Author: Seanbaby

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FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Come On A My House 🌭

Polly Adler was a famous brothel owner, and three years after she died, the great comedy writer Phil Hirsch compiled a book of jokes about her. As the editor of 101 Hamburger Jokes, Vampire Jokes and Cartoons, and more than one joke book about tits, he was the perfect voice to tell the hilarious story of sex workers in 1960s New York.

The cover might be a little confusing. It’s a prostitute reading what seems to be an unironic, non-silly choice of books and a title taken from a 1951 song about feeding holiday party guests. Also, it contains zero cartoons about Polly Adler. To make sense of it, we have to flip it over and check out the back cover.

I’ve tricked you. This is no help. These are nothing. Most brains instantly classify these cartoons the same way they do a distant car horn or a wife’s voice in a 1965 joke book– unimportant nonsense you’re not meant to understand or notice. So these are… unfinished prostitute jokes not about recently deceased Polly Adler? For fucking whom? And to what fucking end? Maybe there’s an intro that can help us?

Oh, I see. We are meant to hate every micron of this. Got it! Let’s do it!

Phil Hirsch is not a good joke book editor, and this is not his best effort. It seems like he hasn’t done anything more than tell a dozen cartoonists, “gimme your… I don’t know… 38th through 49th best hooker gags.” As such, there’s a lot of overlap in material. So I’ve broken the book up into six parts, the first of which is about how crazy it would be if, get this, prostitutes actually existed.

I mean, can you imagine? In a world where you could buy sex, women would wear price tags! Like a coat, only much, much cheaper. This is the very first cartoon of the book and it’s barely even a gesture toward a joke. This is more like how you’d explain prostitution to Alvin and the Chipmunks.

This is a great example of a bit the book revisits about thirty times. If sex workers were real, wouldn’t they have things like coupons and punch clocks and complaint departments? “Ha ha what if a guy at a brothel had a gift certificate,” this cartoonist thought. “Oh, shit, that’s already the perfect caption,” this cartoonist also thought.

Sometimes instead of a joke, the characters are just going about the ordinary business of buying sex. “Mind if I browse?” is a creepy way of putting it, but he probably can, right? Is it meant to be a scheme? The only way this could be anything would be if his plan was to wander around looking at the ladies without paying and then go home and masturbate, and I’d argue that’s not a joke either. The caption might as well be “Blessed be the flesh of your neck, for I am the Whore House Strangler.”

This joke is about how hard it is to understand modern art. Unlike Polly Adler jokes! For example, the curator for this art museum hung a naked picture of a prostitute named her phone number. “That’s precisely the zany situation which has happened,” explains the caption.

If this wasn’t in a book specifically about hooker jokes, it would make no sense. It takes place in a world where prostitution is so ordinary that scientific aptitude tests might suggest it as a career, but it’s still so taboo that a man administering those tests has to be delicate about how to break it to you. Is this the first time the test decided someone should be a hooker? Is this simply an unprofessional decision made by a man with a desperate boner? Maybe they should have expected this after adding a full strength handjob to the testing procedure?

This contributor wisely obscured their signature, but it’s from the same hooker cartoonist who brought you “Woman Has a Price Tag and no Second Thing.” This time, his outrageous take on sex work is how a prostitute’s main features would be her body and price, and oh no… no second thing again. Unlike the now-classic “Career Aptitude Test Says You’re a Natural Whore,” this cartoon might suffer from being in a book about only prostitution jokes. Like, if this happened in a Family Circus comic it might catch you off guard, but here it’s as if the author has decided we still don’t get it. “No, listen! Idiots! He’s renting the lady! For fucking! Gah, how do I put this? Okay, look: it’s like if you were in a bar and instead of buying a lady a drink you bought her.”

“Yes! Exactly! Thank you!“

To be fair to Come On ‘A My House, I wanted to include a good one. This is a foreign royal telling the American Department of State that instead of going to Disneyland, he and a drunk prostitute are going to tear apart an Anaheim motel room. It’s definitely not what you or I would call a joke, but think of how much had to happen to bring it to us. Someone asked this person for a one panel prostitution cartoon and they wrote an entire screenplay about a sex addict Arabian prince dodging Henry Kissinger at Disneyland, drew this one insignificant moment from it, and threw the rest away. I would watch three documentaries about the making of this cartoon.

Here is the same cartoonist, again doing something so hauntingly not a comedy bit. The man in the hat wants to start a sex worker’s union, only the woman isn’t very interested. He’s also clearly evil, but why? Is it an anti-labor political statement? Is it a trick? Maybe collecting fake union dues from prostitutes was a common grift in 1965, but that still wouldn’t make this a joke. Maybe Phil Hirsch’s publisher changed this from, “Act like you’re reading an ordinary petition. I work for Henry Kissinger and America needs your help to assassinate sex monster Prince Abdul Ahtamaziz. We’re being watched. Pull out a titty if you accept.”

Oh, weird. This is just a nice one about a couple who had a nice time on a date. Wait… continued on next page?

This is only getting weirder. It’s as if the cartoonist has never been on a date or talked to a woman who has heard of a date. You know who writes female characters who say things like, “HOW CAN A POOR, SIMPLE, LITTLE GIRL LIKE ME SHOW HER APPRECIATION?” Men who ask other bus passengers to pee on them. This isn’t the end, though! This cartoon goes on for a third page!

