Author: Seanbaby

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! 🌭

In 2005, using only Comic Sans and a questionable sense of reality, Katharine DeBrecht wrote a book about her dodgy conservative values for kids. She called it Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed! and it retailed for $15.95.

The back cover’s first blurb came from Melanie Morgan, a radio host who, let me look her up… said a New York Times reporter deserved the gas chamber, accused Barack Obama of being a Muslim, threatened to kill Nancy Pelosi, and said George Soros worked with the Nazis “in order to further his own career.” And speaking of working with Nazis to further careers, Katharine Debrecht has used every shameless, MAGA culture war trigger word she could think of to promote herself, and she has 13 followers on Twitter and two on Facebook.

So look, if you’re new to this, being “conservative” means you live in a world too complicated for you, so you simply refuse to believe in all the confusing parts, replacing them in your imagination with crazy shit you hate, while also demanding everyone take you serio– you know what? You get it. I don’t need to spend all this time explaining a thing you already know. Besides, I can sum up Conservatism in one word: windmill safety. *windmill safety. Sorry, autocorrect kept changing my punchline from “whitesupremacy.”

Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed! is about Tommy and Lou, two small town, Chrstian, hardworking, great American boys. If this was a movie, book, TV show, video game, or any other media produced in the last 150 years, you would have no doubt in your mind they and their town hid a dark secret. Katharine says Tommy and Lou are good little boys whose only flaw is sometimes they pray a little too fast. You know who talks like that? A woman who isn’t mentioning a third son getting the sin whipped out of him at gay camp, or the many village daughters given to The Man In The Well. If you’re looking for the perfect tone for the opening of a story about a cute small town that eats outsiders, ask any conservative “baseball mom” to describe her idea of Perfectville, USA.

Tommy and Lou want a swingset for their yard, and their loving mother tells them to go fucking buy one. She does this while standing right next to their living room portrait of Ronald Reagan, and I know decoding symbolism in right wing cartoons is like putting diarrhea back into a cat, but telling your children, “I’m keeping all the money and you can go fuck yourself,” is actually a really elegant way to explain Reaganomics to kids.

Luckily, the good little boys are resourceful and clever. They saw their mother point to a lemon tree, tell them to make lemonade, and it gave them an idea: offering her to The Man in the Well to bargain for their lost sisters. Then they had a second, better idea: asking God to pleasemakeSpanishillegal, inJesusChrist’snameAmen. Then, after seven more outrageous joke ones, it hit them: lemonade!

“We’ll make lemonade and sell it!” Tommy spelled out. It wasn’t a complex idea, but the boys had it for hours. They had it all day, and nearly had it past their bedtime. If they weren’t such good little boys, they might be awake still, just having the shit out of the idea to make lemonade and sell it. Anyway, after passing out with all that capitalism adrenaline in their veins, Tommy and Lou each dream the same 34 page (I had to count because there aren’t page numbers) political cartoon.

The boys find themselves in Liberaland, an assault of mixed messages and nonsensical parody. You can tell the artist has picked a side in a culture war, but it’s not clear why or what the win conditions could be. I’m sure Katharine DeBrecht thinks she became the way she is for logical reasons, and I’m sure she has strongly wrong opinions about any wedge issue that turns up on her Facebook feed, but her mind is an empty toilet where grifters dump their propaganda.

When left with the wide open topic of “stuff liberal people do that sucks,” she couldn’t come up with a single coherent criticism. Is it decadent wealth? Discount prices? Working together? Eating Dean’s cream? This picture requires six years of right wing radicalization to even know what she’s referencing and four more to learn why you hate them. And it’s meant to indoctrinate kids? Their skulls aren’t soft enough for this Boomer shit. Here, young boy, enjoy this pun about a talking point used to explain to grandparents how the ACLU will take away churches. If I was six I would assume this was a coffee table book of bad kidnapper tattoos.

Let’s skip ahead a little bit. Their lemonade stand is a success!

The dumb fucking idiot kids can’t read or write, but they’re amazing lemonade chefs and even better businessmen. The town loves their lemonade stand. “Not too sweet!” they scream as they fill the street, blindly wandering into traffic in every direction. I’m not sure how the kids keep their overhead so low when they’re giving away $1.36 worth of glassware with every 25ï¿  purchase, and I get these are a lot of notes, but I think it’s interesting the author of this book doesn’t know how children, alphabets, lemonade, sidewalks, economics, or streets work. And here this dingbat is, writing a blueprint for navigating all of life.

At this point you might be wondering how these children are the good guys. They’ve turned a public street into a non-stop lemonade riot and they did it for money. Sure, that’s fine. Noble even, but Tommy and Lou also champion the most conservative of all values. No, not drinking your liberal tears. No, not fucking your feelings. No, not measuring skulls with calip– look, if you’re not going to take this seriously, stop guessing. I’m talking about social welfare, of course. In order to make these free market capitalist boys the heroes of this story, the deranged right wing author has them set aside $1.75 to buy shoes for local “kids with no shoes.”

