Morishige Shunsen’s relentless grift. But here’s what I do know: the passionate cooks Kanye West, Kate Middleton, and Sailor Moon Franchise will carry on cooking. They’re each best known for livening up the world’s dinner plates. And nobody knows that better than me (an iconic-yet-disgraced expert on cookbooks (which is a word that might be spelled “cook books”? With a space in the middle? Sean/Robert please give that a quick google before publishing.))

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, who is kind of the Oral Oysters of Angela Lansbury’s Erotic Foods for the Sexual Diner.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: The Sexual Key to the Tarot 🌭

Greetings, my acolyte. Welcome, young novice. [A gesture done with a penis to indicate “hello”], pork-padawan. This article is dirty! I wrote it for 1900HOTDOG, which is a mystical order shrouded by secrecy. According to the back cover of this book…

…membership in any mystical order shrouded by secrecy, such as our mystical doggz-order, gives you access to all the secrets of…

…The Sexual Key To The Tarot. A mysterious, eldritch tome available as a mass market paperback. These secrets could be unlocked for $1.25 USD, in the early 1970s. Or you can pay a fraction of that (with inflation) for a used copy, in 2023, festooned with stains. A lot of stains on this book. You see them. So you realize how much I care for you. I braved unsettling vintage discolorations – stains on a book about you-know-what – for you. I also spelunked for you. I found this in the basement of the world’s largest used bookstore. The Strand is literally the biggest, most overstuffed used bookstore on Earth, with inventory beyond any mortal’s reckoning. Yet this book is so weird, even by their standards, my cashier saw this and said “What? Ewww” out loud.

Dear Hotdogger: she was right. This book is gross! Also it’s kind of adorable. I’m almost not even self-conscious about how sexual it is, because its simple corny/horny combo is a breath of fresh air. I approached this book in a weird headspace. I’m coming off of a diet of books that force J6 on kids. So cracking open The Sexual Key To The Tarot was a welcome change-of-pace. Partly because it turns out the stains are exterior-only. Mainly because this author is an earnest clod, bubbling with B.D.E. (Boyish Doofus Energy). He is a horny idiot. He did also look up some fancy words in the library dictionary. But that’s all he is! His heart is pure – in the sense that some nudie mags use the word “pure” as a modifier for “babes” or “butts” or whatever.

Unfortunately, having read this, I’m confident this guy is probably not fun to do sex with. But that’s okay, now. Why? Theodor Laurence wrote this old-man-ish book in 1971. So I presume he is dead. If he was a weirdo to potential partners, he stopped. He got pulled outta the bars and off the streets by the ultimate cop (Time). I can’t find any biographical information about Theodor Laurence. But this book seems to be his magnum (non-condom meaning) opus. It also seems to be a book he wrote several times over:

He basically does magic sex books, for money. If you leave the word “books” out of that sentence, he is a sex worker with a B+ gimmick. Also, yikes, I think he did this gimmick semi-successfully. He’s got more than half a dozen published something-or-others. Also, some poor soul translated this sex-tarot book into Spanish. So at least one English copy sold first. Also, what a waste of bilingual man-hours. How about we tackle the rest of Cervantes’s diary before we rush El Tarot Sexual into tiendas.

Let’s go back to my English copy of this book. This gloriously dumb book. The book’s premise is that in every moment, every adult on Earth is on the verge of sex-ing. You know: like in pornography. This book is so porny, it reminds me of (I’m so sorry Kurt) Kurt Vonnegut’s maxim about porn’s essence. Everyone in this book is an upbeat, uninhibited, certified freak. They could all pass a Philharmonic Orchestra audition for first chair skin-flautist. However: this universal horniness presents a challenge. Wait, what? No it doesn’t. A world of people heaving with horned-up-itude is not challenging to live in. You just horn to completion. Still, here is what this book presents as a challenge: what if you live in a plentiful sex playland *and* wish to achieve clairvoyance? What if you wish to *foresee* the imminent nutting, before it pre-nuts? What if you don’t want any surprises in your life as a constant Mister Pre-Nut? Well if that describes you, you’re gonna love this book. By purchasing this book, you now wield the awesome power of…a deck of cards. Specifically, tarot cards. Which are cards bearing 1400s Italian concepts, drawn and published in their modern form in 1909. Tarot are historically interesting cards that also informed the development of regular playing cards. I earnestly think tarot cards are cool, both as a storytelling medium and as a form of fine art. However: they are so much more, according to this paperback. This book claims the tarot abound with hidden magicks. These magicks are the unlockable sex wizardry that this author holds the sexual key to, or something. How can that key be inserted (sex word!) into its lock (more of a home security word)? Here’s how: the key is to select one tarot card, and look for all the parts of the card where there are straight lines (penis) or flowers (vagina) or water (body fluids, i.e. sex water). Then, by interpreting those penises and vaginas and sex waters, one may something something something something sex.

