Author: Seanbaby

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: World Bodybuilding Federation 1 with Dan McQuade 🌭

It’s an all beef, maximum meat Podcasting Day! We invited one of our favorites, Defector’s Dan McQuade, back on the show to discuss the most bulging failure in the history of sports entertainment! It’s Vince McMahon’s World Bodybuilding Federation. You can listen here or wherever y–

It was catastrophic and insane. A spectacle no emotion can decide on. Is it boring? Intensely fascinating? It was a steroid celebration followed by a steroid scandal. It was a desperate, money-burning love letter to bodybuilding that destroyed bodybuilding careers. How is it nothing yet so many things? We talked about it so long this is only part one! Like us on meat! Beef us on subscribe!

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Fighting the Pain Resistant Attacker 🌭

We all know pain is the best way to defeat a calm, rational enemy. But what if you’re fighting a man too insane to feel karate? Or too drunk to know when to die!? In 2010, Loren W. Christensen came up with a solution. It is my great, eye-gouging honor today to show you his book called FIGHTING the Pain Resistant Attacker (fighting drunks, dopers, the deranged and others who tolerate pain).

When he wrote this, Loren was a 64-year-old former Oregon cop who had written over forty books about killing dirtbags with your thumbs and feet. “Oh no, this is going to be racist,” you might be thinking. You have good instincts, but you’re wrong. In fact, on the very first page, he explicitly says three different times this is not racist:

This is a story of his time in Vietnam. He was in the military police, which might be why he puts “racial tensions” before “snipers, bombings, and rockets” in his list of Vietnam Dangers. The story goes on for a few pages because he takes time to explain things like how hard he can punch. However, when he got behind this black maniac, and again he doesn’t have a problem with that, he started throwing punches into his spine and got completely ignored. He concluded it was because “he was padded with fat and muscle and flying high on drugs.” He had to watch as this unstoppable African American tore through people of all colors in an inclusive display of violent harmony.

It was this gigantic man, immune to the pain of punches, who inspired the fighting techniques we’ll be learning today. I want to warn you, though; we will still be using a lot of pain. In fact, it’s pretty central to all of these moves. These might be my keen former-Cracked-writer senses talking, but it’s almost as if this man wrote a normal self-defense book then someone else gave it a provocative, misleading title. Anyway, let’s go over which type of enemies are weak against this book:

It’s good against all huge guys, intoxicated guys, cranky guys, and the mentally ill. It’s also effective against the very bonered. See, some attackers want you to hurt them. When that happens, Loren’s advice is do it. Scrape and bonk them… see where the relationship takes you. The point is, this book is great against everyone except small, calm attackers. So if you’re being strangled by your kind dentist, get a different book or die. For everyone else, it’s maniac killing time.

This move rules. I went into this book expecting complicated techniques designed to cripple a Terminator robot. Instead, Loren went, “Here’s how you defend against a real jerk: steps one through three are slap them upside their fucking head.”

One aspect of Loren’s self-defense system is to imagine a worst case scenario, a mentally deranged assailant, but also be super optimistic about it– he probably looks around a lot and protects his brain with a papier-mâché skull. This would be so fantastically dumb in a regular fighting book, but it’s a stupid too magnificent to look at in this particular one. If you’re fighting a pain resistant attacker, these are instructions on how to secretly smack them without their knowledge, not disable them. Why would he ever thin– oh, right. “Pain resistant.” This is what self-defense is left with when you take away the dick attacks.

Loren livens up his groin strike theories with comedy. Like remember when figure skater Nancy Kerrigan had her knee shattered with a pipe? Ha ha you get it, she was in a lot of pain and had no idea why she was attacked. Groin strikes are sometimes like that, and sometimes not. And you can’t tell if someone has a kickable penis from looks alone. Sure, kick it, but also don’t bother? Another aspect of Loren’s self-defense system is that nothing means anything and karate is more of a desperate guess than a real answer. Okay, let’s learn how to defend against a Dumpster Push.

Step One: get pushed. Steps Two and Three: bash them in the goddamn head. Just flap your paw into them like an orangutan trained to safely box children. This is glorious. As advice, it is so much less than the first instincts you would have in your first fight. This is like teaching someone to swim by saying, “I don’t know, thrash around in a primal attempt at survival.” What gave Loren the idea that you could stop any grabby creep with a gentle rabbit punch? I’m glad you asked! It was the time it happened to him!