It’s sort of sweet, but should they be doing this? Wouldn’t those shoeless children love their shoes more if they worked for them? I can’t remember which book I read that in.

Now that the boys are successful, a liberal tax lover leaps from behind a tree. “Hellllloo,” he says, touching himself with his meaty hands while he gazes at their money. These are the author’s words, not mine. One of the cool things about being me is I know “fat Democrat jerks off on little boys’ lemonade stand money” isn’t quite right for a children’s book.

The kids, who I mentioned earlier are total fucking idiots, have never heard of taxes. The mayor explains it’s money we give to liberals so they can take care of us, which is a perfectly right wing way to describe something in that it’s kind of not “wrong,” except when you think about it in any way. It’s basically a reworded version of, “I’m exhaustingly uneducated except for conservative talking points and I refuse to apply nuance to anything other than every man’s sexual misconduct charges.”

Ha ha ha the mayor levitates away with their money screaming, “Boo-yah!”

Is the villain supposed to be fun? What a strange and amazing decision from the mind of a truly impenetrable writer.

There’s something I should have mentioned by now. In this vivid and very long dream, the boys are full-time, around-the-clock lemonade men now. Their entire day is running the lemonade stand and their entire night is squeezing lemons. And while they are doing their late night lemon squeezing, they see the man who robbed them come on the TV to announce he is going to take their shoe charity money and spend it on, what’s this? D-dustpans!?

So we all get the criticism this is trying to make– liberals are crazy wrong! They don’t understand shoes like good boys! But what events took place that made Katharine think this? When you’re taking a stand against a thing no one would ever want to do and you have to imagine it inside a child’s dream for it to take place, maybe you don’t need to have this fight? Maybe your enemies don’t exist? This isn’t even my field of expertise, but I can think of a few ways unregulated charities run by children could go wrong. Until I saw this book, I would have assumed anyone could have.

So okay, the book made its point, right? Leave the free market alone and trust in the eventual generosity of the wealthy. Without opening a browser, I’m 98% sure it’s a bad idea, but it’s not like any kid ever read this. I’m just glad this lesson on taxes is over and an author this stupid and clumsy didn’t try to tackle any of the more delicate cultural divides in our country.

Ha ha ha, holy fuck.

Alright, so the kids wanted to thank Jesus Christ for the gift of, and I quote, “Mom and Dad let[ting] them stay up one hour later to squeeze lemons.” So they hang a picture of Him on their lemonade stand, which causes a second liberal to appear. This one is part snake and he tells them the Jesus offended a man in a limousine and now they have to hang a picture of a big toe instead, because conservative grievances are extremely real. To any kids reading, it’s like this: we all know snake men won’t really come in and replace your God with feet, but how dare the liberals try to send snake men in to replace your God with feet! This is why your mommy and daddy are mad all the time, pal, and why you had to watch one of them die on a respirator over FaceTime.

You might have seen this one coming. Hillary Clinton shows up next. She yells at the kids for not following health codes and tells them they have to use less sugar and include a side of broccoli with their lemonade. Again, this is a child’s dream in a book by a maniac, but what’s the ultimate stand being taken here? I don’t think you should trust anyone fighting so irrationally for their right to put whatever they want in your drink. Katharine desperately struggled to come up with a circumstance where “inalienable freedom of drink ingredients” was a smart idea and I would argue she did not find one.

In a series of analogies too graceless to be of any use, the insane politicians have destroyed the lemonade stand. They have turned it into a permanent press conference, but also an overpriced health food stand, but also a socialist commune, but also now their property. There is no longer any messaging and the best case scenario here is that a young reader learns all liberals are mentally ill because they’re crazy. What a waste of $15.95 when you could do the same thing by choking your child to sleep every night from behind a Jimmy Carter mask.

This is a kid’s book, and we’re now twelve pages into an extended satirical argument against business regulations. It’s like Katharine got fired for sneezing into a salad bar and then arrested for starting a fake charity and a voice in her head spent her entire prison sentence explaining how it’s actually the universe that’s wrong and she needs to tell the kids.

Oh my god, it’s still going. Broccoli and dustpans litter the liberal dystopia and I think one of the kids is dead? I feel like whatever political debate was going on was beaten to death half a book ago. I get not everyone is going to agree on how much lawlessness it takes to make the best lemonade, but anyone taking a side in the battle at this point is nuts. Have your wasteland of unsweetened broccoli lemonade. Or your kids running a fake shoe charity scheme endorsed by Jesus. No one cares. Kids, if you think the author is right about those being the two sides of a thing, I have bad news about your piece of shit brain and how hard your life is going to be for you.

