Author: Seanbaby

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Seven Months of Hot Dog

It’s been 7 months since we started this website– an oasis of fun designed so two incredible men could produce short bits of daily hilarity. But we are not men of short bits. Our mighty hands type jokes by the thousands. Our strong backs hunch over to Photoshop by the hectares. So it has become this: more comedy than any world deserves. The people have told us things like, “This is good, thanks,” or “You should cover my fetish of shrunken women trapped in fart balloons one of these Fucking Days, because you see, ever since I was baby, I kn–” but most commonly they say, “This impossible. I sorry for English but you men incredible are make too many laughters.”

Well, here we are, seven months after we started writing far too many jokes, and the real joke is on you, cowards– all it has done is made us stronger. We are now among the top 1% of Patreon pages, putting us in the prestigious company of “Podcast About The Show Cop Rock, But Not The Main One” and “Drawings of Tiny Ladies Trapped in Toot Balloons (Fantasy, NSFW).” Look upon all the joy we have created from the trash media of grifters, lunatics, and the horny. And speaking of looking upon things, that’s what I want to talk about. We commissioned an artist to help you do that!

To celebrate seven months of hot dogging, we hired game designer and pixel artist, Julia Minamata, to hide references to us in this CGA masterpiece. Through her brilliance, you can now relive your favorite 25 moments of early 2020 in one image! If you can’t find them all, head over to the brand new Archives Page on 1900hotdog.com for a quick refresher. Maybe you can also help solve a fun puzzle!

Other Breaking Pixel Art News: Lydia Bugg has her own 1-900-HOTDOG Play Instructions banner since she’s signed on to write bi-weekly articles for us! As you probably know from the several things she’s done here, she’s funny, likeable, and fluent in Wrong Universe. Visit her Twitter to congratulate her before she’s driven mad by article research and sending me Slack messages like, “need help: too drunk to decide if transformers fuck as robots or cars, AND FUCK YOU if you think it’s robots NO FUCK YOU EITHER WAY” the way Brockway does. He and I, no bullshit, spent the month’s talent budget on a German version of our podcast theme song and neither one of us has a bit planned for it! We just both thought it was a funny thing to do! We’re really counting on Liddy being any kind of a voice of reason in our lives!

I’ve told you before during our intimate Reflecting Days how fun it is to be doing this website, but I actually thought of a way I can show you. First, I’m going to need a picture of Mel Gibson jumping into a pair of pantyhose.

That’s from the already rebooted 2000 film, What Women Want. It’s a movie about a man who can hear the thoughts of women like when Helen Hunt thinks, “OH I JUST LOOKED AT HIS CROTCH!” and then “OH I JUST LOOKED AT HIS CROTCH AGAIN!” which I’m not making up. It’s one of many movies about a very dumb, magical concept which means the writer(s) had to explain how the main character suddenly had fantastic powers. In this one, Mel Gibson is trying to “get inside the female psyche” to be a better advertising executive, and his idea is to go home and try every female product. And I don’t mean only lipstick and exfoliating strips. He waxes his legs. He tries out pregnancy tests. They put that in the movie– the main character pees on pregnancy tests to help figure out what ladies need to hear to buy nail polish.

So, of course, the next scene is not him going back to work armed with the insider lady knowledge that it sucks to pee on your own hands or be the one taking the tombstone piledriver when someone screws up their end of a standing 69. He doesn’t sit a client down and say, “Ladies, shut the fuck up for a second. I’m not like the other guys. I know balls are smelly and pantyhose are hard. I know the heartbreak of peeing on a stick only to have it say you missed another chance; you’ll never be a mother.” Instead, Mel Gibson(‘s less hairy stuntman) slips on bath beads and falls into the tub with a blow dryer and at least five used pregnancy tests– so many more than a 44-year-old man should need.

When he wakes up from his head trauma, he can hear lady thoughts! So, okay, what does this have to do with anything? I’ll tell you! I sometimes remember this movie exists where the main character gets woman telepathy because he was electrocuted while touching too many female products. And it’s so goddamn stupid to me. It’s an idea you’d float to a room full of cats and then ask, “So unless anyone can top it, we’re going with the electric pregnancy test accident?” This is worse than not explaining it at all. It’s absurd to imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking, “How is this guy magic all of a sud– oh yeah, he was touching pantyhose when he almost died. Of course.”

I spent many years at Cracked, so when something like this sparks inspiration, the rest of my brain reflexively starts playing Trivial Pursuit to build it into a List. You don’t need to be an SEO genius like Jason Pargin to know The X Dumbest Explanations for Fantastic Movie Powers is going to be a fucking hit. In fact, I’d probably Google that title 25 different ways to make sure no one else had already written it. And assuming no one had, yay, now 85% of my article is about shit similar to but not the thing that inspired me to start it.

So let’s imagine what that would look like. I’d probably consider including Big, where Tom Hanks grows up by wishing on a carnival machine. It’s dumb, but it’s also cute and everyone liked it. I went into this so pumped to write jokes about Mel Gibson dying from every ’90s gender stereotype at once and now I’m going to spend an equal amount of time explaining the conceit of the movie Big to you? Fuck you; you’ve seen Big.

Now I’m thinking, “What else, what else… in Black Knight, Martin Lawrence traveled through time by finding a magic amulet at his work.” That’s dumb as shit, but dumb as shit in the good way, right? Like, that’s the writer’s equivalent of saying, “You guys saw the back of the box or the Netflix thumbnail or whatever. We don’t need to waste a bunch of time with an electric bathtub thing.” So now I realize I need to focus my thesis. Am I doing “fucking lame” stupid origin stories or “fucking awesome” stupid origin stories? I only want to make fun of Mel Gibson dying in ladies panties!