I know better than to trust an anecdote in a karate manual, but this book does make more sense when you consider it was written by a clumsy idiot whose body immediately shuts down when something bumps into it. His next tip is probably going to be, “Distract any attacker by shouting their social security number. Mine is 240-33-0183, and the first time an enemy screamed that, I had already lost the battle. He was black, but that’s okay.” Anyway, now you know the defense for Dumpster Push. Let’s learn how to defend a Dumpster Tackle.

Bash! Repeat as necessary! Leave! YOU ARE NOW A MASTER OF LOREN W. CHRISTENSEN’S FIGHTING ARTS! Or maybe you’re skating away from a below average hockey fight. What I’m saying is, if you needed a book to tell you “try clubbing the angel dust warrior with your human hand,” you’re going to die. Until someone creates a style of kung fu based around holding still and waiting for death, this is the laziest martial art there could be, and Loren fights like he knows all these punches and conks are a waste of time. And I think I found another story to explain why. It’s the time he and five cops had to restrain a bodybuilder:

What’s great about this story is it demonstrates how Loren’s fighting abilities, which didn’t work on a giant man who felt no pain, also didn’t work on a giant man who felt way too much pain. For almost an hour, Loren and five other police officers rode around on a man who went berserk every four minutes. I love this story, and believe every word of it. If you told six cops you were a muscle werewolf, they would absolutely jump on you. It’s called a police code 139, or a “Hulk Rodeo,” and it pays double overtime. What I especially love is how after their brilliant idea of grabbing him until he let them tie him up so they could tranquilize him like an escaped rhinoceros, Loren says “This is an example of improvising.” He thinks the dumbest fucking thing anyone could possibly do and barely winning a 6-on-1 fight was, like, an innovative solution!

A lot of Loren’s advice is barely more than “win the fight and leave.” His ground technique here is to already be beating the shit out of your pain resistant enemy, and if things start to go their way, smash their face against the ground and go somewhere else. “Somewhere with fewer dead bitches,” you could tell their remains.

Let’s get serious for a minute. This is the kind of takedown defense that might have been okay in the ’80s when most karate battles took place in a yellow belt’s imagination, but Loren published this book in 2010. He could have asked any casual MMA fan, “We now live in a world with 20,000 recorded tackles… has any man ever stopped one by clapping?” The answer is no! You can’t fluff a man’s head like a pillow and expect the methamphetamines to wear off.

If the clapping didn’t work and you find yourself mounted by your assailant, Loren’s aggressively optimistic advice is to keep clapping as needed. How would this hurt anyone? What am I, Brendan Fraser at the 67th Annual Golden Globes? Boom, roasted 2010 style.

This is how to punch a maniac in the neck when he is in your moun– wait, no. Loren, this is your “guard.” I get none of this would work anyway, but it’s worrying you don’t even know the names for the things you’re getting wrong.

You’re still wrong, Loren. About a very basic thing mentioned during every televised fight at least fifteen times. How can this be? This man claims to have 11 black belts. He has been a martial artist since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. This is like spending your entire career editing encyclopedias and your retirement speech is, “What the fuck is a double U? Giraffes are bicycles, thank you.” It’s impossible. It’s stupid in what has to be a deliberate way. But why?

Well, I think I figured it out.

A lot of martial artists like Loren have to pretend MMA doesn’t exist because when you actually test these moves, it turns out you’ve been playing a pointless game of ninja make-believe your whole life. But Loren is feigning ignorance for a whole other reason. He seems to think you can’t get convicted for sitting on a man and beating him to death if you don’t know what that’s called. An entire page of this book is dedicated to pretending you’ve never heard the words “ground and pound!” To avoid prosecution after you do it! This is the kind of detail a fifth grader would make up to explain why Steven Seagal can’t be arrested for his death matches, but Loren W. Christensen was a fucking real cop. How many suspects did he let go because they claimed to have never heard the term “missing wife”?

Sometimes a maniac will try to kick you. Step one is don’t get kicked. Step two, three, and three again are FUCKING BASH THEM.