Tommy and Lou both wake up from their identical dream, and sure enough, after 34 pages, they never found an opportunity to get the remaining money in their SHOÆŽ FUND to those shoeless children. I’m not saying it was a scam the whole time, I’m just saying in a wild fantasy designed specifically to showcase the superiority of conservative ideals, our heroes were defeated by enemies who don’t and will never exist and broke a sacred promise they made to destitute children for 87ï¿ . Or the author forgot, but that’s silly. Everyone’s right to give money to charity seemed so central to her anti-liberal beliefs.

Lou’s takeaway from the dream was, “Fuck everything if liberals exist, man.” And the lesson Tommy learned was, “No, brother. We must grind our bones on the mill of capitalism.” And maybe they were both a little bit right because the book ended with them getting right back to work, “like the good little conservatives they were.”

Has the phrase “like the good little conservatives they were,” ever followed something positive? It sounds like something you’d only say after, “They explained to black athletes how they were wrong. . .” or “They sure had a lot to say about transgender people using the bathroom. . .“

I just feel like any sane author would have proofread this and said, “Oh no, I forgot to have a point or a plot or a lesson. Oh no, I think my entire ideology is morally bankrupt. Honey! Honey, I reread my book and saw the reflection of my beliefs and I… I might be a soulless moron! What? What do you mean, you know!?”

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Dr. Awkward: who only uses their meaty hands to steal from the children of lapsed Catholics.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Dirtbag Jeopardy! 🌭

On today’s very special roboquiz edition of The Dogg Zzone 9000, we invite back friend-of-the-🌭 and host of the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating Podcast with Alex Schmidt, Alex Schmidt!

The rules are simple: Brockway and actual-Jeopardy!-champ Schmitty face off in a game of Jeopardy! reprogrammed by Seanbaby in the Weiner 2600, only they’re not facing off, many of the rules have been changed, and the stakes could spell doom for all of us. It’s not simple at all! Listen here, or wherever you fart-sound, arooga your earholes, ba-boing sliiiiide whistle!

After the show, Patreon hot dog champions and better can listen to the bonus podcast featuring Seanbaby and Alex really struggling with an action-packed episode of That Guy From Airwolf. It’s all games today, so if you like fun: subscribe and review! Slide whistle us on Fart Sound!

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Shield 🌭

Last month of this very year, Archie Comics published The Mighty Crusaders #1: The Shield. It was a lifeless reboot of a 60-year-old knockoff superhero team, which isn’t as mean-spirited as it sounds since that describes most comics, but the reason we’re talking about it is because it was written and illustrated by Rob Liefeld. And it may very well be the most Liefeldian thing ever made, which is absolutely as mean-spirited as it sounds.

If you’re not familiar, Rob Liefeld was a comics illustrator from the ’90s who could sort of draw a few human parts and nothing else. Everyone noticed this, talked about it, and hated it, but they just kept letting him do it and here we are. The Shield’s second page shows a group of superheroes who look like they were mocked up this morning under the words “The Pinebrook Nazarene Youth Camp Super Duper Squad (Option Four).”

It’s okay if you don’t know the classic Archie heroes Flygirl, Captain Commando, Jaguar, Black Hood, Comet, Fox, and Lancelot Strong. They don’t do anything in this issue other than stand here hiding their difficult-to-draw feet behind their (maybe) office’s only furniture– a rectangle drawn by a 4th grader learning how to draw shapes. One hallmark of Rob Liefeld’s writing is that every character gets one small text box explaining which superhero archetype they are, no second part to this list, and then the comic gets cancelled.

Let’s talk about superhero archetypes for a second. Comic writers have been using them as shorthand for decades, and we’re fine with it. A character in a third party superhero world might run into a “clearly Batman guy” or “whatever their Fantastic Four is.” We don’t need to know everything about them; they’re just there to establish the setting so the author can show us his unique take on the genre. Rob Liefeld doesn’t do it like that. He thinks his idea of an 85th Captain America guy with no interesting twist totally rules. The Shield isn’t even his first “exactly like Captain America guy.” He was so good at drawing Captain America he produced a comic called Fighting American, who was a guy in a Captain America costume who carried a round shield.

The Fighting American had a team just barely not called The Avengers with a guy named Smash who turned into a giant monster when he got angry and a viking god of thunder who doth verily spaketh like this. You probably believe me, but I feel like I should make it clear I’m not kidding:

If you’re wondering how they got away with this, they mostly didn’t. They were sued and Fighting American was legally prohibited from throwing his shield which didn’t matter because the company went bankrupt and Rob created another Captain America called Agent America which also didn’t matter because lawyers told him to stop fucking making Captain Americas. Every entertainment industry blindly regurgitates the same idea over and over hoping it will work again, but it’s rare to see this pathology in one specific person. Which brings us back to The Shield, the (at least) fourth Captain America Rob Liefeld illustrated. 