Jesus, remember Mannequin? The Mannequin got her powers in ancient Egypt when she asked the gods for help avoiding an arranged marriage and then, unrelated to the first half of this sentence, she is a mannequin who comes to life when only Andrew McCarthy is looking. So that’s in, for sure, but hold on. All these amazing abilities led her to being some guy’s, I guess literal, sex doll. Could I be writing about feminist tropes where supernatural powers are used almost exclusively for fucking ladies? This was another side effect of Cracked growing so big– there was an unspoken pressure to make articles “important.” So I might have spent a few hours of research filling out a “X Movie Characters Who Got Amazing Powers and Used Them To Problematically Fuck” list. Maybe there’s something there? And, of course, there is. Flubber, Spider-Man 3, Next, Hollow Ma- no wait, that’s unfunny dark… Aladdin maybe… ha ha Shallow Hal, kind of? Okay, this is getting nuts. I think I’m plotting out an Anita Sarkeesian video, not a me article. Which I think would go something like this:

The point is, a few years ago I would have taken that dumbshit decision made by the writers of What Women Want and turned it into two weeks of research, then struggled for 30 hours to figure out how to make Rob Schneider’s ancient, magical body-swapping earrings from The Hot Chick funny. I’d figure it out– I’m that good, but I’d push that deadline at least ten times. For a month I’d wake up with “take screenshots of Rob Schneider in a bra” on my calendar and decide a day off would be healthier. So now you see why I love this place. Writing an entire article about just three ridiculous minutes of a twenty-year-old romantic comedy is refreshing as fuck. And I can tell fellow Cracked legends, Robert Brockway and Jason Pargin, feel the same way because they’ve written articles here about the time The Dirt Bike Kid gave a handjob to his dirt bike and nothing else, and the time when Cobra ate frozen pizza with scissors and that’s all, respectively. 

So you see, with your help, we’ve created a comedy writer’s utopia from the ruins of this many-times-destroyed Internet. Bye!

Categories
FUCKING DAY PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting: Godek’ing with April O’Neil 🌭

In man’s quest to get his dong into things, he has tried an infinite number of options. A romance “expert” named Gregory JP Godek made it his quest to list them all then spent decades boiling it down to one– fuck on pizza. On today’s Dogg Zzone 9000 Podcast, we’re joined by adult film star April O’Neil to discuss the hilarious tragedy of Godek’s career.

Hear how Godek went from best-selling author and love guru in the early ’90s to nothing else despite three desperate, embarrassing attempts!

Witness him take ideas from 1001 Ways to Be Romantic and repackage them in different books for 30 years in increasingly less successful ways!

Listen to Seanbaby explain, in exhausting detail, why it’s okay to hate this pitiful naked man who makes his wife’s birthdays special by letting her pick the toppings on their sex pizza.

Hear Brockway and April compete for Seanbaby’s love in the hottest, most romantic Seanbaby’s Book Game the Dogg Zzone 9000 has ever seen!

After your throbbing settles, no wait -during the throbbing- be sure to subscribe, leave a review, or do whatever else helps our podcast which condensed the life of one of literature’s worst monsters into one hour of pizza fucking jokes. Seanbaby wrote 42 pages of notes for it, which is nearly the amount of work Godek puts into getting the bra off his cheese-filled wife, and over 9000 times the amount of work he puts into writing one of his bullshit advice books.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Stunts of Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch

Today is my 15th 1-900-HOTDOG Punching Day article, and according to Punching Day tradition, this is the anniversary where I give you, my lover, the gift of Kill Switch. Kill Switch is, of course, the 2008 direct-to-video “action” movie “starring” Steven Seagal. You will fucking hate me for it, which is perfectly in line with our hot dog traditions.

There is no academic framework to discuss the Steven Seagality of a film with this much Steven Seagality. It’s as if a moderator showed a focus group three hours of a fat man taking a nap, asked them to describe what they didn’t like about it, and Steven Seagal mistook their notes for an action-thriller script. Kill Switch is something that would get an Uzbek father to say, “The death of your mother saddens me, but this is an adequate Steven Seagal parody you have made in a weekend, my impoverished children.” Explaining everything hilariously, Steven Seagalably wrong with Kill Switch before the last of our civilization burns down will be impossible, so I’m going to focus on the stunts— the one element in this film that never, at any time had anything to do with Steven Seagal. It might be myopic enough I can get out of here in less than 20,000 words.

You’re going to think I’m kidding, but this movie opens with Steven Seagal, Memphis homicide detective, investigating a woman who has a bomb planted in her boob. He knows the bomber is in one of the nearby apartments watching, so he goes inside it. I’m not leaving anything out. He immediately walks into the unlocked door of the apartment containing the villain. There’s a timer on the titty bomb, so even in the fiction of this universe what he’s doing isn’t possible. It’s like a scene you would write if the only book you’ve ever read was half a Steven Seagal movie. 

It’s so embarrassingly stupid it would land like a mean-spirited joke if the editor chose this moment of peak absurdity to put the “Written by” credit.