This is another great move you can try against your local unstoppable lunatics. After you’ve won the fight, try slapping them in the neck. Loren calls this move SLAP FROM BEHIND, but you better pretend you’ve never heard that name when your lawyer asks.

To save time, Loren sometimes skips past the easy part of the fight. Let’s assume you’ve already defended against their attacks, taken their back, and secured their neck in a choke. For legal purposes we’ll call this “the attacker’s left mount.” Great, now squeeze. Keep squeezing. Wait for them to be groggy. You’re listening for snores, possible whispered secrets, and… now! Flee.

A wall is not like a dumpster. If you are tackled into a wall, you want to clap, not conk. It’s in your best interest not to remember this, but this forbidden move is called Fierce Urkel Plays the Accordian, and if you land it the fight is already over. But, you know what? This would be the perfect time to see if you can really break a neck like in an action mo– oh shit, it worked! Flee.

Somewhere towards the middle of the book Loren remembers its premise. He realizes all these attackers he’s dropping from ear slaps and eye pokes are supposed to be immune to pain. It’s here where he comes up with his boldest pain resistant attacker theory– pain hurts again if you rub it. For instance, instead of poking your attacker in his eyes, which would do nothing to a madman, you rub your fingers across his face. It’s crazy, the childlike plan of a lifelong idiot, but fighting madness with madness is crazy enough to work. Let me show you another example:

Once you have the junkie trapped in any face clasp or advanced head clomp, saw your arm back and forth to “activate numbed pain sensors.” Wake up, pain. It’s time to party. You can also use this to check if a sticker smells like grape. The point I’m trying to make is, Loren thinks these moves are deadly because they’re how he lost a fight to his big brother in 1953.

You won’t always be grabbing the drunks and dopers from behind. Sometimes they’ll be grabbing you! If this happens (rare), do a little peek over your shoulder to find your attacker’s eyes. If they’re not where you look, they’re probably in the spot you’re not looking. No time to rub! You have to just poke and hope he’s not immune to pain! Sorry, this should have been in a different book, flee.

If you hate poking and rubbing eyeballs but still want to blind an unstoppable monster, you still have some options. You can delicately flick at the corner of their eye. There’s no need for violence when any gesture made anywhere near the eye will cause enough pain to disable a man who feels no pai– wait, okay, now I hear it. This one’s dumb. But you know what’s not dumb? Eyeball law.

Get your story straight for when you explain yourself to a jury. First tell them you tried all of your pain-based martial arts techniques. They’ll have a hard time believing this, but next you tell them your pain-based martial arts techniques did nothing. This part of the story they’ll believe. Then, and only then, do you tell them you decided to unleash the deadly face rub that landed you here in eyeball court. Again, it’s worth reminding everyone this author was a police officer. How many murderers did he let go because they claimed their wives could not be stopped by nerve pinches? Enough legalese– let’s learn how to stop a tackle!

If you’re being tackled, bash the pain intolerant attacker in the brachial plexus, the most painful part of the neck. It’s hard to find, but you can keep trying until you get it. It’s not a great plan, but it’s only a maniac attack. Have fun with it. Speaking of fun, here’s the origin story of why Loren W. Christensen thinks you have a magic off switch on your neck:

In the history of martial arts literature, no one has ever written a book like this. Loren has designed a combat system specifically to defeat himself, a man whose nervous system shuts down when you poke any part of him. From his point of view, Fighting the Pain Resistant Attacker is a selfless and noble act. It’s like Aquaman handing out hair dryers in case he ever loses his mind and must be stopped.

Of all the moves in the book, this might be my favorite. You wait for your attacker to swing a knife at you and fuck it up. Then you kick them in the neck after verifying it’s a justified neck kick and making sure your kicks are faster than knife. I’m not the one to say this because my kicks are faster than knife and I’m never wrong, but this, every word of this page, might be the worst advice possible under any circumstance. It’s spectacular. Maybe flee, but also maybe DEATH KICK YOUR KNIFEMAN.

Loren isn’t good at taking a hit, explaining karate, or defeating the pain resistant attacker, but he’s great at slapping. I don’t have any notes for this one. I only included it because I think slapping is the worst thing a man can have as his only skill. Almost suspiciously worst.