The Shield is in his (maybe) apartment, sitting alone on his rectangle. A hot dog menu levitates? Rob Liefeld, without exaggeration, one of the biggest successes in modern art and he has remained incurious about how to draw any single thing in 30 years. This chair’s existence is very much like if Richard Donner asked a makeup artist which side the camera things film from.

Because art is life, this world-famous illustrator drew The Shield watching a panel of himself from later in the comic on his TV. He lives in a cement box decorated with only a shape and a lamp, and yet even this was too much clutter for Rob to remember to draw the levitating hot dog menu.

Agents wearing the kind of shoulder pads Rob knows how to draw burst in through The Shield’s open window and knobless door! Chunks from unrelated objects follow them in! They’re here for his invincible armor and, wait did they say invincible armor, oh no, that explains why none of their weapons are going to work.

In stakes Rob Liefeld seems to think are high, these faceless agents from an organization we don’t know harmlessly shoot the superhero for reasons not made clear. He barely has to move to beat them, which is good because Rob thinks he knows how a human arm connects to a torso at this one angle. He’s wrong, but my main point is this isn’t storytelling. It’s something a bored nerd would look down at during Algebra class and not really remember drawing.

Rob seems to have lost track of shit himself. The Shield brags about how he is super duper like his suit, explains to the reader how no he’s not, then headbutts and punches through everyone’s helmets with what is clearly super duper strength. Maybe? We’re not told what their hats are made of. They’re not quite motorcycle or SWAT helmets– they’re more like what you’d draw if you were an untalented artist falling off a bridge and almost had time to draw one last human head. Anyway, over the course of five pages of low effort storyboards for a Ugandan kung fu movie, we are told and shown several contradictory things about our main character while learning nothing about anything. It’s magnificent. If you showed this to the kindest comics editor in the world, they would say, “Tell the kid who drew this they should maybe be a fucking dentist.”

This goddamn fight is still going. He punches one guy so hard they leave the confinement of his 3000 square foot cement box apartment and land on a Frank Miller spatter paint background. If you were to interpret this as real art, you’d say it was revealing something about a dark brutality within this hero. But it’s not that. This art says nothing more than “I didn’t know how to draw The Shield’s love seat from the side.”

Jesus Christ, he is still handing out this one-sided beating while he thinks the Wikipedia entry for The Shield to himself.

After maiming whoever these men were, he rides one of them out the window. It’s not clear what floor he’s on, but his building is a mid-century cement rectangle in the city’s Gray Nothing District. There’s something more amazing happening here, though. Rob Liefeld is known for his reluctance to draw feet, and it’s almost genius how he managed to hide The Shield’s feet three different times on a single page. He had to savagely murder one cop(?) to do it, but there it is– a master at work.

It’s not over! The Shield gets shot a few times by a Pictionary drawing that was going to be a helicopter, so he leaps up onto it. Which means, wait, mounted aircraft guns don’t even jostle him? And they sent in eight(?) dudes in egg carton helmets to take him down with small arms? Holy shit, do I know more about helicopters than Rob Liefeld?

I’m being silly. Rob Liefeld knows parts of the helicopter I couldn’t even conceive of. Like how The Shield is clinging to the helicopter’s… I guess you’d call it its dorsal fin? Then he reaches into the windshield, pulls out its important wires, and raises them up above his head. I have no notes about raising your hands while you’re on a moving helicopter’s windshield and can’t think of a single very specific thing Rob Liefeld is forgetting about helicopters.

You know what? This all seems weirdly familiar like I’ve seen it before. And not in the usual Rob Liefeld way. I mean a Captain America guy spending entire pages beating the fuck out of a room full of government(?) agents… that’s from Civil War, the extremely popular Marvel comics event they based a billion dollar film on. Here, I’ll show them side-by-side:

The similarities end there, though. It’s not like in Civil War, Captain America jumped out the window and punched through the windshield of a helicopter. It was a jet.

Obviously I’m not accusing internationally known haver-of-original-ideas, Rob Liefeld, of plagiarism. There are still some major differences between these two sequences. For instance, The Shield was attacked in his apartment and Captain America wasn’t. But wait, oh no, I just remembered Luke Cage’s scene in Civil War.

Oh fuck, I think that rectangle graveyard might have even been Rob trying to draw Luke Cage’s couch from a less interesting angle. So look, maybe it wasn’t on purpose that Rob Liefeld did a shot-for-shot ripoff of one of the most well-known comic events of the last fifteen years. But whether he knew it or not, something inside him said, “Let’s do exactly the thing everyone saw, only again, and worse in every way. Again.”

Oh, this must have saved him a few minutes. The page after the helicopter crash is just a The Shield pin-up.