Oh, fuck. Oh, Jesus fuck. Do you see what I mean now about how we’re never getting out of here if I’m going to talk about every deranged detail of Kill Switch? Steven Seagal wrote a movie where he plays a genius serial killer hunter. So he walks right in, growls a one-liner too wordy and stupid to repeat, and just beats the fuck out of him. Steven’s stuntman makes his first of many appearances to choke the guy, smash his head into a wall, and fireman’s carry him into generously explosive furniture. This exact sequence of moves repeats, without exaggeration, seven more times. The fight choreographer knew one attack Steven Seagal could do without moving, and two that hid his stuntman’s face, and it’s a true inspiration to the stupid that he was able to fill ten minutes of a fight scene knowing nothing else.

Steven Seagal’s brain is made entirely out of action movie cliches, so in his script, the bomb squad calls him during the fight to say they have the titty bomb wires narrowed down to two. He beats the bomber until he confesses which wire to cut, but Seagal tells them to cut the other one. He was right. He saved… oh my god, ha ha I just now realized the first thing Steven Seagal wrote was the hero, himself, using torture to literally rescue the tits of a nameless damsel character. Ha ha ha that’s so goddamn ridiculous. Ha I just realized how often this happens. Ha ha ha ha noticing shit like this all the time must be why feminist critics are always having so much fun.

Anyway, Steven Seagal goes to arrest the suspect, who we’ve established has no chance in a fight against him, has implicitly confessed to an act of terror, and has already been beaten mostly to death. The writer of this movie, Steven Seagal, decided this character would scream, “Fuck you!” and attack. So Seagal kicks him out the window. I swear, I didn’t edit this animated gif. This is precisely how Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch chose to edit this scene and how it appears in the final cut:

What the fuck kind of filmmaking decision is this? That’s, what, eleven times he went out the same window? Why? For what reason? They only shot it from three angles. Was it a mistake? Is he a time traveler sending Morse code? Did the editor hear “It’s working, but one ain’t seem like enough– I want at least ten of these defenestrations,” when Steven Seagal actually mumbled, “Workin’ on a new blues song called ‘Ain’t Enough, and Dat’s Not De End of Mah Pizza Frustrations.'”

What happens next is maybe more crazy. Steven obviously has to say some kind of one-liner after a thing like this. A man falling out a window lends itself to virtually unlimited wordplay. Guess he had a flight to catch. He shoulda taken the stairs. Cleanup aisle DEAD. You might fuck like Peter Pan, but you sure ain’t fly like him, baby. Sorry, dead guy, but I’m insecure about my age and obesity. Flight pants? More like regular pants, dumbass. But instead of any of these perfectly acceptable choices, Seagal says, and I quote, “Hey. Looks like he got da hiccups. Somebody get that guy a glass of watah.”

So wait, wait. No, wait. He’s referencing the guy jump-cutting back and forth through time? Does this mean Steven Seagal can… see the movie? I know it sounds nuts, but hear me out. After he delivers this exit line, to the amusement of no character or viewer, the scene doesn’t end. The camera stays on him, he looks around in frustration, and he lets out an audible “buuuuhhhhh.” For homicide detective Jacob “Lightnin'” King, recent titty rescuer, it makes no sense. But for writer/performer Steven Seagal, who can see how badly this movie is turning out, it’s a very appropriate reaction.

Oh my god, we’re 1000 words in and we’re only just now starting Stunt TWO? I knew this was going to happen. Luckily, the second big stunt of the movie is the serial killer asking a prostitute to help him put a baby into a car seat when this happens:

For context, this is the serial killer in a battle of wits with Steven Seagal, who is completing some kind of moon ritual with his murders. He taunts Seagal with mysterious astrological codes carved into the bodies, so they call him “The Grifter,” a name not really related to what he does or the things he’s into.

Steven Seagal is the kind of man who writes “EXT. NIGHT– THE GRIFTER bludgeons PROSTITUTE #4 with a toy baby, instantly killing her. She thought it was a real baby, which was a grift, The Grifter’s signature activity.” But he’s apparently also the kind of man who forgets things, so when her body arrives at the morgue, the coroner describes her death, which you’ve seen in its entirety, as a long and painful punishment. Kill Switch‘s writer wisely knew it was a medical examiner’s job to make wild, elaborate conclusions about the personality and intent of an attacker from each of his victim’s injuries.

While he’s at the coroner’s, fucking up the plot of his own movie over the topless corpse of a baby-murdered prostitute, Steven Seagal finds a symbol carved behind her ear. It’s a big help in decoding The Grifter’s secret code, which a nerdy seven-year-old might recognize as a substitution cypher, or the kind of cryptography you’d expect to find on a box of Honey Combs. It’s the codemaster’s equivalent of putting your email in Wingdings font. Still, it lets him finish translating a message in a second, unrelated code he… wait a second. Let’s zoom in on this code.

Are you sure that’s right, Steven Seagal? I only read one of The Da Vinci Code books, but you have “Omega, 9, H Fucking Cantalope, Triangle, M Holding Spear, and another H Fucking Cantalope” meaning both “AT THE EDGE OF” and “IS THE TRUE.” You might want to have your prop guy take another pass at that. Oh, damn it. I thought I would only be telling you “the killer’s outrageously silly murder weapon was a fake baby,” and here I am making fun of Steven Seagal’s code-breaking skills.

Steven Seagal goes to a bar where they recognize him from TV as the homicide detective investigating the murder of their friend. Then they, and I promise I’m not leaving anything out, attack him. Several men take turns trying to punch him in the face which causes the movie to speed up right before they jump into the nearest breakable object. This happens a few more times, in exactly the same way, until one of the guys gets the idea to murder this cop with a broken bottle. There’s only one problem.