Wait, Loren once accidentally stomped on another cop’s leg in karate class? Is the lie in that story that it happened at all or that it was an accident? Would a police force even let a cop keep his job if he thought it was reasonable to accidentally stomp on a prone man? I’ll research that later, but first: HEAD AND NECK COMBINATIONS!

The Head and Neck Combinations section shows how we can chain our attacks together. For instance, you can follow up a headbutt with a headsnuggle to activate the junkie’s nerve receptors or whatever. Then you… I mean, you get it. Bash and flee. This sucks. I want a challenge. Aren’t there any moves for easily distracted attackers who kind of forget where they are?

Oh, perfect. Wait for them to try to figure out where they are and then BASH. Don’t even bother fleeing. This poor, confused man will never be able to identify you.

There’s a whole series of these toward the end of the book– moves for finishing a man already mostly dead from liquor.

For a guy concerned about the legality of street murder, it’s weird for Loren to advise his readers to shove a drunk by the back of the head to amplify his fall damage. Like, he’s not even trying to spin this one. This man is going through something totally unrelated to us and we’re smearing the skin off his skull for doing it too close. Grind it until the son of a bitch is more sidewalk than head; wait for help to arrive or flee when you can.

“Sometime all it takes is one powerful blow to activate the arm’s delete button,” says the man who thinks everyone’s arm has a delete button. “Don’t you guys hate when you hit your leg nipples on a coffee table and can’t get a boner for 15 years?” he adds.

This move almost makes me feel bad because bonking someone in the arm until it drops lifelessly is such a sweetly innocent idea of combat. It’s like the author still believes anything possible and I shouldn’t stand in the way of it.

Seriously, this is wonderful. Punch both arms until they don’t work! It’s something my daughter would suggest if we were being crushed by a robot.

Well, now you’ve ruined it, Loren.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Adrienne H, Junior Hulk Rodeo Breakaway Roping Champion (Fixit Division).

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Todd McFarlane’s The Twisted Land of Oz with Merritt K 🌭

In your wettest moment, whose name would you call if you were aroused beyond containment on Satan’s pelvis? Hi, I’m Todd McFarlane. And this week on the podcast, Brockway, Seanbaby, and Merritt K are talking about the time I asked myself that very question. In 2003, I wrote a dark retelling of Wizard of Oz, but no– far more evil than you’re thinking. I took out the plot and added one boner. Then I broke it up into parts and spread it across the packaging of grotesque action figures. But less grotesque than you’re thinking. More like stupid. Listen here, or any place the nightcast pods.

I worry I wasn’t making myself clear when I said this was stupid. I’m saying I took Dorothy’s shirt off, made everything all shitty, and again, told the story of her doing nothing on toys for extremely single adult men. And Seanbaby and Merritt had no idea Brockway was going to do it. Brockway just told them to prepare for me, Todd “The Toddfather” McFarlane, and then surprised them with my Wizard of Oz fan fiction. Seriously, though; what if Dorothy was 18, so she is legal, okay, and she’s a virgin, right, but so hot. And she just needs it. She’s also a freak, right, but not a weird one. Like, she wears a corset and doesn’t mind dating older, nerdy men. Mmm. Now picture the regular Wizard of Oz and you’re daring to step into the world of Todd McFarlane’s Oz.

Laugh in hysterical horror at my twisted version of Dorothy’s dog, Toto. Spoilers if you haven’t bought the 17th toy yet, but suddenly everything in Oz turns into a dumb Spawn monster. Except for the supple, barely legal flesh of Dorothy who stays so, so desirable and desperately wants to give her tight flower to the first older nerd she meets. Mmm. I’m Todd McFarlane, and you’re welcome.

Podcast illustrated by Brett Ellefson

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Official Mortdecai Twitter Account

To view this content, you must be a member of 1900HOTDOG's Patreon
Unlock with Patreon
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.
Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: God’s Clowns 🌭

Hello, where are the clowns? More clownly, why am they? Clowns are hidden, forever, and hidden. They are both clown and clown. How is clown, clown teeth. Clowns definitely aren’t maybe, or is it? Hello again, I’m Seanbaby and here is reason: I’ve recently finished reading GOD’S CLOWNS: MESSENGERS OF THE GOOD NEWS.