To harness this definitely real power, the book walks us through every card in the tarot deck. As we journey through the author’s descriptions of people, we learn he thinks everybody wants to have sex right this second. They’re all lookin’ to Rider somebody’s Waite, if you know what I’m spreadin’. It’s hard to find any entry where his predictional prognosis is not “you are about to smash.” He almost gets there with the card called The Hierophant, but only because that card is a plain drawing of two Catholic monks and a Pope. Not sexy. Yet this author free-associates his way to a Sex Pope.

In real life, not everyone is having sex at every moment. You would think that would mean at least one of these cards indicates Not Sex. But no! This guy is so horny, he sees the card for Death and thinks “vagina flag, plus solar dick mesas.”

Things get far more wild whenever a tarot card is plausibly sexual. Faced with the prospect of you saying “no duh” to the card’s sexiness, Theodor digs up every hidden meaning he can. However, he only knows how to find three hidden meanings (penis, vagina, torrential onslaught of ejaculate). So some of the entries are a sweaty cycle of Theodor repeating the same three tricks, over and over again, like some kind of dog/author/gimp who you never asked to own/hire/own. Easily the messiest entry is The High Priestess. That’s a card rendered by Rider-Waite as a lady sitting between two pillars marked “B.J.”. Even the most amateur look-at-picture person could find something sexual there. Theodor goes above and beyond, and insane. He turns up two vaginas, five penises, further genitalia in numerological vibration form (?), and then tries to class up the joint by closing with a reference to “concupiscence.” I had to google that word. It did not enrich my experience of this author going on a dong-based snipe hunt.

When you see sexuality in a yawning vagina, that’s fair. But when you look at gray globes and think, “FLESH, fleshy pursuits, FULLNESS OF FLESHY APPETITES,” most people would call that too horny.

Speaking of dongs, you may be familiar with some of the suits of tarot. Such as the wands, and the swords. I know what you’re thinking: wand is penis, sword is penis. Theodor Laurence knows you are thinking that too. After all, he is a Master of The Tarot. He knows everything there is to know about The Tarot. Also, no he does not. Turns out he hasn’t Mastered which suit is which. He can’t get one sentence into his book’s introduction section without mixing up which tarot suits led to which playing card suits…

…but hey, he’s trying his best. Why don’t *you* try typing out an entire book! With one hand! Because your other hand’s gripping your wand! Anyway: phalluses. They abound in The Tarot. In order to prove you’re in the (half-occupied) hands of an expert, Theodor does not just point out these cards’ various symbol-stiffies. He goes overboard, over-reading every phallic shape in the deck. For example, you may think the card The Tower has a phallic shape. Because it is a tower. Wow: shut up. Would you shut the heck up and let a Master show you its secrets?

Another example: you may think the card The Emperor is holding a scepter. Wow: you rube. Let Theodor show you what you’re missing:

See? He’s not holding a penis! He’s holding a penis, during a specific video timecode. Duh! But also: not duh. Because these secrets have been restricted to only the mightiest of knowers, for millennia:

Heck yeah: that’s solid hokum *and* a clear claim you can’t get the goods here anyplace else. And boy howdy: what goods! The Sexual Key To The Tarot is tumescent with understandments, mystical-wise. For example: did you know the “Ouroboros” snake is sucking itself off? Or that “the sphinx identifies with conquest”? Or that the classic symbol of a “Wheel Of Fortune” is primarily a symbol of the human penis becoming hard and then soft and then hard again? Wow: you had no idea. All three of those cards were prophecies of penises ejaculating, and you were too busy wondering about every other element of your life to notice.