Since it’s just a quick sketch of The Shield standing near the color orange, Rob has to explain in the text box that he is searching through the wreckage of his tenth(?) recent murder “for survivors.” If you’re wondering if it’s normal for a comic to do this -describe all the action because it’s faster than drawing it- no, it’s not.

Another hallmark of Rob Liefeld’s art is frantic nonsense instead of anatomy or design. It’s why the plain concrete walls of The Shield’s building have random cracks and bricks(?) every few feet, or why his indestructible costume suddenly has a bunch of super cool battle damage. Wait, oh yeah, fuck, indestructible costume. Well, no worries, they can add a text box explaining it has, I don’t know, “limits” and “self-repairing nanites” now. What I’m getting at is that Rob Liefeld will rewrite an entire character and his origin story if it gets him out of forty seconds of work.

The comic ends with all the superheroes voting to kill The Shield including this lady version of a Captain America guy. Like many Rob Liefeld drawings, it’s hard to tell if Dusty Simmons, “former boy detective current Crusaders liaison,” is three feet tall or if Rob’s brain made some kind of mistake during its understanding of perspective. It probably doesn’t help that they are standing on nothing in a dimension made only of primordial America.

There’s one more thing to talk about. Obviously, I’d never claim a comic was Maximum Liefeldian without another important aspect of Rob Liefeld’s work: petty, stupid behind-the-scenes drama that leads to him leaving the project.

Apparently, Rob was furious when an alternate cover by Tone Rodriguez was “leaked.” It revealed the surprise that would have shocked The Shield’s longtime fans*! A version of The Shield from the future, a big gun-carrying one, was going to come back to the current The Shield’s time! That’s right, the guy known for creating Cable and also the same things over and over, created Cable again!

* ha ha

What’s great is that an image of Old Gun The Shield was already being circulated in promotions for the comic for months. And the first page of this issue I’m talking about, the very first page, has a picture of him, battle-damaged indestructible suit and all:

It’s not a sudden twist at the end! Even assuming you had any expectations for whatever the fuck a The Shield story might be, knowing an old time-traveling version of him was going to show up only spoils the brief moment between picking up the comic and opening it. And Rob Liefeld quit over it! That’s like walking off the set of Transmorphers 2 because the first one’s DVD box told everyone it was 86 minutes long. There is nothing more Rob Liefeld than abandoning a knockoff Captain America comic after drawing eight lazy splash pages, one foot, and even fewer backgrounds. Even trying to imagine something more Liefeldian would risk shattering our reality and L-Liefeld Liefeld Rob Liefeld Liefeld. Liefeld. Rob Liefeld.

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This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, TheLaziestManOnMars: Who comes complete with katana, shoulderpads, beltpouches, and couch rectangle. Feet not included.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: The Human Tornado 🌭

In 1976, Rudy Ray Moore made the perfect film. He took everything he learned from Dolemite, forgot it, added tits, refused to do anything that wasn’t fun, doubled the tits, and the result was a kung fu art film about a male prostitute superhero called The Human Tornado. It rules.

We discuss its intentional successes and its accidental successes with our own Lydia Bugg, who had never seen it until the night before recording this. She loved it! Who wouldn’t!? Listen to it here or wherever you like to Dogg Zzone. Also, as you know, rattlesnakes have bit us and crawled off and died, and it helps our podcast if you motherfucking like and subscribe.

Because there’s no wrong way to discuss The Human Tornado, Seanbaby designed an Action Question Quiz to test Robert and Liddy’s Human Tornado quote quotient. It is fun and it’s fierce because we are cool and we’re steady, and if you’d like to play the home version, fucking scroll down already.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Eyes Right 🌭

In 1920, a man named William Horatio Bates published a book about curing poor eyesight with eyeball exercises. His claims were dubious, disproven with even the gentlest application of the scientific method, and eleven years later he died a disgraced liar. Eyes Right with Bethany Alldridge is a 1992 VHS tape showing you how to use the same methods!

Before we work out those eyeballs, the video has a warning. Two warnings, in fact. The first warning is simple: This video is for people with eye “complaints” not eye “disorders.” So if your eyes have something wrong with them that affects your “vision,” you obviously aren’t going to cure that by moving your eyes around. You eye idiot. You goddamn dumb-eyed fool.

The second warning is sort of amazing. It takes what we’ve learned from the previous warning –how none of this is going to work– and places the blame on you. When this doesn’t fix your eyes, it’s because you will have not put in the work. And while it’s normal for a workout video to claim they aren’t responsible for your injuries, this is the first one I’ve seen that adds the caveat “fuck you even if you do everything exactly like we tell you.” You almost can’t hate a scam this plainly obvious that also opens with two warnings about both of the ways it will never work.