After five panels, it’s revealed this dork was on a date with an escort. Or maybe she spontaneously decided to charge her friend money for sex? If it’s the second one, it’s grotesque. If it’s the first one it’s nothing more than a child’s understanding of prostitution. This is a skit Alvin and the Chipmunks would perform to let everyone know they still don’t quite get it. Which brings us to…

You may have already figured this out, but don’t ask cartoonists if they have anything funny to say about hookers.

No, hold on. What started years ago, cartoonist Bob Tupper? Her sex worker career? Are you saying she’s been a prostitute since she was a child or that she started fucking teddy bears as an adult and thought, “With a few years of training, I could make a living with this!” Which one is the joke, cartoonist Bob Tupper? Because one is unimaginably not funny and the other is my delusional hope you meant something else.

Who is this for? This would be a below average joke in A Child’s First Roast Beef Riddle Book, but in a book on such an adult subject matter it’s an embarrassment. “I guess I’ll take a prostitute with both titties if that’s what you mean, ma’am. Or simply the one butt if that’s what you’re referring to. Because if that was only a pun, fuck you. I’m serious, I’ll walk right out of here and go to the cops if that was a pun.”

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the gags are “What if sex workers were real?” Some of the ideas are reasonable, like how they might wear price tags or distract princes from Disneyland trips, but then there are some that didn’t quite translate. If you aren’t old enough to remember, lay-away plans were a type of credit system where a store would hold an item for you and you’d pay it off in installments until you could finally take it home. This system would extremely not work for prostitution, but in no kind of heightened, comedic way. How are we meant to picture this? Does her boss lock her in a bathroom after you make a down payment and release her when you come back with enough money to fuck? Laughing at this is what murder investigators call “evidence.”

Picture this: the elevators are actually bedrooms and they are operated by sexy babes with affordable holes. Congratulations, you’re getting off on floor 69 at The Nutbuster Grand.

Cartoonist Bob Tupper is the only man brave enough to ask, “What if a prostitute answered the phone and it was a call of no significance?” Take a moment to picture it. Congratulations, you’re getting your dick wet at Wrong Number Roadhouse.

I spoke too soon. Cartoonist Ted Trogdon was also brave enough to ask what would happen if sex workers had no idea how to screen calls. Congratulations, you’re watching The New Les Crane Show at Madame Allure’s Nielsen Media Research and Ball Draining Center.

Being generous, cartoonist James Lindensmith might be trying to say, “Wouldn’t it be outrageous to ask someone their name only after you’ve fucked them?” Except he’s doing it in maybe the one situation where it wouldn’t be since most prostitutes wouldn’t care or be using their real name. What James has done is made a comic about the first thing every creep asks a sex worker with no twist or punchline. “Lettuce wraps. Alopecia. The Cleveland Browns,” it could say with the same amount of literary skill.

This one is pretty funny because Mrs. Fromsett is buying four bags of groceries for her whore house, but the store clerk thinks she’s doing it for a different reason. “Why, I bet none of these carrots are going to go up a human butt, Mrs. Fromsett. Boy, your hungry husband must go through a lot of… Dr. Slapp’s Vaginal Repair Cream, Mrs. Fromsett.”

So in a normal cartoon, this would be a gag about a frugal pervert trying to trick hookers into thinking he’s an infant and breastfeeding him. Hilarious, yes, we would have all loved it. But in the broken world of Phil Hirsch, it’s about that plan sort of failing and the awkwardness of its aftermath. It’s an argument between two prostitutes. One of them is a prostitute who has somehow heard of deceitful sex creeps and another thinks a six foot man in a bonnet, in a brothel, must be the world’s largest but otherwise ordinary baby. Comedy relies on truth, and anyone can tell you this is not how you fuck in a diaper.

You know, this is the perfect time to move on to…

In 1965, the only birth control available was a bad haircut, honk honk, I don’t know what that was; let’s just see the terrible pregnancy cartoons Phil Hirsch took to full term.

If this cartoon was taking place in the same world as the rest of the book, one where prostitution is a fully legal, regulated industry, this would be a coherent gag. But it’s not. All these men know she doesn’t belong here… this expectant mother wanting a handout. The caption for this should say, “I guess I just kind of hate women under any circumstance?”

How would child custody work in a world with a mainstream sex industry? Would a group of sad prostitutes hand you your most recent baby in a shoebox every time you stopped in? Oh no, it’s that one? Oh no.

“I know! I’ll name him Lenny Sixfootbaby, after his father. Oh, look, he has his daddy’s diaper!”

Phil Hirsch, master joke book editor, figured the reader wouldn’t mind another version of this gag. See, the thing about unwanted pregnancies is how they’re funnier when no one cares about you, you whore. Speaking of, part four is called…

“Is my wife a prostitute!?” is both the concept and the punchline for a Bob Tupper comic.

There are no heroes in this one, but I do like how Sad Sack and Grumpy Prostitute are working on their marriage. Imagine the life the cartoonist must have led to create this. We have never seen these characters before, and they both took separate cars from the marriage counselor to the whore house to have an argument over midday sidecars. It’s so much to take in. It’s like they tried for awesome and hit depressing with every single decision.

Phil: “Dennis, pal, I hate to say this, but we already have 14 cartoons about how hookers answer the phone for any reason.”

Dennis: “What if the person calling had the wrong number?”

Phil: “We have two of those.”