There’s also rich theology here for any Christian reader. Also, if you’re a Christian reader, thanks for rolling with the earlier bit where this guy’s least favorite concept in the whole world is the Pope. Your reward: the secrets of the card Temperance:

If I’m reading that right, he’s done a “Sexual Key To The Bible” version of the Covenant between God and Man after the Flood. According to this guy, Noah’s Ark both contained *and floated on* seamen. And speaking of young men: Theodor knows exactly how they talk and think. Check out his breakdown of the card The Fool. Is this some hep young people talk right here or what?

The one Major Arcana card this book does not cover in detail is The Lovers. Probably because it’s almost straight-up a “Sex” card. Theodor does achieve one layer beyond that reading, with a claim that only heterosexuality is normal.

Theodor also shares a bit more about his own life, accidentally. He appears to be way into fantasies, and appears to be old. Almost like he’s a lonely older guy, making the best of that. However: you are wrong! Is what he would say. Because when he analyzes the card called The Hermit, he makes a point of saying that old guy on the card is alone on the card because he is *so great at sex* he doesn’t need any sex or companionship or friends, thank you very much. He would definitely be having sex right now if he wanted that, though. That’s what’s going on…with the card.

Anyway that’s it! All the tarot cards, rendered in the world’s stupidest interpretation of tarot. It’s so bottomlessly dumb. I meant that thing I said before, about liking tarot. Tarot is interesting. Part of why it’s interesting is that tarot cards have (highly technical description incoming) a whole lot of stuff on them. Real dense drawings. Super intricate little doodles on those suckers. Their visual complexity, combined with symbols from all sorts of religions and mysticism, makes tarot a fun playground for your mind. If you get creative, tarot allows you to ponder every aspect of the present and future. One aspect of that present/future can be sex. But if you exclusively use these cards to think about sex, you are ignoring the entire rest of the human experience. You are zero-ing in on sex stuff, and shrinking your imagination, in the same way people and animals do whilst cranking off. If you do that, that’s fine. If you do that *and* publish that, you are…a lot of things. Chief among them, you are author Theodor Laurence. And his stupid book. With cover text written in borderline unreadable letters. Just the most pendulous, heaving font.

Wow: those letters kind of have boners. Right? Or not? Let’s say they do. As I re-read what I wrote there, I feel like it’s kind of a flimsy claim. The letters aren’t quite phallic. They’re doing more of a fiddlehead fern shape. However: I’m gonna plow ahead and call them penile. Why? Because I read an author recently who rocked my world. He taught me any author can squint, and type fast, and claim to see a million billion boners in an old thing, and then move on with their life while readers are just kind of left hanging, with no thought-through conclusion to the

…
This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Milly, who just drew the two feral hogs porking in an abandoned Arby’s card, and so will have success in romance.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: American Presidents Children’s Books

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: UCSB’s Self-Published Dorm 🌭

You’ve heard of self-published books, self-funded movies, and other “art” foisted on the world by a committed weirdo. Now it’s time to discover the self-published building.

That’s a mockup of a future dormitory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It’s also the most deranged architectural project I’ve ever heard of (Non-Mad King Ludwig Division). It’s borderline evil. It’s also worse than Mad King Ludwig’s work. At least that guy was going for something. Disney only steals the good stuff. As you can see from this mockup, the good stuff this ain’t. This self-published dorm idea is a cubic nothing. It’s like if The Borg were an American exurb’s HOA president. I’ve seen better building ideas in my first 30 minutes slapping together a The Sims house – and much like this building’s designer, I draft Sims homes without any real empathy for the residents.