He can’t hit him! He’s aiming at a 380 pound target and about 30 of those pounds are rattling pill bottles for his angina, back, reflux, and penis. He stabs and slashes, but can’t seem to get the broken bottle anywhere near the barely moving blob taking up half his bar. It goes on like this forever, and Seagal seems almost bored with it. His jacket pockets contain so many notes from his doctor to stay off his knees he knows a glass knife could never penetrate it.

You might notice the abrupt change in Steven Seagal’s figure and hair when they’re filming him from behind. That’s because Steven Seagal not only doesn’t do his own stunts, he doesn’t even do his own fretting and wiggling anymore. If you have a keen eye you can tell when his double is doing the slight waddling because he’s a third Steven’s size and age, and he’s wearing a Princess Jasmine wig instead of two cans of spray-on hair.

That isn’t to say Steven Seagal has given up martial arts completely. They often edit in shots of him waving his hands or looking cranky into these shots of different men missing each other. For instance, here’s a fight where Steven did his own backhand slap, but had his stuntman perform the much more dangerous elbow strike from a diner bench. No matter what country he’s filming in, there are strict union rules about Steven Seagal performing near food. Bratva Cleanmoney Productions lost an entire day of shooting when Steven found a wedding cake on the set of Killed to the Death 2: Geoff Gets Married.

Even in his prime, Steven Seagal ran like a Tyrannosaurus losing control of its hula hoop. Now that he’s an elderly man hiding his mass under a two-person centaur costume, the idea of filming him in a rush is unthinkable. So whenever he’s hurrying, the film replaces his movement with flashes of him teleporting across the screen. So when he’s in a chase scene it abruptly changes from a film about a cop chasing a killer to a stop motion animation about the ghost of a rock n’ roll pig haunting the dark alleys of Memphis, Tennessee. As with the others, I did not edit this gif in any way. This is from the actual final cut of Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch.

I did not count the misses in Kill Switch, but it’s definitely a contender for the most inaccurate gun fighting outside of a G.I. JOE cartoon. Steven Seagal and his enemies stand still and empty clip after clip into nothing. Normally the editor puts these shots together one after another to create what any artist would interpret as a brilliant commentary on the pointless, endless cycle of violence. But when Seagal and The Grifter have their shootout, it becomes a dreamlike sequence where two lazy men can’t hit fucking shit with their guns. They miss in hallways where each of them is the only thing for a bullet to go into. Steven Seagal’s bullets are the same as his hairline — fake, and smeared all over the wrong spots by a fat idiot.

The Grifter escapes 200 clips worth of Steven Seagal bullets and hides. After Steven runs past, he knocks him down with a pipe and walks over to give a villain speech. He doesn’t hold him at gunpoint or tie him up, or have him at any disadvantage really, so the movie does something unpredictable — nothing dumb. Steven simply grabs the much smaller man who can’t fight and fucking bashes the face off his skull with ham fists.

He does this for minutes. He is mauling this tiny man, bringing all his weight onto his chin again and again. It is nothing other than twenty fist murders placed end-to-end. A UFC fan watching this next to a wife with two black eyes would be pleading for someone to stop this savage, ceaseless beating. But The Grifter uses the one move Steven Seagal has no defense against — leaving at a mildly brisk pace. Look, I wish we lived in a world that made sense too, but this movie was written by Steven Seagal and his assistant transcribed, “After takin’ 1,000 unanswered super punches from Aikido punchin’ master, Jacob Lightnin’ King, Da Griftah get up an’ he jus’ sorta walk away.“

Don’t worry, though! The Grifter drops his wallet during his casual escape. Plus, Seagal recently learned he managed the house band at a bar where everyone knows him as a local celebrity named Lazarus who opened fire on a cop in front of several hundred witnesses, but with ‘dis wallet? Murda police Jacob King might have what he need to crack ‘dis case wide open, pardnah. You know, I guess I shoulda mentioned by now — Steven Seagal, he be doin’ a Cajun accent ‘dis whole movie, baby.

At The Grifter’s serial killer murder house, Seagal finds a star map that corresponds to Memphis hotspots. With it, he easily predicts his next kill and goes there to slap and shove him for several minutes. I have no idea if you will believe me or even believed me any of those other times, but this is the actual final fight scene from Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch.

There has never been a main character in less danger than Steven Seagal in a Steven Seagal movie, but this villain is especially hopeless. The debris gently brushing up against Seagal’s elbow in that gif is the cleanest shot Grifter lands the entire fight. It has all the tension of a Garfield reader worried the lasagna might win.

Hold on, that wasn’t the real final fight! Billy Joe, the titty bomb guy from earlier is back! The Supreme Court, after twoish days, has dismissed his case because of all the police brutality. I think the writer, Steven Seagal, doesn’t know a lot about court proceedings, and also may have injected some of his personal politics into the story because when his partner hears about the court’s decision he says, “That animal should be put to death!” And then, to prove himself right, he wrote, “BILLY JOE stab his own lawyer to death in da car ride from prison. Dat animal ain’t even wait five minute to kill again. CUT TO: He at Jacob’s house and he stab Jacob’s girlfriend to death too. Lord have mercy.“

It’s weird for Steven Seagal, a known source of sex crimes, to embrace this kind of “Criminals need to be put down” moral objectivism, but anyway, after batting around the serial killer for 40 minutes, Detective King has to spend the denoument avenging his girlfriend’s murder. Sorry I never mentioned her — he barely paid attention to this girlfriend character in two scenes totally unrelated to the plot and 100% doesn’t give a shit she’s dead.