Dennis: “I’ve got it. What if it was someone calling for a TV ratings survey?”

Phil: “We did that too.”

Dennis: “Okay, I’ve got it. What if it was her husband and she’s sick of it. He’s always fucking doing this. His lack of boundaries is putting a real strain on their marriage, and the stranger fucking her is all, grrr I’m going to kill you both.”

Phil: “Ha ha ha I love it. Try to keep that exact tone.”

This one is hot. A second later, Edwin and Clara definitely went at it like it was their honeymoon. Kink-wise, sneaking off to a whore house and running into your wife has got to be like dressing up like a baby at a whore house and running into your mommy.

It’s a very old joke to say marriage is more expensive than prostitution, which means this cartoonist has a fundamental misunderstanding of prostitution, marriage, and comedy. And he’s not alone. There are a lot of comics about unfaithful husbands in this book and most of them are as impenetrable as Lulu after a marriage proposal. For instance:

How the fuck could calling a prostitute “George” help his lie? Is his wife listening? When she asks why his tuxedo smells like sex is he going to tell her he buried his dick in George’s pillowy breasts at the cigar lounge? There are a million details about this he can’t tell his wife. Is he going to go home and say, “I ate George’s ass in an elegant canopy bed! It cost $35 and her name was my friend George!” Ridiculous. This 1965 hooker joke book is stupidly improbable.

You don’t have to like it, but by the laws of wordplay, this is the lady’s own fault. “You said I could have a short one, wife. You didn’t say the ‘one’ had to be a non-prostitute! You also didn’t say which dinner. I can technically do this as many times as I want.” Look at this sad, frumpy idiot. She doesn’t even realize if she took off her shoes, she’d be about the same height as the hooker. Add it to the list of dumb mistakes she made to ruin her marriage. Which leads me into…

Everything you’ve seen so far was light-hearted. The bastard children, the infidelity… those were the cute ones. Let’s see what the worst cartoonists of 1965 really thought about women.

Cartoonist Bob Tupper shrugged and added a goddamn suitcase handle to a human woman. “I’m glad my mom is dead,” he probably said as he drew this.

“Okay, so the pimp stole the mindless sex object from some guy who didn’t fuck it enough,” cartoonist Bob Tupper thought to himself while drawing a pair of sweet tits. It was great, but not yet perfect. It still needed something. Bob shrieked out loud, “A weirdly tall man with a pipe and a big ‘S’ on his sweater, the ‘S’ stands for Some Random Guy With A Couple Too Many Things! See? My cartoons are deep, mother! You died wrong, mother!”

I might not get this exactly right, but there’s an old saying that goes, “Comedy equals whore house plus a child you know coming in right as you leave.”

Oh my god. A cartoonist finally gave one of the sex workers agency and she’s using it to refuse consent. Sorry, I figured these would be “objectifying women” dark, not “groping a woman on her way to a funeral” dark. I dare any cartoon to get darker than this, and oh no I think my hubris summoned this:

Cartoonist Art Lutner could have drawn anything. This book is trash assembled by a lazy psychopath with no sense of humor. Art Lutner could have drawn a hooker playing paddle ball with the caption “Stop playing paddle ball, Elaine” and no one except me 58 years later would have cared. But instead he thought, “I bet a sex slave would be really bad at her job on the first day of her kidnapping” and decided he was done with the joke. What a fucking nightmare. This is something a 5-year-old would say before growing up to be the devil. This is a Russian adaptation of The Bachelorette.

Shit, I think I summoned this one too.

Not all of the cartoons in COME ON ‘A MY HOUSE are as coherent as a half woman/half suitcase or some prostitute you’ve never met who plays too much paddle ball. I want to show you some of its rare misses:

This cartoonist tried to imagine all the absurd ways the world would look different if sex work actually exis– “OH MY GOD, YOU COULD BUY TINY WOMEN LIKE SANDWICHES!!!”

Let’s say for a minute a parking meter is the best way to keep track of how much time you have left with your prostitute. Fine. But look at the football stuff on the wall. This is his room. And they’re not even fucking! This man was paying so many women to nap next to him he installed a parking meter in his own home! That’s madness. That’s an idea you share with the anaesthesiologist accidentally killing you and no one else.

You might be thinking, “Huh?” Well, I looked this one up and there is an old, debunked urban legend about women of the night using candles to time their sessions. And even if it was a real thing, are these two meant to have sex for the entirety of that candle? I don’t think you need to be a birthday cake scientist to spot that as a “several dick” candle. So this is a non-joke about something the cartoonist is wrong about featuring characters who are vacant, confused, sad, smug, and sad about it in that order. This is the highest density of stupid mistakes I’ve ever seen, and I’m an American.There is no way I could be more frustrated by this book, and oh shit what have I once again summoned:

I don’t know what this means. I wouldn’t know how to begin the research process to discover what this means. You are out of your mind if you think I’m going to google “Michigan +prostitute +suitcase” and scroll through five pages of Grand Rapids cold cases to discover there was some 1930s song called “My Summertime Michigan Whore.” Not on the same day I read a “comedy” book about human trafficking. I asked everyone I know and nobody has any idea what this could be. I’m sure someone reading will get this reference, but listen: I don’t care. If you know, don’t put it in the comments! This lady bought luggage in Michigan and that’s already by far –by far– not the worst hooker suitcase joke I’ve seen today.