Written in 1990, GOD’S CLOWNS is a 135 page exploration of a metaphor about clowns actually being other things. I can’t stress this enough: it is not a book about how to spread Christ’s message with pies and honks. Nor is it the memoirs of a missionary clown. Those types of books are pretty common. I have an entire section of my library dedicated to them where I weirdly always find my missing scissors, but none of them are like this one. As far as I can tell, aside from one afternoon as a child, the author has never been a clown, Christian or default. He is simply a big fan. No, more than that. This clown nerd, C. Welton Gaddy, has decided nothing is more majestic or important than the clown. They are the center of all life. In many insane, poorly explained ways, they are all life. Let’s get started.

Note: There were no images in GOD’S CLOWNS: MESSENGERS OF THE GOOD NEWS, but when I ordered it from an online bookseller, a nice lady (who must have thought I was a Christian clown) included a free copy of The Clown Ministry Handbook (3rd edition). This was lucky since I, and this is real, only owned the 4th edition. Anyway, this other bonus clown book had more than enough pictures of Christian clowns to illustrate this article. These images are irrelevant to the text, and are merely a haunting presence.

No one will ever love clowns more than C. Welton Gaddy, and even he could only write about clowns for four sentences before they made somebody cry. This opening is the perfect encapsulation of the book. This is a madman blindly sprinting away with a premise. What if we need clowns!? What if they are necessary for all things!? WHAT IF THE ANSWER IS ALREADY YES AND IT’S TIME TO EXPLAIN WHY.

Gaddy also writes like a D student making fun of a C student trying to sound smart in a freshman philosophy class. He is in the first half of the first page of a clown explanation, and they are already reflecting the pathos of desperation to challenge us to entertain redemptive fantasies. Nonsense. Raw, clown-bonered nonsense. And it never changes. If Christian clown hands closed around your throat right now, you would die with a full understanding of God’s Clowns and this book named after them. For everyone else, let’s continue.

This is the story of the time Gaddy got to be a child clown in a parade. Well, most of a parade. His legs weren’t long enough for the whole thing, though his soul was. This is page 2, and clowning is already a transcendent gift of freedom to the human spirit. Gaddy spent some of an afternoon waving at people in a costume, and he writes about it like a dying X-Men recounting their origin story. “As a youth I was hunted for my large shoes, my ‘unnatural’ pie abilities, but t-today I die… a free clown.” What I’m saying is there are no fucking brakes on the part of Gaddy’s brain that imagines clowns.

Clowns aren’t exactly a normal thing to like, but go ahead and like them. This, however, is an absolutely deranged way to put it into words. Clown faces continue to evoke your appreciation? Fucking what. I dare you to put that a crazier way. Oh, they feed on the imaginary in each of us? Fine, I guess that was my fault. Speaking of nuts, Gaddy has some criticism for people on top of parade floats: be far more emotionally vulnerable, you plastic sons of bitches. Fuck you.

Genuinely curious, I searched through the whole book to figure out what the hell is wrong with C. Welton Gaddy. It’s dense, unthinkably thick with clown metaphor and clown description and nothing else. However, I did find this passage of him describing how he thinks children play. It might help us.

So this might explain why Gaddy can’t deal with the thrill of clowning. While trying to picture the kinds of things children play, his only four examples were: pretend to be at church, pretend to be at work, commercial airline pilot, and pretend to be at church. This is more of an observation than a joke, but I guess it’s easy to enjoy clowns when your soul is already dead.

You probably know this, but motivated reasoning is when you decide something then figure out how it’s possible later. Christians do this naturally sinc– you know what? We don’t need to get into this. The important thing is C. Welton Gaddy somehow decided: clowns. They are good, and everything good is them. In a way, what isn’t a clown? The rest of the book is that idea stretched far past its breaking point, and is indistinguishable from a clown representing himself in a murder trial.

Gaddy looked up the word “clown” in the Bible, and didn’t find it. He did find “fool” several times, which is a type of clown, in a way, sort of, so God probably meant all of His prophets were clowns. I went to enough church as a child to know that looking up words in the dictionary and rethinking them with the 3rd or 4th definitions is a normal starting point for a sermon. So when Gaddy started claiming everyone who ever got called a fool in the Bible was technically, when you really think about it, on Team Clown, no big deal. I didn’t understand why he was doing it, or to what end, but it seemed like the ordinary thoughts of an incurious mind killing time before death. I could have put that in a nicer way. C. Welton Gaddy is the religious version of someone explaining how Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Wait, that’s meaner.

