Author: Seanbaby

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD

There was once a man named Bruce Tegner who spent the ’70s writing the same martial arts book over and over and over then changing the name of the martial art on the cover. He was a shin-kicking, backfisting master of a thing he called Judo, Aikido, Jukaido, Tai Chi, Ju-Jitsu, and sometimes Savate. He was also deadly with most weird sticks. And some of his techniques were so lethal they could only be trusted in the feet of the pure-of-heart like the intended audience for this Punching Day’s topic: 1976’s SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD.

You’d think this would be a survival guide for children in an increasingly dangerous world, but the stakes in SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD could not be lower. This is not a book about kidnapping prevention or pedophile identification. It teaches you how to fuck up a different 10-year-old and nothing else. In fact, I can prove it’s a weak ass book for bitches because look:

This copy was previously owned by a Karate school with a leaky roof run by someone named “Slendl Srbltrrp” who warned readers “DO NOT REMOVE FROM DOJO.” Well, I’m holding the book right here, Slendl, far removed from your dojo, and I’m intact as fuck.

Still not convinced this book is for pussies? Let’s zoom in on some of those accolades. Looks like CHRISTIAN HOME & SCHOOL called this manual on beating up children a “very readable little book.”

That’s the cruelest taunt I’ve ever seen. I fucking dare someone in Christian home school to say that shit to me. Leave “this was a very readable little article” in the comments and see what happens. I will pull so much of you apart your organ donor card will become a dark punchline for the man collecting your remains in a shop-vac. And the judge at my liquefaction trial will say, “You were right to do it, handsome liquefaction defendant! I sentence you and a guest to four nights at the Wailea Beach Resort in Maui!”

The book goes over a lot of the attacks you’ll see from your fellow third graders, like, for instance, a bare-handed strangulation from behind. By the way, the defense to this is turning around and kicking them in the knee. You might think it’s asking a lot of a child to decide when they should escalate playful roughhousing to full-on maiming, but you can take some comfort in knowing anyone who is taught to escape a choke by just kind of leaving and throwing a close-range sidekick will never hurt anyone with their Karate for as long as they live.

That’s not to say all of the attacks in this book are unlikely and pathetic. Some of them are absolutely overpowered. Look at this one:

Those are moves 53 through 59 of the same ass kicking. For dozens of pages, this kid unleashes a single unbroken combo against his opponent’s face, neck, and shins. And here’s a fighting tip for youngsters: if you’re queuing up hit #35 of a 59-hit combo, your classmate has been dead for some time. Oh, this seems like a good time to mention all of Bruce Tegner’s fighting techniques work best on attackers who announce they are attacking you and then stand very still for 20 minutes.

I should also mention Bruce Tegner always includes a weird chapter in his books on how to deal with pests. Not violent bullies or muggers, but everyday annoying people. In this one it’s called “Section Four: Annoying & Humiliating Actions,” and it’s at least the 7th time I’ve seen Bruce explain to his readers this secret technique for escaping a friendly lean. Here’s what you do, and follow these instructions carefully: if someone is leaning on you, fucking karate chop them with one of your hands. To his credit, it’s not NOT a fun idea.

It’s a lot to ask of a child to know when to unleash the full force of their deadly arts, but Bruce is expecting much more from the children of the reader. He’s expecting your kid to identify incoming foot attacks and react with different defenses for each one. His idea to block a kick by kicking it is optimistic, but I think most fighters would agree putting a leg between you and a kick is a way better idea than using your arm. But Bruce’s idea of waiting to see if a kick is going to be a knee and then ducking down into it to brush it aside with both hands– that’s nuts. It’s what I would act out if my charades clue was “Man Who Has Never Even Seen a Fight.” I know these techniques are 44 years old and developed during a time when the government listed ninjas as “Very Fact,” but authors should at least try to knee one kid in the head before they declare themselves an expert on it.

This is from the section on GROUND KICKING. There’s always a few parts of a Bruce Tegner book where the reader can’t be sure if they’re supposed to be the good guy.

Like all self-defense authors, Bruce Tegner believes you, the victim, are in an intellectual arms race with your attacker. If they find out you know how to duck into knees to nudge them aside, they will throw brain chops. If they know you know the defense to brain chops is spin-screaming, this will almost certainly be a feint. For well-trained children, all of these calculations happen in the blink of an eye. If you truly study SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD, the chest cavity of any kid who leans on you will be shattered before your brain has even caught up to your Karate.