My Dear Hotdogger, I have a note of encouragement for you: please make art. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. Make art! Also, spare one thought for the humans around you. Because there’s one wrinkle in the artistic process, if you are the artist equivalent of a dictator. Creativity goes sour when it’s imposed on other people by force. It’s no longer a net good when a creator traps others in their work and coerces them into liking it, via money. Suddenly an artist becomes the town puppet master. One guy with a small fortune, no matter how mysteriously-gained, throws together a film set and treats dozens of grown adults like they’re his LEGO men. The horror also scales up as the budget rises. Once you’re throwing around “son of a post-Soviet oligarch” rubles, you can buy a whole-ass pop star career, built on nothing but money and personal threats to critics. So yes: making art makes your soul grow! But your soul does not eat its Breakfast of Champions if you make an Excel sheet to track your reputation-faking web of payoffs.

Back to the picture above. Until I learned about Munger Hall, I didn’t know somebody could self-publish a building. Had no idea! Technically, I’m the only person who calls this “self-published.” That’s because I’m forced to coin a name for its whole deal. Munger Hall is slated for construction thanks to a $200 million donation from benefactor Charlie Munger. The building’s designer? Amateur self-taught architect Charlie Munger. Do you notice how many of the people in this Munger Hall story are Charlie Munger? That’s because Charlie Munger is self-architecting. He wrote a check for an entire dorm building, and directed it to a university system with wobbly finances in a housing-poor state, because they simply can’t say no. They need dorms, any dorms, especially free ones. So that bars California from saying “no” to Charlie Munger’s art. Er, “no” to his architecture? Hang on, I’ve got it: his artch. Much like a Neil Breen film, or a drifter’s affordably-photocopied manifesto, Charlie Munger’s self-published artch will exist. It will get out there. And then it will confine a population of 18-year-olds against their will. Normally no artist wields that kind of power. They’re not rich enough. Other art-forcers can barely blow a thousand bucks on three lights for a movie scene. Charlie Munger is rich enough to light $200 million on fire. (Ironically, Lighting $200 Million On Fire would be a solid Andy Warhol-style short film.)

Who is Charlie Munger? He is a billionaire. He is Warren Buffett’s right-hand man (they grew up together). And folks, big number incoming: Charlie Munger is 99 years old. Are these the qualities of an architect? No! They are the qualities of someone who should’ve been retired for 50 friggin years by now. If I siphoned a chunk of Uncle Warren’s money, I’d retire in my forties and veg out. You’d find me in my palatial relaxation den, with a Brosnan flick on the teevee, munching on snacks from Secret Version Of Trader Joe’s For Rich People. But no: Charlie Munger rejects that lifestyle. He still works at Berkshire Hathaway, even though he is 99 years old. Every time I type that he is 99 years old, my brain tries to flip the numbers into a far less bonkers amount. “Please rotate so he is 66”, I think, in vain. This man is ninety-freakin-nine years old. He works a full-time capitalism job at age 99, then spends up to several hours per day on his uncalled-for amateur architecture. Why? Disruption. Or, innovation. Or something? He says he’s doing this to shake up the architectural establishment:

Yeah! Who among us hasn’t attended one show, seen two different-sized bathroom lines, and decided every trained architect is a total moron? It’s like when I drove a car one time, experienced traffic, and realized you’re all flaming imbeciles who are too thick-skulled to commute by blimp. Every one of you is an imbecile, especially the people who plan roads and cities after getting degrees in that. Also, in this story, I possess a couple billion dollars. So that lark of a thought that fluttered through my head is now your life. You’re going to enjoy the BlimpMerica(™) Fleet Inflation Apparatus-Tower I am eminent-domain-ing onto your front lawn. You’re welcome, you dullard. You’re welcome.

To Charlie Munger’s credit, this UCSB dorm is not his first dormitory project. Our artch maverick produced a few smaller student residences at other schools, through this same rigorous process of “I’m emailing you a CAD file before I mail you a check.” To Charlie Munger’s extreme discredit, his main prior project earned these testimonials:

When Charlie Munger gave his alma mater (the University of Michigan) its largest single donation in school history ($185 million), he made them use most of that money to build a 600-person dormitory. That dorm had just one window per eight humans. Each pod of eight bedrooms got one window to share. One measly window, like if we were in a Great Depression for glass. It’s like that old Disney cartoon where Mickey, Donald, and Goofy subdivide one bean for dinner. So yeah, the results of Munger’s design were not great. But the feedback drove Charlie Munger to decide everybody is a crybaby except him.