The host, Bethany, explains how a lot of eye disorders are psychosomatic. She says strengthening eye socket muscles can affect your vision, sort of like how your legs fall asleep when you sit down? Oh no, we’re only moments into this and she is telling us to rub our back because it, and I quote, “gets the oxygenated blood up to the optic nerve to get all of the toxins out.” This dingbat isn’t even trying. She sounds like she’s reading random words from pamphlets in her hypnotist’s waiting room. The last time I heard anyone giving medical advice this bad I told them, “Shut up and sew those goat testicles into my chest, Francisco. I have need of a six day boner.”

The most important move Bethany needs you to learn is called Palming. It’s going to be unfamiliar to anyone who bought this tape because it involves holding your head in your hands like a person capable of feeling shame. She warns you not to mash your eyeballs. You’re merely squashing them. If your vision is blurry, that’s mashing. If your vision improves and you no longer need glasses, w-wow. Please call science and tell them the secret was rubbing your eyes the entire time. Anyway, Bethany shows viewers how to squash their eyeballs with their palms for sixty seconds.

Now that you’ve learned the basics of eye medicine, it’s time for shoulder rolls. Your knee jerk reaction to this is probably saying, “what does this have to do with vision problems?” That’s your first mistake. If you had simply shrugged fifty times, you’d have perfect vision. At least that’s what Bethany seems to believe while they film her awkwardly, sometimes sexually, shrugging fifty times.

The mild non-eye exercises continue for ten minutes. Bethany has us move our head left and right. She shows us how to nod for a full minute and a half. I’ve seen Karate Kid, so I know there’s a good chance I’m being tricked into learning Head Karate, but as for improving eyesight, I think there’s a reason these techniques were all soundly debunked 60 years before they produced this video. This is dumb as fuck. This idiot is bouncing her smooth brain against the sides of her ape skull and calling it eyeball science.

Bethany explains there’s no real way to know how long you have to do these exercises. It’s suspicious, and not made any less suspicious when they show some clipart of people who have “thrown away their glasses.” There’s not a single testimonial. No one comes on to say, “I nodded and shrugged for ten minutes a day, and after a week I told my quack eye doctor to shove his glasses up his ass! They’re lying to you! All the optometrists ARE LYING TO Y– oh no, they’ve found me! The potion didn’t wor–!”

No, they assume you believe every bit of this flagrant nonsense and you’re ready for medium-intensity looking up and down. Be sure to take frequent breaks from this ordinary eyeball motion to hold your head in your hands. Check with your local scientists to see if that’s something.

Next try side-to-side. What’s special about this video is that it’s exactly as stupid as your laziest imaginings. Like if you asked someone what an eye workout would consist of, they’d say, “Looking around in different directions, I guess?” You can’t invent something dumber. The fact that it doesn’t work is secondary to how even if it did, there’s no possible way you’re not already an expert in it. The blindest dipshit in the world would create the exact same eye fitness routine as the leading professor of eyeball science.

It’s time to move on to the most advanced direction to look– around in a circle. Bethany seems to think she invented this, and says “Don’t worry if your first attempt at circles becomes triangles. Keep trying and you’ll get better.”

Is this something that’s hard? Maybe living and working inside an American Gladiator Atlasphere has made me an eye circle genius, but I got this on the first try. And maybe making love inside an American Gladiator Atlasphere has opened my mind in ways Bethany can’t conceive of, but looking around the room in increasingly stupid ways won’t reshape your cornea.

The point is, there are really only a few ways to look around, this video found them, and none of them will help as stated by science and the VHS tape’s own disclaimer. But aside from wasting thirty minutes of your day for the rest of your life, it’s harmless. It’s not like they’re telling you to go outside and stare directly at the su– oh no.

Bethany says, “SUNNING is simple. Go outside. Close your eyes and look at the sun.” So you’re telling us the secret to improving our eyes was cooking them sous vide? Jesus fuck. And Bethany tells us, “Bates says to do this for 10 minutes 3 times a day if you can.” A lot of people can’t spare a half hour a day to grin at the sky like an ape broken by captivity, but it’s up to you if you want to put in the work.

Bates, as I mentioned, is that disgraced doctor from 1920 who notably did not make glasses obsolete. I counted twelve different times during this video where Bethany says “Bates says…” followed by ancient stupidity. The makers of this video read one book, a hundred-year-old get rich quick scheme by a discredited grifter, and they cite it like they’re medical researchers.

Okay, that’s enough sun. If we really want to improve our vision we need to sort of wiggle back and forth. This is called SWINGING, and why not? We’ve already looked around in all four directions and baked our face. Fucking do a little dance, who cares?