After he was done pointing out all the characters in the Bible who were legally clowns because people laughed at them, he moved on to the ultimate clown: Jesus Christ. Again, I have no idea what he is getting out of this. I don’t agree with any of what he’s saying and would call you a fucking idiot if you did, but even if he’s confinced you, fine. Jesus is a clown. Now what? Why lead us here? What is so funny about Jesus?

Ha ha holy shit. We give definitions some wiggle room, and there are a lot of games you can play with words to make a bad point. But fucking Jesus fuck, if you are saying a man getting crucified died an honorary clown because his murderers were sort of ironic… maybe saying things isn’t for you? This is like beheading your neighbor and arguing it was okay by holding up a fish. You’re wrong and crazy in ways that won’t make sense to you, so I’m not going to try. I wouldn’t even know which fish to hold up, you lunatic.

Clowns are rambunctious, yet stoic! Minimalist, yet Santa Fe! And these aren’t just Gaddy’s provably unhinged speculations! He cited an actual “careful student of clowns.” This seems unnecessary, though; since the only other type of clown student is, of course, dead. I am not being cute when I say I have no idea what is going on in this book. It has the structure and content of a nine hour scream. I promise I had no intention of coming in here and making a bunch of murder clown jokes, but read some of this and tell me you feel safe:

I don’t understand why someone would define clowns in increasingly strange ways for 70,000 words. This is something a clown would weep during a dismemberment. The main text is pointless madness and the subtext is a cobra-like penis bite. Despite his love of them, it is not possible to know less about anything than C. Welton Gaddy knows about clowns, who are now every character in the Bible, beacons of joy, icons of revolution, and tortured lovers. And you know what? Why not? They’re unfettered by reality itself:

Now that clowns are defined by any trait, word, or concept and every Biblical character is one, Gaddy starts to consider which secular historical figures might have also been clowns. Now what I want you to do is stop here and think about it. Who do you think is first on his list? What person from history was, when you think about it, a clown? Seriously, think about it. You might really guess it.

. . .

Okay, let’s see if you’re right.

You either guessed Martin Luther King, Jr. or you’re a goddamn coward.

Admit it: even after Martin Luther King Jr., you weren’t expecting to read “prisoners of World War II and Vietnam. Talk about clowns!” If clown ever meant anything before this book, it doesn’t now. Clown is a scurry of legs fleeing from the light. It’s a smell on the wind that lets you know you’re prey. It’s the pure laughter of a child playing church accountant.

Now that you know what a clown is, let’s discuss laughter. It’s what you think of when you think of clowns, along with Vietnam POWs… Martin Luther King, Jr…. the hilarious death of Jesus. Gaddy lists the three main types of clown laughter: fear, trauma, and fake. Wait, holy fuck, I wasn’t kidding. I listed three things no one could possibly use as the pillars of laughter and somehow Gaddy went back and… h-how did he do that?

Chapter four! Time to lose our mind a little bit more! We need clowns, we simply must have them. Please, I beg of you: clowns. We need them, I’m not sure I’m making myself clear, give clowns unto us, Amen.

I guess Gaddy wasn’t done listing civil rights leaders who were plainly clowns. Which, again, is his highest compliment. What’s interesting about Rosa Parks is that when Gaddy calls her a clown he is suddenly sarcastic. And I’m speaking with the benefit of a brain unpoisoned by clown enthusiasm, but I would say the sentence where you describe Rosa Parks’ dignity is the wrong moment to try sarcasm for the first time. And it’s, I don’t know, interesting that Gaddy considers the cops who arrested her to also be clowns. What cards! Rosa Parks and the 1955 Alabama PD– just one big team of silly billies working together to make us do all three types of laughter!

Our need for clowns is quite urgent and can’t be overstated, even this late in the book. We need clowns, we need at least some clowns. Everyone is clowns, yes, but still: we will literally die if we are away from clowns for too long. This needs no explanation, and this book has no meaningful structure, so it’s time to move on to more historical clowns.