Like each of the other fights, this one features a helpless but durable man getting shoved through things. Jacob breaks every piece of furniture in his house with Titty Bomber’s flying body until he finally pulls out a knife and stands chest-to-chest with him for a gentleman’s stab missing contest. It’s silly beyond reason, but I think this is what it looks like when 2008 Steven Seagal gives a fight scene his best effort. Look at these bobs and weaves!

He is the unslashable. Steven Seagal moves with all the speed and grace of a woman trying to watch Bones with a grandson on her lap.

With ten minutes to go in the movie, there’s a sudden subplot where an FBI agent thinks Steven Seagal is the serial killer, so he leaves town to go back to his… wait — his never-before-mentioned Russian family? So the dead girl in his house… he was cheating on his wife with her this whole movie? Anyway, his sudden Russian wife sends their kids away and strips naked. The whole thing is the flimsiest excuse I’ve ever witnessed to see tits, and I own 17 VHS tapes on how to breastfeed. Did he maybe get a tax break for giving a topless part to Putin’s niece? I guess in a way, beginning and ending your movie with unnecessary titties has a kind of poetry to it. No one gives Steven Seagal, sex criminal, enough credit as a writer.

I know this isn’t a stunt, but I’m not going to make this gif of Steven Seagal nodding at a naked lady and keep it to myself. Please enjoy:

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Yannis Ioannidis: the Steven Seagal’s stuntman of lovers.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: The Prison Alphabet 🌭

Here in America, we’ve designed an easily corrupted, very racist justice system. Then we incentivized everyone involved in that system to be the maximum amount of lazy and evil. After that, we declared it a virtue for you to put all your trust into it. It has not gone well. This Upsetting Day, we’re talking about THE PRISON ALPHABET.

A fun way to determine if your country is fucked is if there are 2.7 million potential customers for your educational coloring book specifically for children of incarcerated parents. This is obviously a cursed abomination created by people with good intentions. And to their credit, they seem to know what they’ve done. It’s the only coloring book I’ve ever seen that opens with two pages of small-font apologies and explanations. There is maybe some perfect tone appropriate for a kid’s coloring book on this dark subject matter, but Bahiyyah and Muntaquim Muhammad did not find it. This shit is crazy.

Maybe it’s for adults who didn’t know that in prison “D stands for Dentist?” Maybe it’s for prisoners who love to color? Maybe it’s for kids to frame and display on their bedroom wall? They honestly have no idea which direction they should take this very, very bad idea. This is like building a whoopie cushion that blows out the words, “Inoperable cancer means you have to say goodbye forever!” instead of farts. It’s like hiring a magician to play the cello at a miscarriage party. No, I’m serious: THE PRISON ALPHABET is legally the same category of thing as a laser tag pet funeral.

This is fun, right? ARREST– The thing that certainly went well for your parent! There has to be an A-word that maintains this high level of education without reminding the prisoner or their child about the terrible moment already burned into their brains. Why not “ASS– Your mommy better watch hers if she’s going to run her fucking mouth.” Or maybe “AMENDMENT– The 13th one created a loophole that let us keep slavery!” I don’t know, I’m probably the worst person for writing coloring books. Well, okay, obviously not the worst.

It’s a common misconception that prisoners sustain themselves with a large communal salt lick or by constructing hamburgers out of snitch hair. Let me educate you: they are given a thing called “FOOD” to eat. “FOOD” is served for each meal, and we are approaching the limits of man’s understanding of “FOOD.” The only way you can get your own “FOOD” is to poison a boyfriend like your mommy.

I’m sure the children of the incarcerated can appreciate this nice pro-authority spin on handcuffs. They’re to keep your dad from killing himself, kid. You see, the system that took his dignity and freedom is only here to help. There are a lot of perspectives you can have about the penal system, but this HANDCUFFS entry seems to accidentally reveal the one held by the authors. This could have been Hh for HOOCH or HANGDOG HANDJOB, but they chose the H-word where your parents get chained up and then the coloring book takes the side of the prison. That’s fucked up. And a few handcuff-eyed Amazon reviewers picked up on this too.

Alan Mills, a top contributor for Fantasy Books, looks like he has every reason to side with the status quo and even he knows you shouldn’t try to get children of the incarcerated to root for the handcuffs.

This anonymous Amazon Customer bought this coloring book to learn and it only took them 8 letters before they realized, “This is either a joke or total bullshit.”

Debra M. finished the entire alphabet and her takeaway was not “I know a lot about prisons now.” It was, “I hope the author consults with reputable psychotherapists next time publishing a book to purportedly help children.” I don’t need to tell you Debra is, ugh, the worst, but she’s probably right. Do you have any idea how shitty you have to be at making coloring books if you’re a professor of criminology named Muntaquim Muhammad and some random Debbie has a better take on the prison industrial complex than you? This is like Lena Dunham getting body acceptance explained to her by a guy named Footslut Jake.

Pp is also for PRIVACY which your parents won’t have! Plus, Pp is for PROFIT because unchecked capitalism has turned even your mommy’s love for you into a revenue stream!

Jesus, Ss is for SADNESS. I’ve had a lot of criticism about the artistic decisions made in this coloring book, but good luck representing the soul-crushing monotony of losing your freedom better than this page, all future art.

As a parent, I’ve been exposed to a lot of alphabet-themed media, so I’m used to xylophones and x-rays being brought up in wildly unrelated premises. But what the fuck is this? “X-rays are taken by prison doctors who check inmates for broken bones?” If you have to make up crazy shit, just skip the letter, Muntaquim. The only way American prisoners get access to a radiologist is if the guards can’t remember which inmate they left their baton inside.