Which brings us to UCSB’s future Munger Hall. Charlie decided to treat his Michigan project like it was less of a dorm, and more of a tiny “is this a center for ants?” mockup of his true vision. He scaled that sucker up, and up, and up, until his design fit 4,500 students. He believes it can scale up that far because his chief design inspiration is Disney Cruise Line’s ships. No joke! He sees untapped wisdom for year-round living when he thinks about cruise ships (a thing you visit) and their rooms (the things you sleep in if the deck chairs are taken). 

It’s also telling that Munger brought his Costa Concordia-assed vision to UC Santa Barbara. He wrote them a $200 million check despite having no personal connection to the school. Apparently he doesn’t need that connection in his victims? Is that how psychopathy works? I don’t follow true crime stuff. Anyway, in 2021, because money, UCSB greenlit Munger’s plan. Munger Hall is a two million square foot megadorm, housing 4,500 students in 11 floors of windowless rooms. Experts call it “a jail masquerading as a dormitory”. But don’t worry, you dolt, you ignoramus, you gormless worm of an architecture non-understander: the rooms don’t need windows. Why would they need windows? What would a window in Santa Barbara even do? Offer a view of one of the most beautiful locations in the entire world? No: each room is good to go with no windows to the exterior. Each room offers something even better. That something: a “Disney-inspired” fake window. There. You are now happy with this design. You like it! After all:

Here I was valuing sunlight, when sunlight doesn’t even have the courtesy to offer me The Clapper. Buzz off, The Sun. You’re incompatible with my universal remote.

Some of you may still disagree with this great plan. Bad news: that makes you part of The Establishment. You’re like this foolish Establishment architect, who lazily criticized Munger Hall’s design without actually committing to… [reads ahead] …wow he quit his own job just because the plan is that inhumane.

There’s no way around a criticism like that. Right? I guess you could claim this architect is far more things than “an architect, a parent, and a human being.” That would make this fine. Let’s say he’s also a hot dog vendor, and he’d appreciate the daily shade of the building’s looming shadow. Let’s say he’s a sadistic dungeon keeper, and he’s practically busting out of his leather shorts with torment-anticipating glee. Let’s say the “as a parent” part flips our way because his next kid is a naked mole rat. Anyway, what happened? Once Charlie Munger heard this feedback, I’m sure he took it into– 

Yikes. Okay. But that was back in 2021. I’ll bet new perspectives got looped in, and cooler heads prevai–

That was two months ago. Munger Hall is still up on UCSB’s website today. Also apparently somebody talked them into reducing the scale slightly, down to 3,500 students on 9 floors. That update comes from another professional architect who works with UCSB, interviewed about this by the great website Defector.com. That architect compared Munger Hall’s design to the prior Michigan plan, plus a lot of “CTRL-C, CTRL-V.” Which is a clear sign of structural quality. Let me explain. For all you non-architect numbskulls out there, CTRL-C and CTRL-V are the keyboard commands for copy-pasting. They perform the astonishing magic of increasing something, by pasting. After copying. It’s very complex and smart. And it’s the key tool of the professional architect’s trade. Copy-pasting is as big of an architect skill as sharing a Coke with Warren Buffett, and being about to die.

That noise you hear is the Caterpillar company making construction equipment to press a huge “CTRL-C” button.

Until today, I’ve never had any personal dreams or goals related to architecture. I do listen to a great podcast about it sometimes. But it’s not in the top 10 things I think about. I’m not design-pilled. But now, I do have an architecture dream. I want to get a moment with the Innovative Structure-Master Charlie Munger. I want to sit him down, get him talking. And then I want to ask him about this quote:

Because I love life’s little punchlines. And there would be no grimmer thrill than to learn Charlie Munger thinks mouse traps are contraptions that mice choose to live in.