To the starving people of Calcutta, Mother Teresa was an angel. To everyone else, a little clown.

Clowns tell the truth. Are you fat? Clowns know. Are you irrational? Clowns are Martin Luther King, Jr.. They express grief. They refuse to comply with conventional goodness, fears are screamed aloud. What were we talking about? Irrational? Ha ha ha ha ha irrational!?

Maybe C. Welton Gaddy wasn’t clear enough with you, reader. Tell him where the clowns are. He needs them. Or maybe they need him. In fact, maybe they are terribly sad. Maybe we’re asking too much of them to be all things and people in our life. This is the book adaptation of leaping from a bush to steal a second grader. I have never seen an idea so tiny get stretched so far. If you took the skin of a clown and wrapped it around a van, it would be exactly the same as GOD’S CLOWNS in every relevant way.

You don’t have to be a Jim Crow-era police officer or a sad, beleaguered soul to be a clown. You could be a teenager who doesn’t fuck or the kind of person who doesn’t tell a sick man to “just give up and die” like his unperceptive friends. These are all normal things to think and type. Seriously, we all joke about clowns being scary, but how else would you describe this book? I caught it trying to crawl down my throat while I slept. When I threw it in a fire, the voices of fourteen lost children said thank you. And when it reappeared unburnt the next day, the same voices told me I’d made a mistake.

Aside from everything else, I hate the way Gaddy talks. “Ah, my inventing cap has been donned and mayfor by happenstance, methinks a clown convention there should be!” This dumb fucking shit thinks he’s a clown expert, but he came up with the idea of a clown convention seven years after the World Clown Association’s first clown convention. Which means the clowns, all of them, made a clown agreement to not invite the author of GOD’S CLOWNS to the clown party. This is like writing a book on marriage and saying, “we should come up with a way for women to have sex,” but only after spending 130 pages explaining how women are, at their essence, Martin Luther King, Jr..

Oh good, he ended his book non-insanely. With the forbidden words clowns use to echolocate in the dark. The author brings up an important point, though. For Christ’s sake, where are the clowns, where are the clowns? Where are they then, fuck, the clowns must be near. But where, Amen.

…

This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rhiannon, who knows exactly where the clowns are. Who contains the clowns. Who is all clowns.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Seanbaby’s Big Book Game with Jason Pargin 🌭

Not everything has a reason. Sometimes chaos is the answer you choose for a question no one asked. Hi, we had best-selling author Jason Pargin on the show, and to remind everyone about his upcoming book, Zoey is Too Drunk for This Dystopia (which you can pre-order), we played a full Dogg Zzone 9000 episode-length Seanbaby’s Book Game. It’s the beloved game show normally only heard by supporters on our Patreon, but today it’s for everyone. Listen here! Or anywhere you get podcasts!

The rules are simple and the goals are impossible. The players, Brockway and Jason, roll a die to decide their fate. This part they can’t control, and it determines which book Seanbaby opens. Then they choose a number between 1 and 101 to decide their fate again. This part is merely the illusion of control and it determines which terrible thing they get. The object of the game is to land on these real, published pieces of humor/advice and score points when they are useful or fun. Let’s look at the books pulled from the extremely cursed 1900HOTDOG library:

A roll of One leads into 101 Things To Do During a Dull Sermon, a foot fetishist’s guide to getting kicked out of church. Two sends them into 101 Things You Need To Do While You Are a Child, a carelessly assembled series of notes a Polish maniac copied from an article about things to do while you are a child and accidentally translated into death hexes. Rolling a Three opens the book 101 Wacky Computer Jokes, a 1998 grandparent’s best guess at how you make puns about office equipment. A Four unleashes 101 Uses for a Bridesmaid Dress, a 0-note joke shrieking as it’s torn apart across infinite time and space. Five is 101 Ways To Say “I Love You,” an instruction manual for needy retired wives with no hobbies or self-respect. And a jackpot roll of Six gets you 1001 Best Pick-Up Lines by Don Diebel, a series of worst-case scenarios for the women passing as briefly as possible through your life.

In this great game of destiny, will Jason and Brockway find anything useful? Anything fun? These are the stakes! These are the battlegrounds! This is Seanbaby’s Book Game!