Not all of the crazy ones are bad. This cartoon is about a hooker who gives out fuck trophies! Adorable! I don’t have anything bad to say about it. Look at how happy he is! This must be what I looked like when I beat Resident Evil 4 using only the pistol, while inside a prostitute.

And this one is about a lady whose daughter is back from… from sex worker camp? Again, if you think you know what this means don’t tell me.

Prostitute: “…”

Man at Bar: “Me too! There’s no way this is a response to something you said, but I’m not quite sure how homonyms work or how to set them up!”

“I probably mean a ‘whodunme,’ or some kind of play on words! I… iiiice… creeeeaaam coooone…. haaaaat, help! Help!! Ice cream cone hat! Why!? Ice cream cone haaaat!!”

In order for this gag to work you have to imagine this prostitute had nothing left to lose but her soul. So she called on Satan to sell this last part of herself, and the comic starts right as Satan says, “No. But I will have sex with you.” It’s not “ha ha” funny, but it is “ha ha she has no further to fall and now she’s fucking the literal devil” funny.

This comic is a thousand dead ends in a maze with no minotaur. Your joke instincts might sense hypocrisy, like this woman is accusing men of being one-dimensional while she is guilty of the same thing, but these women are doing five different things. Unless… sitting? Is the joke that men only want sex but women only want ch-chair? No. No. I refuse this. Satan, I have nothing left; I summon thee to fuck me to death.

“Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not a punchline relevant to this situation, Miss. Yes, you’re right. Candid Camera wouldn’t show something like this and it’s not a ‘practical joke’ to solicit prostitution. Look at you, so smart. Well, let’s see if you can answer this: I just ate six packs of cigarettes and the best thing you can do for me is put that pillow over my face and make sure I never wake up.”

“Sorry, I probably mean ‘lick.’ Which doesn’t really have a double meaning since it would be strange for a woman to walk into a bar and threaten to kick everyone’s ass. Let me start over. Hi, I sell full, condomless penetration for $10. If you want a six inch tall woman, there’s a tiny hooker automat in the back. I don’t know how!”

This is so goddamn dumb. By cartoon logic this whore house should have been obliterated by a truck long before the highway commissioner’s office could send a guy out. I don’t know why I’m bothering to analyze it. It’s two seconds of a Roadrunner cartoon glued to a hooker. Let’s do one more.

Cartoonist Bob Tupper doesn’t understand most things. He doesn’t know what’s funny about hookers or what teddy bears are used for, but he does understand the sacred oath taken by mailmen to never solicit a prostitute during work hours. “Neither snow, nor rain, nor moistness of vulva shall keep me from my duties! So swears this man of the United States Postal Servi–” oh goddamnit I’ve lost my mind again. Fuck you, Phil Hirsch.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Chase, who was NOT Made in Michigan. How DARE you.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Yogi Bear Visits the U.N.

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Squire and the Scroll 🌭

It’s a glorious Nerding Day miracle, for today we celebrate the three pillars of nerding: Christianity, High Fantasy, and Virginity. You may remember author and champion of unfucked holes, Jennie Bishop, who wrote The Princess and the Kiss. It was a story about a princess saving her first kiss for marriage written like an allegory, but it actually was about saving your first kiss for marriage. In 2004 she wrote a version for boys, only this time it was definitely an allegory. Maybe. Let’s see if we can learn the rewards of a pure heart in The Squire and the Scroll.

As a frequent reader of religious texts, I don’t find Christians to be good at allegories or symbolism. Mostly because you never know when they’re going to call those things “fundamental truths.” Plus, Christian art tends to be nonsense because they usually take existing creations with their own metaphors and meaning and change one of the words to “Jesus.” For example, “Jesus” but it’s the Frasier font or “Jesus Christ in a pot, that’s some wet ass pussy.” This book suffers from that shit, absolutely, but I don’t think Jennie Bishop would be a good author even if she dedicated her life to normal books. To be clear, no one is capable of crafting a good fantasy story around selling virginity to men. But this dim, crusader-brained dingbat? She is a confused baby left to die in a hot car full of typewriters.

Jennie dedicated her book about never, ever having sex to her husband, who has his own inside-joke, fantasy-themed virginity catchphrase. Sorry, that was a wordy way to put it; sort of like an author writing a 27 word dedication when they could have simply said, “I CUT OFF YOUR NUTS, RANDY.”

Randy, this is catastrophic. The first time he sheepishly asked his wife if she came, she said, “Not only did I not do whatever that is, I am going to dedicate my life to making sure no one else experiences this. I don’t care if it takes years, I will find a way to tell even children you can’t fuck.”

So once upon a time, a king was in charge of a magic lamp that kept everyone in his kingdom pure. Jennie mostly means celibate, but I get the idea she’d be okay with any way you wanted to interpret the word “pure.” This joyful kingdom doesn’t have any good falafel carts or jazz clubs, is what I’m getting at. I don’t know why I’m being cute. Hey, Jennie. You missed responsible sex education and hit Christofascism, you smooth pelvised monster.

With all the storytelling skills of a gorilla caught skipping sign language class, Jennie explains how an evil dragon stole the kingdom’s purity. Does this mean, on leathering wings and with dreadful magic, it fucked each and every person? Or did it merely fly around announcing that fucking was possible? Maybe none of this is allegory and it really was a magic lamp. I admit I have no idea. Jennie is building this story backwards from a religious certainty that her idea of “purity” is important, so none of it is really coherent or convincing. I only know this is about virginity because of the book jacket, promotional materials, and the author’s lifetime of public advocacy against sex. Without all that, I’d interpret this as a dragon stealing, like, the kingdom’s ability to say “Merry Christmas” or their zoning restrictions against drag performances. This feels like a medieval retelling of Footloose, except I don’t think Jennie agrees with Kevin Bacon about who the bad guys were in Footloose.