They really did it! Zz is for fucking ZOO! Color the stated metaphor for how your daddy is an animal, kid. And look, I know THE PRISON ALPHABET is nothing more than a series of regrettable mistakes and it’d be best to ignore it and never think about it again. Still, for not being able to draw tigers for shit, this artist is saying a lot with this zoo picture. These animals are living in harmony inside one giant enclosure. Giraffes share a pasture with tigers along with a baby elephant who gets to grow up surrounded by the love of its family. Coloring children, these caged animals have it better than your parents. Let’s skip to the About Page to see what in the hell is going on with the publishers of this book.

Oh my god, there’s an entire THE PRISON ALPHABET universe with child superheroes? Which, wait, means they have fantastic powers but believe their criminal parents were justly imprisoned and should be left there? I need to see what in the goddamn fuck is going on with these Project Iron Kids. It says for more information on them and upcoming books, visit www.projectironkids.com and… oh, there’s nothing there. Maybe their parents paid their debt to society and they lost their powers? T-that can’t be right. Let me see if I can find out more.

In the About The Authors section, a normal thing for a coloring book to have, it says Mr. and Mrs. Muhammad’s next book “100 Questions Children of Incarcerated Parents Ask” will be published Spring 2014. So I’ll just search for that and… okay, it doesn’t exist. Which means, and I don’t know if this is a happy ending or not, THE PRISON ALPHABET was so terrible it undid the life’s work of its authors. To put it another way, if you lived in a universe where children of the incarcerated had adequate educational material, this exact coloring book is what you would send back to erase your timeline from existence. And that’s a banana you can suck on, kemosabe!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, The Artist Formerly Known as Devon. C stands for Champion, Devon! Oh. Oh no, sorry. It’s Crack. C stands for Crack.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Show Off! How To Be Cool At Parties 🌭

The year was 1986, and being cool at parties was in. But cool at parties wasn’t something you could simply decide to be, nerds. You had to put in the work. You had to watch “top-rated star” Malcolm Jamal Warner on a VHS cassette for nearly 30 minutes. Think that sounds easy? You goddamn nerds, wait until you try getting through “SHOW OFF! HOW TO BE COOL AT PARTIES: Stunts, Tricks and Gags to Amaze Your Friends Starring MALCOLM JAMAL WARNER of the Cosby Show.”

I knew something was wrong when I first scanned this tape with the 1-900-HOTDOG’s WEINER 2600 Media Analyzer. Why would a tape on being “cool” set off the alarm for maximum Nerding Day content?

Right off the bat I saw what the WEINER 2600 was trying to tell me. The production logo is nine cartoon balloons floating next to the words “Children’s Video Library” to the tooting sounds of pan flute music. It’s how a dream team of the world’s greatest artists would communicate, “You’ve made a huge mistake, ’80s teen looking to be cool at parties.” The tape very nearly fried a second piece of expensive equipment, my COOLVIEW VCR/TV Combo from the Malcolm Jamal Warner Collection.

Malcolm Jamal Warner immediately starts doing an awkward magic trick with scissors and string. Except it’s nothing. He cuts part of the string and then dazzles you by showing the uncut part is still together. Whatever about it he meant to be amazing was not communicated. It’s like someone handing you a 7 of clubs, showing you a dead rabbit inside a nearby hat, telling you rabbits die when no one is there to care for them because you see, like magicians, they need fathers. But with a little magic, maybe… just maybe, we can turn things around. Then they pull the 7 of clubs out of your hand and say, “Is this your card? That’s the whole trick and this rabbit is still dead. Hi, I’m top-rated Malcolm Jamal Warner.”

I think the analogy got away from me, but it’s important to me you understand: a tape promising to make us cool opened with Theo Huxtable saying, “Psst!” and doing a confusingly bad version of the dorkiest thing. If he screamed, “OH NO, NOT NOW! NOT IN MY MEDICAL GARFIELD PANTIES FOR INCONTINENT GIRLS!!” while he visibly peed his pants it would be more co– no, sorry. I already did a whole thing explaining the magnitude and strangeness of this uncoolness. It’s just such an immediate and remarkable failure of the stated goal. If I didn’t know this tape existed, I could see myself explaining a different spectacular failure with “it’d be like a VHS tape on coolness opening with a child actor botching a rope trick.” I am a top-rated archivist of the absurd, and what Malcolm Jamal Warner has done in the first five seconds of this has exceeded my most cynical expectations. If the Titanic failed as hard as this video, history would know it as the story of one guy saying, “Gentlemen, I have an idea to build a gigantic boa– AARGH! I’M PEEING IN MY MEDICAL GARFIELD PANTIIIIEEEESSS!!!”

The next several minutes are Malcolm explaining the three rules of showing off– be cool, have fun, and courage. I wouldn’t call it inspiring, but at least he’s moved on from the bad magic trick. Wait, hold on, after he explains the cool rules he starts in on a lengthy tutorial on how to do the rope thing. I don’t know why anyone would need to perform such a terrible, joyless magic trick, though. If you performed this trick while a child watched Peter Pan, Tinkerbell would stay dead. This is not how you become cool. This is how you construct an anti-magic net to capture Santa Claus. For what need do you have this dark power, Malcolm Jamal Warner!?