You should also blink, which is a thing that gets its own section and explanation. It’s when you sometimes close and open your eyes really fast. Let’s see… what else, what else…

Reading! Bethany explains, “Bates says you should read every day.” And they show her doing it for sixty uninterrupted seconds! While they explain reading! Listen, I’ve seen this kind of thing happen before, but never on this scale. Imbeciles who decide to become educators always assume they are teaching people dumber than they are. It makes sense. But when you’re teaching something that doesn’t exist, but is also too basic to require teaching, it creates a kind of stupidity spiral where their intended audience, by necessity, must become less and less capable. Anyone still watching this video must need the very concept of reading explained to them, and they need to see a woman holding a book for a full minute to really get it. I swear I’m not setting up a bit when I say these assholes are one segment away from teaching us how to wash our face.

So Bethany teaches us how to wash our face. She literally leans over an imaginary sink and splashes make-believe water onto her eyes. With the rictus grin of a North Korean prostitute, she pretends to dry her eyes with a towel. “Bates says this is very good for the eyes as it creates a massage-like vibration.” Or to put it another way, “A long dead liar claimed washing your face is like a vision-improving eyeball massage and here is an amateur mime performance about it.”

They explain a few more helpful exercises like “MEMORY OBJECT” which is really looking at objects and then trying to remember them, or “OBSERVATION” which is really looking at objects and then nothing else. You could also try “ZOOMING” which is watching your hand slap you in your own stupid fucking nose. 

Which leads us to SQUEEZING. Just fucking squeeze your face and silently scream and it’s so simple I don’t know why eye doctors even bother existing. Every optometry school should be replaced with this:

If you want something more stimulating, the section called “EYE GAMES” lists all the games that can improve your vision. They cite Dominos, backgammon, and other dice games. Wait, also card games, any games with colorful shapes, Scrabble… it seems like if you’ve ever played a game, any game of any kind, you may have accidentally given yourself perfect vision. But let’s talk about NOSE PENCIL.

You draw things with a cute little finger pencil on your nose! Every person you see without glasses does this for three hours every day after they’re done sun-baking their eyelids. Anyone still blind this long after this amazing video was released wants to be.

The last section is called EDGING, but it’s not the kind you’re thinking of because if you do it right you will absolutely cum. You’re welcome, now fully satisfied and perfectly visioned reader. You’re welcome.

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This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: The Artist Formerly Known as Devon, who has such tantric control over his eyeballs he can look at something for up to six hours without climaxing.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Sanford and Evans Double Feature 🌭

Doris Sanford and Graci Evans spent the 1980s making inconceivable books about childhood trauma, and they’re my favorite team of well-intentioned maniacs. Today, we’re going to read two of them. One, Please COME HOME, is about divorce because Doris and Graci are always careful to soften a book’s subject matter with a vague title. The other one is called DAVID HAS AIDS. Oh, did you think David has trouble making friends? No, AIDS is what David has. It’s Upsetting Day, not Happy David Day.

Let’s start with Please COME HOME. It opens with Jenny sitting alone in an orchard and thinking back to the time her newly single mom told her her father doesn’t love her.

This is pretty standard development for a Sanford/Evans mother character. When they write moms they think, “What would a lazy Skeletor do here?” I’m not a psychologist, but I do own nineteen of these womens’ books about depressed kids, and the mother in each one is a neglectful sociopath. There’s no bedrock of hope in a Sanford/Evans book. It’s madness and sadness all the way down, and God is there ignoring all of it.

Jenny has decided to never speak to her father again, but quickly changes, then loses her mind. She has entered the Bargaining stage of grief, followed by the Demanding Help From Trees stage. And it can really feel like that, kids. Trees everywhere, and not one of them a custody lawyer. I never thought I’d say this, but this kid’s book about divorce is too depressing and we should switch over to DAVID HAS AIDS.

This is the very first page of DAVID HAS AIDS. It opens not with the dangers of his deadly disease or its origin story, but with a group of mean kids saying, “Keep it moving, buddy. The AIDS section is over there.” This lonely child is dying and we’re going to focus on how he’s being bullied.

Already this is better than Please COME HOME. “My body is filled with AIDS, but theirs are filled with fear,” is something you would say if you were in a prison wrestling league and also a genius. It’s only page 2 and this book is calling 9-year-olds cowards for asking a classmate with full blown AIDS to play somewhere else. It’s amazing. At this point in most Doris and Graci books, the main character would just be sitting around explaining their problem to God.

Right. Exactly like that. What is going on here? Is David praying or sending God a letter? And why is he explaining AIDS to God? As someone who grew up in a religious, conservative household in the ’80s, trust me, God knows exactly what AIDS does. Theologically speaking, this is like explaining how bug spray works to your exterminator. Oh man, that sounded darker than I meant it to… maybe we should switch back to Please COME HOME?

So when we left Jenny she was holding her head and shrieking for a tree, any tree to deliver her from the unbearable pain of a broken family. She’s since pulled herself together to calmly express herself to her teddy bear. This is hard, and it hurts, but her parents’ divorce has not driven her insane.

Oh shit.