A lifetime of not being fucked and also not understanding metaphors means Jennie makes a lot of very horny, unintentionally funny word choices. This isn’t the best example, but when the brave knight and his pure, pure squire acquire their first treasure, she says they “split the underbrush” and “found a bag of wool” which is exactly how C.S. Lewis would describe your first time going down on a satyr. I just realized I haven’t talked much about the story. Let’s catch you up.

So the squire lives his life by the commands of a purity scroll. It’s the same scroll everyone in the kingdom is meant to live by, but he’s the only one who takes it seriously. He and the knight are attacked by evil, lustful whispers and he remembers the scroll’s First Command: “Listen only to words that are pure.”

You’d think this would mean ignoring temptation. However, Jennie is a Christian and sometimes her metaphors are literal, so this command means to take the wool out of your inventory and use it on your ears. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything that this desperately unfucked author had the heroes overcome their first obstacle by stuffing each other’s holes.

After hiding from the sexy noise, the two pure adventurers find a shield outside a cave. “These are helpful,” explains the man who didn’t pack any shields for his dragon fight. “This reads like a novelization of a point-and-click adventure,” explains the man who noticed these virgins are finding items and then using those items at the very next location.

In the very next location, they are tempted by evil gems. The squire remembers the scroll’s second command, which is now referred to as a rule: “Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you.”

Do you know what this means? It means Jennie got so lost in the parable that her instruction manual for purity is no longer a way for the reader to live their life, but an extremely specific set of instructions for the characters to survive this one adventure. This kingdom has built itself around these commandments and the second one is only useful for getting through its evil gem cave.

By the way, the knight doesn’t care. He’s already spending the money. He’s like, “Kid, I have done way worse things than look at cave faces.” Is this a metaphor for anything? I guess in context it probably means he’s going to put his dick in one of their mouths? I’m… hmmm. No, I don’t think I’m kidding. This is a sincere interpretation. Anyway, he of course dies horribly.

Driven mad by the beautiful toothless mouths of the cavern, the knight denounces the teachings of the scroll. The shield he picked up turned out to be a nightvision shield, which is suspiciously lucky. I highlighted the words “fought to stop his horse, but to no avail,” which is suspiciously how Tolkien would describe a Hobbit trying to keep a boner under control.

“I have noticed the scroll in my belt, and I’m grasping it tightly,” is how Robert Jordan would DM a cosplayer.

The only thing the squire has left is his well-grasped scroll, so he’s about to die of thirst. He comes across a filthy pond of dead fish and wonders if his faith has any tips. It does! The third rule of the scroll is “Keep the unclean far from your lips to guard the wellspring of your life.” I think the author is trying to say we shouldn’t even do mouth stuff, but her writing is so elegant it can also refer to not drinking from a toxic fish graveyard.

The boy, mindful of the allure of temptation, finds a flask of water labeled PURE and immediately drinks it. It’s possible this could be dumber, but I’m not sure how. The scroll, a nonsense document of no help to anyone in or out of this story, is being praised by its own author for being useful and wise. So far we’ve learned to only listen to, look at, and suck on pure things. This is how a hungover girl finds her way out of a fraternity basement, not any kind of philosophy.

The squire comes to a fork in the road. The dry way is fine, while the wet way is obviously quicksand. Using the wisdom of his virginity scroll, he chooses wet. And he gets rock hard. There’s no official rule in the scroll for this, but if there was it would be “Always bet on wet.”

The actual fourth rule is “Breathe only that which is pure,” and whether you think I’ve been fair to this stupid fucking book or not, I think we can all agree this is no longer any kind of metaphor. How would a prospective virgin even use this in their sad life? Do you avoid perfumes? Moist feet? Wafting pubic scents? Speaking of disgusting, the squire enters a yawning chasm to pluck a rose and stroke his parchment. This is all gross. This is how George R.R. Martin would smell a panty.

Luckily, the squire’s plucking and sniffing gets interrupted before he loses the fight to stop his horse. It’s the dragon offering him a deal. He’ll give the Lantern back, but the boy will have to… I guess in the context of this story, give up his virginity.

Okay, so I hope I’m wrong. I hope I’ve fundamentally misunderstood something. But this is a story about resisting sex until marriage. The scroll represents the boy’s purity and the dragon represents temptation. And the dragon is saying “give me that sweet virginity and I’ll give you the lamp.” The boy says no, but then… does? He takes the scroll out of his pants, it transforms into a sword, and then he plunges that sword into the dragon’s body. That’s unambiguous. That’s fucking. That’s how any good dungeon master would describe dragon sex.

This is the hard, wet climax of the story and our hero is whipping out his virginity to penetrate temptation with it. And it cannot possibly be what the author intended. This woman set out to explain why celibacy is important, never did, and accidentally killed her purity allegory with an underage boy’s penis. Everyone knew going in she was going to fail, but this is a true wonder. This is like an orthodontist leaving for work and mistakenly eating a box of diarrhea in a dimension without teeth.