Now you know how to do this awful thing, yay, cut to:

We are thrust into a musical number where an upside-down chin man lip syncs a ’50s song he did not have time to rehearse. Let’s take a step back for a second. I would describe coolness as doing something interesting effortlessly, which would make this little skit the second example in a row of the maximum limit of that concept’s opposite. If you were to sarcastically say, “Everyone knows what cool is– it’s putting sunglasses on your chin and singing oldies upside down,” I would marvel at your ability to construct a joke and communicate irony. It’s almost unthinkable something could not only be this bad, but this specifically, perfectly bad. This video is like a plot by a Turbo Teen villain to destroy coolness forever.

I thought this was only going to be a weird transition between coolness tips, but after the song, it pulls out to a bald, middle-aged man peeling the wig off his neck and struggling right-side up. Clearly in a lot of pain from a skull bursting with blood, he shrieks, and I quote, “LIP SYNCING IS FUN, BUT EVERYBODY DOES IT THESE DAYS. USE AN UPSIDE-DOWN FACE TO GIVE A NEW TWIST TO YOUR FAVORITE HITS.” So this wasn’t a failed attempt at a cute transition. It was a prelude to a lesson on recreating this, this blighted abomination.

This video’s advice has gone from bad to possibly dangerous. You know when superheroes are fighting a guy who absorbs power and they get the idea to lean into it and keep pouring energy into him until he overloads? You might be getting an understanding of my cool expertise from such a cool reference, but this feels like that. If you tell your fellow teens to stop everything to watch you blindfold yourself and perform your favorite doo-wop hits upside-down, you’re playing into your bullies’ strengths. But what this video seems to be suggesting is that you can humiliate yourself so much it can overload your bullies’ dickhead glands. Any sadist seeing this will instantly die in ecstasy.

Next up is Fred Newman, kids TV host, who comes into frame playing a drum solo with his mouth. He’s here to teach you, the cool viewer, how to beatbox. The producers didn’t get Biz Markie or the Fat Boys, household names for this very thing at the time, but the author of the book MouthSounds: How to Whistle, Pop, Click and Honk Your Way to Social Success. Again, this decision seems like it was written backwards from a joke. Forgive this abrupt code switching, but if you saw a crew trying to be legit and failing, a way to communicate that might be, “You sucker MCs couldn’t have been more wiggity-wack if you had hired the white children’s entertainer known for hosting the Mickey Mouse Club as your rap coach.” Fred is a talented blooper and honker, but “cool” is very specifically the last thing you’d call him. At least one time in his career, a cruise director has told Fred Newman’s agent, “We’ve already booked our headliner and I don’t think the ship needs a second Dave Coulier.” Jesus, I need to step away for a second because that’s the fucking meanest joke I’ve ever written.

The next thing on the video is the best type of thumb wrestling– scripted thumb wrestling with satirical color commentary by top-rated star of The Cosby Show, Malcolm Jamal Warner. If you held a gun to my head and said, “You have three chances to live. You can, One, name any way this All-Star Thumb Wrestling skit benefits mankind. Two, create a hypothetical person who would even smile at this. Or three, suggest any number of changes to make this concept work,” I’d say “Shoot me three fucking times and tell Malcolm Jamal Warner I’ll see him in Hell.”

For the next twenty minutes, a rotating cast of off-duty birthday clowns and clean comics come in and teach obnoxious dad gags and church youth group activities.

After you’ve massacred your chance of being liked again by anyone ever again, the video shows you a hilarious way you can leave for your life of loneliness by smashing your face into the door. You’re going to hate this gif so much:

“WAIT, NO! THIS IS THE WRONG KIND OF LAUGHTER! I MEANT TO DO THAT! STOP LAUGHING AT ME!“

This is going to sound weird, but SHOW OFF! How to be Cool at Parties reminds me of pickup artist techniques. They give you a specific set of tools to manufacture these high-risk, all-or-nothing human interactions. Most of your targets will hate you, mock you, or ignore you until you finally meet a susceptible target. Most philosophers would describe this approach to life as causing the maximum possible harm to others for a tiny chance at selfish pleasure, or in other words, “very morally excellent.”

As long as you don’t care about other people, this sort of works when you’re hunting strange poontang since Plan A is never seeing your failures again. If you scream “Show me your bush!” at a stripper and she isn’t into it, you can try it on a different one tomorrow after you follow the first one home and murder her. That’s not an option for the target audience of this video. You’re a kid performing these limp gags at your classmates and family– people you have to live with after you’ve made your shirt into a turban and screamed nothing more than, “I AM A SHEIK WHERE’S MY CAMEL, MAKALAKAFART, I AM A SHEIK!” Who is supposed to love you after you do these things? You reprehensible, shirt-turbaned fuck, you’re just a needy kid who knows four magic tricks and one way to mash your face against glass. There’s no party in the world where you’ll be cool. Malcolm Jamal Warner lied to you. He lied to all of us!

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Let’s Read: Crazy Love

For centuries, romantic couples knew only eight “insanely creative ways to show love.” Finally, decades after fuck scholars had given up, Grace Edwards published CRAZY LOVE which promised “More Than 200 Insanely Creative Ways to Show Love!” There was only one problem. Grace Edwards was a liar– a stupid, corny liar with seemingly unlimited wealth and cobwebs where her genitals once were. We are about to wade through her landfill of bad, but very expensive ideas together.

Like all books promising X number of things, the real number of things is far less. About half of Crazy Love‘s ideas are a variation of “hire a servant.” Grace suggests hiring waiters, personal assistants, drivers, personal chefs, house cleaners, videographers, or sculptors as a romantic gesture for your lover. The other half are variations of “take a vacation” or “rent out a public place.” Expressing love the Grace Edwards way usually costs in the middle four figures and involves at least five strangers watching you. The few others, like this one, are just early signs of dementia.