Jenny, no. What are you doing? Product of divorce or not, you absolutely need to stop sharing your secrets with the talking bear in the woods. Let’s go back to the kid less doomed than you, the one with AIDS and a God who hates him.

So David got a mysterious bag of cookies from a child who calls himself “Washington,” a name two elderly white women, after a difficult discussion, decided to be “non-racistly black.” Washington has been watching David, and he wants to play with him. It’s all very normal, including how he ends the note with the default 5-word message Shopify prints on every gift receipt, “I know you have AIDS.”

The two become fast friends, so David writes a very weird, very passive aggressive letter to God.

Dear David, 

Ha ha what? His comfort is the kind with a FORT in it!? Are you sending me the “maybes” from your grandma’s needlepoint idea notebook? This sucks. If you want to figure out why I don’t treat you like most people do, SEE FUCKING ABOVE.

I know you have AIDS,

God

P.S. I know you have AIDS.

Jesus, is this kid still talking about how safe AIDS is? Look at Washington’s face. Even he is tired of hearing about this shit. David will be going over this for awhile, so let’s see how Jenny’s mental breakdown is going in Please COME HOME.

Not great. Her teddy bear is still speaking in the tongue of Man. You know, it’s been several pages and it’s still not clear if this is a therapeutic exercise, rhetorical device, or total psychotic break.

Wait. Oh no, what. The teddy bear can wave goodbye to her while she’s not looking at it? S-so this isn’t taking place in her head? I hadn’t considered this fourth option: something unknowable whispered life into this toy after hearing a forsaken child’s screams on the wind. It’s safe to say we’re now in a murder race between Teddy and AIDS. Let’s see what David is doing. Probably talking about how safe it is to be his, despite his AIDS, friend, right?

“Class, let’s thank Sandra for bringing in her box turtle, Battlecat. So cute. Now up next for Show n’ Tell is… ugh. David. Okay, let me guess what you brought in. Your AIDS?”

He’ll be doing this, again,  for a while, so let’s get back to Jenny.

I don’t know what Jenny’s mom and whatever now lives inside her teddy bear said to her, but Jenny has decided hurting her father is how she is going to make them happy. And Graci Evans knew exactly what you’d be thinking: “I’d love to see a colored pencil drawing of the custody handoff after Jenny rejected her father’s unopened birthday gift.”

This is rough. You know what might cheer us up? Hearing what David is talking about.

Damn it, Dave. Are you still lecturing your classmates on the safety of AIDS? How is that disease your most likeable personality trait? Let’s see what Jenny is up to.

It’s important to remember Jenny is not the narrator of this book, so when you hear them stop the story to editorialize, “UNDERWEAR IS NOT A PRESENT!” remember it’s not a second grade girl. This would have been the perfect time for her to realize she shouldn’t have rejected her father’s love or his presents, but instead her teddy bear stares into her soul and tells her how special she is, forcing her to repeat its words fifty times. I’m, of course, kidding. Can you imagine how insane that would be? 

Ha ha, reader. You fell for the classic demon teddy’s gambit. Let’s go see if David has finished his 831st presentation on why someone should play with him, and by “play with him,” David means “listen to his 832nd presentation on why someone should play with him.”

Hold on a second. Is David sitting inside watching Washington spend time with his grandmother? Was the weird bag of cookies and the note a plan to… okay, this is going to sound nuts, but did this kid just steal his grandma? Is this the dying boy version of cuckolding?

We’re not cutting back to Jenny. We need to see where this is going.

Dear David, 

Last week, you had a grandma and AIDS. Then I sent you a friend with a bag of cookies, and now all you have is AIDS.

Love,

God

Dear David,

“What is dying like!?” I’m an eternal being, the Alpha and the Omega, and you’re a little boy whose entire life was spent suffering organ failure. Like, you tell me, David. Asshole. You asshole.

Love,

God

P.S. If you think this is bad, let me show you what I do to kids who betray me and follow the teachings of witch bears.

Jenny’s story wraps up nicely with her mother neglecting her, her father being pushed completely out of her life, and her teddy bear just fucking ecstatic about it. It’s nothing, certainly. A horror egg hatching from a broken mind, but a happier ending that any of us should have expected. Let’s see how David’s story concludes.

Dying is… it’s like what? It’s like fucking what, Grandma Brown? Doris and Graci gave Jenny a magical teddy bear to emotionally counsel her through her parent’s breakup. Yet this withering child of God has been begging his creator for an explanation since the day he learned the word “AIDS” and the best the authors could do for him was to send a confused old lady to his death bed to tell him dying is like a reverse movie something, maybe? This is so fucked. But I guess with the way David’s story was going, we’re lucky the book’s finale wasn’t a two page spread of his grandma wordlessly grabbing his neck and ending things her way.

O-oh fuck.

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Dan Bush: who understands that dying is like a backwards movie and living is like a sideways book and fucking? Baby, that’s a horizontal game.