The boy’s sword goes flaccid after he pulls it from the spent dragon, a detail Jennie included to make sure we understand: it was his dick and they fucked. And we don’t make it three sentences before someone is on their knees in front of him, begging for that sweet purity. I’m not crazy, right? This is horny as fuck. This is how George R.R. Martin describes what his characters are eating.

For saving the kingdom and becoming a man, the squire is given a virgin. This isn’t a metaphor or any kind of lesson, Jennie just doesn’t know when to end a story and truly believes a woman is an appropriate prize. This might also be nothing, but the knight is back on his knees again, yearning for those turgid words of purity.

The slow death march of this story’s denouement continues, and we learn that the squire has started a whole virginity club to protect the kingdom against future horny monsters. These men are dedicated to the rules of the scroll, which again, are four pointless clues for navigating a trip to see the dragon their boss fucked to death. This kingdom’s entire philosophy makes more sense as a warning label on toilet cleaner.

We’re still going! On the merciful final page of the epilogue we learn the squire’s virgin wife knew how to please him because she fucked by way of the scroll. Let’s go over the rules one last time. Don’t listen to anything gross, look straight ahead, don’t put anything gross in your mouth, avoid inhaling toxic fu– oh my god oh my god, I’m fighting this horse to no avail! No avaaaaaaaail!!!!

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Clementine Danger, the gem-eyed cave skank.

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PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Thunder in Paradise with Dan McQuade 🌭

It’s Dogg Zzone 9000 Day, and this week Defector co-founder Dan McQuade returns to share his expertise on the Civil War. More specifically, the time Hulk Hogan won it for the South using only a superboat, a remote control grenade launcher, fifteen laser guns, and an XXXL Victorian gown. That’s right, we’re finally doing a show on episode 9 of Thunder in Paradise, “Gettysburg Change of Address”!

Listen here or wherever you get podcasts!

As you certainly remember from when it first aired in 1994, it’s the episode with the skeleton mystery and the big Sea-Doo race where Hulk Hogan used Civil War costumes to trick an Army captain into thinking he had traveled through time in order to win a laser tag battle which was also a murder scheme.

Footnotes:

Podcast illustrated by Brett Ellefson

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Tomima Edmark Academic Study on Creative Bankruptcy

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Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: 1001 Street Fighting Secrets 🌭

1001 is probably too many secrets to be keeping about street fighting, but in 1997, Sammy Franco wrote this:

My experience with books starting with “1,001” suggests I shouldn’t bother looking inside 1001 Street Fighting SECRETS: The Principles of Contemporary Fighting Arts. This number is too high. Sammy is going to run out of punches and kicks by 47 and have to list his favorite karate songs and mid-maiming snacks to fill the next two hundred pages. Plus, is he even crazy? I’d better look up some of his other books to make sure I’m not going to be combing through increasingly boring variations of “remember to lock your car” and “every bulge on a bus passenger could be nunchucks.”

A good sign. These are fucking nuts. Okay, let’s get started.

Speaking of secrets, the book starts with a quote from Henry Ward Beecher, a historical figure who cheated on his wife so much his adultery is included in the first sentence of his Wikipedia entry. He was sniffing another man’s wife on his fingers when he said this and was absolutely not talking about karate secrets.

This is going to sound too cute and nerdy for a book about killing day drinkers with your hands, but the last secret in his book of secrets is a secret! The first 1000 secrets are a clue to decoding it! It’s the kind of idea you would have if the only people you talked to were adults in ninja costumes, and I mean that in the best way. I also mean this: if you’re a book that doesn’t do this, fuck you.

Eight pages in and we still haven’t started the secrets. Sammy first has to thank the United States Border Patrol (USBP), the kind of idea you have when you and the adults in ninja costumes you talk to have a secret favorite race. He also gives an acknowledgement to God (T.M.F.B.A.K.M.), an abbreviation he never explains. Which means this street fighter has an inside joke with God and I’ve made the right decision to read his book.

Right now would be the perfect time to start listing secrets, but I’m sure you’re wondering how Sammy Franco’s school, Contemporary Fighting Arts, got its name. He explains all three word choices for an entire page and during that time there are no twists or surprises. It’s obvious and no one asked. It’s like someone getting out of The Muffdiver Express and telling you how his van got its name. It’s like a man named Buck building an interactive exhibit so customers understand the creative process behind the name Buck’s Fishing Supplies.

Before we get to the secrets, Sammy warns he will be including some defense and spirituality. As he explains many times, these things will get you killed on the streets, but they are what separate you from the animals. Like most people training you for the imaginary, Sammy’s advice changes depending on whether he’s thinking of an underground kumite or a restroom pervert. Still, knowing your spirituality made you better than your local tough guys had to be a big comfort to an adult ninja in 1997.

Every moment is a potential attack. That’s why Sammy’s first street fighting secret is DON’T BLINK. I love it, but this is already too figurative to be useful and very, very much not a secret. No one’s last words in a death tournament have ever been, “The rules never said I had to pay attention!”

This rules. Sammy was out of secrets at number zero and he still has 999 to go. Wait, I forgot about entry ? ? ?. He only has 998 to go.