So let me understand this correctly. I leave a bow out and my wife says, “What’s this bow doing here?” And then I act suspicious? I want to be absolutely clear I’m understanding this: I need my wife to be curious enough to enjoy the “Mystery Of The Gift Not For Her,” but trusting enough to think it doesn’t involve “Some Other Whore I’m Fucking?” And then, two days of strange behavior later, I give her a present and hope she believes this was all some backwards, ill-defined cuteness? This plan is fucking crazy. It’s something Timecop’s teenage son would do to outsmart his high school principal. It’s something Hitler would do to a prisoner to see if it was possible to erase birthdays.

Crazy Love was written in 2013, about ten years after the bottom dropped out of the “Dumbshit Little Tidbits For Dumbshits” non-fiction market. So this was probably a vanity project by a woman with nothing pressing to do after screaming at her decorator. I was expecting there to be some comical misunderstandings with how the real world works, but bitch, have you never blown your nose with a tissue? Unless you’re a manufacturing robot built by a scientist studying the nature of pointlessness, you can’t disassemble a box of tissues and put it back together. Have you tried this, Grace? Did you take a pen and have a fun time very carefully not poking through 1000 tissues while you drew little hearts? Did you clumsily mash up and stuff, at best, 15% of them back into the box so your sick husband could see the ink of your dumb hearts get smeared by his snot after he rubbed your hand germs all over his immuno-compromised mucous membrane? Have I made myself clear how bad this idea is, Grace?

Grace, find a fucking hobby. Anyone who told you this psychotic bullshit was romantic was obviously worried about what you were capable of if they hurt you.

That’s a fun idea!

There are many slight variations of this love tip, which is to identify something very ordinary your partner likes like coffee, beer, or flowers and then planning a theme vacation around it. “Behold, my love! We’re in Kyrgyzstan! Where they make the tube socks you get! And check the itinerary– we’re going on a tour of the plant where they process the beaver anal glands for the root beer float you said you liked on our 17th date! I! Know! It’s like a dream! You haven’t heard the best part: we’re visiting the graves of the kids who made that phone you’re always playing on! I love you too! You’re worth it!”

This is a nightmare. A subway ad about your love? Grace will spare no expense to make sure the maximum number of strangers are sickened by her and her husband’s relationship. She probably follows him to work, one car behind him on the same subway line to listen to the passengers complain. “Jesus, is this an ad for someone’s fucking husband? Who would do this? If you were writing a stalker movie, this is how you would show the audience she’s about to murder. What a creepy, obnoxious gesture by a desperate kept woman. I hope no monster ever thinks to do this ever again.”

She listens to the mockery… the complaints… the confusion… furiously moistening. This is her fetish. Knowing we hate them is the only way Grace and her husband can fuck. When he rides the subway home hearing strangers say, “I’m glad this nutbag isn’t my wife,” he grinds his teeth. God damn it, he can’t wait to get home and enter the disgusting, unwanted hole of his loving wife.

What I’m about to ask you to do may seem like an unthinkable torture, but try to imagine riding the subway and seeing paid advertisements for a specific husband. Not for a product he’s selling; only to let commuters know his disgusting love is precious to his wife. You hate it, it sucks. Then you get off, mind your own business up the stairs, and the crowd in front of you bursts into dance. Their leader, a beast bursting with unlikeability, looks right at you as she mechanically jerks. Long after your adrenaline gland has told you you’re about to die, a man behind you says, “Honey! Oh my god, no way, WHAT IS THIIIS!?” Oh god, oh fuck, it’s the husband from the subway ad.

Now, take a step back from this outstanding, delightful Internet article you’re reading and realize something: this story had to have really happened to someone. There’s at least one poor person out there who lived this.

Fucking why? Am I dating my twin sister in a POW camp?

Great idea! Go to a local sandwich shop with a list of strange ingredients and nag them to change their menu in honor of the devotion you have for your husband! And won’t he be surprised when you go there together and he orders a “Guy Whose Deranged Harpy Wife Won’t Shut The Fuck Up and Leave,” with light mayo and fries.

I wasn’t joking earlier. I am 100% certain watching people hate them is Grace and her husband’s sexual fetish. I mean, what makes more sense? That she wrote this book for couples to improve their relationship!? Ridiculous. Dog fuckingly ridiculous.

“Honey, I, uh, have a question. Well, more of a two part comment. The first part is: you went through my phone without asking. And the second part is this: I’m so happy for it and how much you must love me to do it! You even remembered the ringtone that holds a special meaning to both of us!” Grace, you nauseating ape, you write romance books like the closest you’ve ever come to fucking is getting a pelvic cast removed after a Black Friday injury at Build-a-Bear.

Hi, I’m the person who has already made it clear I think you’re getting sexual gratification from bothering others and when I read this I still screamed, “CRASH A WEDDING AND PRETEND IT’S YOURS!?” Grace, you unspeakable bitch, take the yearning you’re feeling from my hate and wrap yourself around a wild dog. Let it struggle and die slowly inside you. Take out a full page ad in a magazine with a picture of your husband sniffing its decaying remains on your panties under the words, “I love the rotting things inside my horrible wife! Happy 11th anniversary to Grace and to all the readers of Obnoxious Karen Monthly!”

Whoa, this one is great! Sorry about earlier, Grace. This idea of watching a TV show, one I’m a big fan of you say?, is a pretty amazing idea! It turns out you are a real expert on romance!