Really wanting to kill the other guy is an important step most street fighters forget. Sammy illustrates the 10th street fighting secret, “a virtuous killer instinct,” with a picture of one of his students thumbing a man’s eyes out. He is experiencing rage, happiness, and ecstasy– all the emotions you feel when taking a man’s life eyeball first, over a caption about how he’s demonstrating a perfect lack of emotion. It’s something to keep in mind, that this author who dedicated his life to surviving an afternoon in Jackie Chan’s body is weirdly incorrect whenever it’s possible to be objectively wrong.

After learning how to breathe and get comfortable with murder, it’s time to reveal the street fighting secret of standing like you’re in a fight. Sammy calls this BLADING YOUR BODY which is how you get a 1997 adult ninja to say, “Oh fuck yeah.” And they’re right.

You know, Sammy, you’re the one who decided to frame these as “secrets.” You only have yourself to blame for looking like an idiot here. You are revealing the secret of heads to head owners (this includes top, front, sides, and back). You’ve made a fighting system so basic you’ve accidentally written an operator’s manual for a parasitic mold colony. This is an instruction manual for when Jackie Chan wakes up in your body and you don’t want your wife to get suspicious.

I think we’ve learned enough about blinking, breathing, and the benefits of heads. It’s time to practice surrendering. Sammy has now spent over twenty pages explaining how to master every last thing your body does involuntarily. If you read 1001 Street Fighting Secrets to a baby their first words would be, “oh my god, no shit.” It would be so hilarious if after all of these exhausting essays on what ears and fingers are used for, Sammy finally gets to the actual fighting and goes, “I don’t know, hit him with your foot.”

No fucking way.

Groin kicks: the 40th street fighting secret! Sammy calls them “vertical kicks” because if he called them groin kicks he’d have to write three chapters on your changing body and how a groin swells when its owner blinds a man with his fingernails.

The 70th street fighting secret: poking them in the eyes! I know enough about literature to know every 1,001 Things author discovers there’s nothing left in their brain long before they finish their book. Here is where it happened for Sammy. He has explained both kinds of kicks– dick and regular, and now he’s shown the reader his forbidden eyeball strike. That’s all his moves. He genuinely thought there would be more karate in his head than 70 karates, but the rest of the book is the desperate panic of a frequent sword browser. You’re going to love it.

How are you going to tell me not to do spinning punches in a book for imaginary fights? If I’m taking out a hypothetical knifeman, I am doing only hypothetical rad shit. Full splits. Bikini beach setting. I might make him Dylan O’Brien so I can say, “You should have never run out of that maze, Dylan O’Brien! For no minotaur in there is as fierce as my very much spinning punch out here, Dylan O’Brien!”

Eating a raw opponent runs the risk of disease, which is not me making fun of Sammy, but actual advice he gives after telling the reader to deeply, penetratively bite their enemies, anywhere, to send them a message.

Reminder: the double-thumb gouge is a nuclear grappling tactic that can produce devastating results. My count might be a little off, but when Sammy Franco street fights something without eyes, he only has 814 secrets.

Exactly! Dylan O’Brien didn’t become a household name by defending mazes. I doubt this is good advice for a fight, but only the dumbest dumbshit would read a street fighting book for good advice. Sammy is telling the reader to put all their faith in dick bites and eye gouges, and that rules.

Shit, don’t be airborne? This sucks again.

Think of how desperate you must be if you’re sitting down to write street fighting secrets and you think, “Y’all ever look around at karate class and wonder who are these people? I know you guys have seen the shy one– always hesitant to participate in training. Why are you so shy, shy one? Is it because I told you to take a bite out of a sick man in our parking lot? And y’all ever do karate with a dilettante? Talkin’ ’bout karate isn’t important and shit. And that’s a double-thumb gouge! Nobody is safe from Sammy! Let’s see, who else…”

Oh no. I need to kick but I have the flu. Suddenly I flash back to my Sammy Franco flu kick training. You thought you could strike while I was weak, but I have been preparing for this exact situation, Dylan O’Brien. The two of us mount our combat wheelchairs and gossip one last time about who is the worst in our karate classes.

Find yourself a nice mannequin head at a cosmetology school to practice your eye strikes. This is a fantastic secret. I think everyone should have a few mannequin heads lying around their home. “They’re for poke practice,” you can tell your guests.

This is probably the most important street fighting secret. Non-street fighters do not respect books, especially street fighting books. Plus, if someone else reads your street fighting books, they will know all of your moves, like how your punches don’t spin and where you shop for mannequin heads.

Half of all street combat takes place in the library. Three of Sammy’s street fighting secrets are plugs for his other books, and I happen to own Killer Instinct: Unarmed Combat for Street Survival. The jacket says “On the streets of America, there is no bushido, the honorable code of the ancient warrior,” and speaking of insufferable weeb shit, Sammy also suggests reading The Art of War “at least 10 times.” Maybe check the newspaper to learn the methods of your local criminals? Oh, and be sure to pick up the Uniform Crime Report so you know which ethnicities to watch out for. This isn’t as useless as it looks. Racial profiling and untreated paranoia are a huge part of street fighting.

Everyone who says Sammy Franco wet his pants at the Boulder No-Contact Open, Blue Belt Adults and Under Division is a karate liar!

When Sammy finally limps his way into the 300s, he is filled with a new self-confidence. He is certain he must be a genius. He starts taking the most basic concepts and making them impenetrable with the biggest words he can find. Words that say, “buddy, be serious” when you look them up. So for about a hundred entries something like “hit them with a bowling ball” will become “cranialize yon Midgard child with the sphere of leisure!” It’s like he’s writing a Family Matters spec script called “Everybody Was Kung Fu Urkel.”

Oh no, this one feels real. I think Sammy Franco is still mad about the time he got interrupted biting a homeless man to death.

Real street fighters avoid crowds and events because no one has enough thumbs to blind an entire baseball game. “People get ambushed and trampled all the time outside,” says the non-paranoid man writing a perfectly sane book for real, awesome fighters.

Less than 700 entries to go! Um, park your car… at the end? This reduces scratching risk by half, and right, I forgot to mention– this curb has a mean guy who will fight you if you park where his car scratches it. I’m not sure even Sammy Franco knows what he’s afraid of at this point. His enemies are everything from sudden axe maniacs to grouchy shoppers to the general public. He has no idea what they want, but he is desperate to give it to them at any cost.

Don’t worry about thinking sometimes. Using all the judgment you have as a paranoid master of bites who knows which races do which crimes, know when it’s the right time to turn off your brain and get crazy.

Follow the rules of the death formula, the formula everyone knows for justifying deadly force. Wait, wait, I think Sammy got confused because instead of telling us that he told us to multiply where we want to hit our enemy by how hard we hit him? Ha ha that’s not anyth– wait. I guess… yeah, (1) Dick multiplied by (2) So-Goddamn-Hard does equal Death. I guess I knew this one already.

I love this book so much.

Really? The assailant’s inside position doesn’t sound very serious. Do you maybe have a picture of it?

Shit!!

There really is just the one street fighting secret.

Alright, I’m on it.

I really wish you put these in a different order, Sammy.

I … ha ha I love this book so much.

I love that Sammy made up a friend who once got massacred by a baseball bat ambush to help explain why revenge can be dangerous. He even called him a “street fighter!” Like, he wasn’t a dentist who won a fist fight after an arena football game. He was employed as a street fighter. How is this the first we’re hearing of this guy, Sammy? You thanked the border patrol at the start of this book but didn’t have room to mention this dear street fighter friend who died(?) in a Tom & Jerry skit?

In America you can walk right up to law enforcement officers and say, “That’s the man who bit me at the mannequin head store.” This is almost all of the book’s legal advice, by the way. It’s almost an afterthought, as if the possibility of a real fight is so far from Sammy Franco’s life it didn’t occur to him until secret #493 that you can get in trouble for it.

I can’t wait to see what these are going to be.

I love it.

Excellent.

Every country has its own stick strangle, but there is no better way to end a man’s life or a below average marriage than the American Stick Strangle.

Examining the motivations of the knife criminal may help you defeat him. “Reason number 8 of question mark: my lawyer said he has an easier time with my stab murders than my gun murders and, um, I’m not gonna pay a guy $40 an hour and not listen to him! Reasons 9 and 10: everywhere, affordable. God, listen to me go on. I just love knife crime!”

Everything about this is good advice. Anyone who tells you not to jump directly at a knife is probably trying to kill you with a knife.

Every street fighter should carefully, if possible, move to a house where they can own a gun.

Earlier you might have thought I was exaggerating about this author losing his mind after he ran out of special attacks. And here we are at secret #809 where he is listing all the skills you unlock if you spec your character into Gun Flashlight. He has listed four reasons it’s good to have a flashlight on your gun. Three of them are seeing in the dark, and the other one is not seeing in the dark. This is iconic in its dumbness. This is the American Stick Strangle of dumb.

Everyone thinks they’ll be able to trade jokes during a gunfight, but the fact is, cowboys and cop buddies learn specifically to shoot and speak at the same time. Without proper training, you might try to say, “Consider this a divorce, sweetheart!” and it will come out, “BOOMno no no what happened, what have I done?“

After number 867, Sammy gives up the longform street fighting secrets and starts writing little philosophical quotes. The only problem is he’s dumb as shit and his “Philosophy” is a child raised by television going through mood swings. These are fortune cookies that disagree with him and each other. They’re t-shirts you might see at an insurrection. They are bumper stickers you read on a truck before not making it out alive.

A bold stance to take in a book about ending lives by way of hand, knife, and gun is “the state should execute more people.”

I think you should have to wait more than 91 entries from your last failed explanation of flashlights before you start mocking stupid men.

In the early 900s, Sammy’s writer’s block crashes into the part of his brain that hates karate class. You’re not fucking magic, Karate. Sammy’s going to tell everybody, Karate. Maybe 15 or 20 times; it’s that important.

I don’t think kindness or consistency is fundamental to the Contemporary Fighting Arts System, but it will always protect you, you fat coward fucks. Why don’t you die already.

Easily, the most repeated theme in the book is how you can’t trust anyone, especially the trustworthy friends you trust. And yeah, I wasn’t expecting a self defense author to write a book about how things usually work out and you don’t have to worry about it, but this is a man who can’t order hot wings without telling the waitress she’ll die first if he tastes one single bite of poison. This is a man waiting for the world to betray him, and he’s ready with a flashlight on his gun that does nearly two things, or as he would put it, over four things.

Exactly like he promised, Sammy ends his book with ? ? ?. I looked everywhere for a code, but never found one. I thought maybe the first letter of each paragraph could spell something, but it was a dead end. After all, only a crazy person would do that. Only a crazy person would do that. So in the end, we can only guess what Sammy Franco’s final street fighting secret must be. All we know is that it’s probably dumb, crazy, and very different from something he said earlier.

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