KEEP IT SECRET!

A lot of you are probably thinking, “This is a readable little book, but I’m often facing off against multiple fourth graders. Are there any techniques for me?” Oh, shit yes. You want to see how to beat up two children at the same time? Scroll down zero inches.

Shin kick! Shin kick! Twist your legs for a crossover double shin kick! Shin kick them until one of them is hurt and use them as the shin kick! This is going to be the most important secret you and I will ever share, but the only defense you need is shin kick! Steps 1 through 213— shin kicks! If your enemy has shins and trouble with cursive Qs, your kick is where their bitch ass journey ends! Now get out there and defend yourself against some children!

This article is brought to you by Hot Dog Supreme Patrons Neil Schafer, Nick Ralston, and Eric Spaulding who have never met and never knew until now they could merge to form a giant panda.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Fucking WHAT, Archie?!

In 1980, Archie Comics Group published Archie #298 of the Archie Series, and I am here 40 years later to make the case for it being the craziest comic ever published. It is the first media of any kind to ever score the rating of MAXIMUM!? on the Archie Derangometer, which says it all making everything past here mere whimsy in support of a point already perfectly made.

The story begins like nothing has or ever should start– with Archie shrieking the word “PLASTIC!” at no one and with no context. He’s furious, screaming it like a curse. Archie is filled with a dark insanity and the people around him live in constant fear of it bursting out like Anne Frank’s family watching her hold in a sneeze. When it comes out, the rules of everyone’s universe suddenly change and nothing can escape the wet spray of Archie’s madness. Welcome to Archie #298.

Note Jughead and Betty are not saying, “Oh this plastic bullshit again.” This is the first time Archie has ever spoken to them about plastic, much less lost his mind at them about plastic. There’s also no plastic on or near him which means he was on a walk with his friends in the park and his own thoughts wandered to plastic crimes so awful he had to stop and scream “PLASTIC!” He continues…

Archie exists in a fiction with loose rules. He has addressed readers directly to sell Twinkies, fought the Predator, and killed wizards by calling on the actual Christian God. So it isn’t unusual for the horny Riverdale gang to stop rubbing their pubises on Archie to do something like an environmental PSA. But are we sure that’s what this is?

It seems to be an environmental rant, right? Maybe Archie read something about the dangers of non-biodegradable waste and he’s simply having trouble remembering it or expressing himself? Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for this famously conservative and known psychopath to be howling about the plastic apocalypse?

Well, aside from violent, philanderous, stupid, cruel, and ginger, the best way to describe Archie is “a teenaged cranky old man.” This comes out here because the first reason he gives for his seething hatred of plastic is not how it kills seagulls or overcrowds landfills– it’s how plastic prevents him from listening to goddamn records before he goddamn buys them like he used to.

I’m not sure this is plastic’s fault since plastic has been around at least as long as vinyl records because vinyl is fucking plastic, but Archie accidentally makes a good point– retail trends have eliminated nearly every opportunity for consumers to masturbate in record stores.

So in case you fell for my masterful misdirection up there, no, this is not an environmental story. This is Archie deciding he hates the shit out of plastic and desperately trying to justify it while his loved ones try to reason with him. And to be clear, this is not a genius writer hiding a metaphor for American politics in a children’s comic. This is nothing more than what it is on the surface– a fictional character losing his mind because he’s being written by someone losing his mind.

Oh, by the way, Archie comics in the ’80s had three stories inside each issue. Let’s take a quick break from this plastic one and look at a scene from the second Archie feature!

Oh. Oh no.

Let’s maybe go back to the plastic one?

So Archie’s second reason for hating plastic is because of fastener packaging. Not because it refuses to decompose and its manufacturing causes carbon pollution, but because teenagers can no longer go into a hardware store, paw through a vat of unlabeled nuts and purchase a single unit. Again, I’m not sure this is the doing of plastic. This is like declaring war on zippers because no one will let you suck them off.

Anyway, Archie’s third reason for dedicating his afternoon to destroying plastic is cheese. CHEESE! SEE IT IN THERE?

Fucking try to open cheese! Archie DEFIES YOU! Oh, you say it’s got an e-z opener tab!? AN E-Z OPENER TAB!? BETTY, YOU TRUSTING, IGNORANT BEAST DID YOU SAY IT’S GOT AN E-Z OPENER TAB!? TO ARCHIE!? YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS TO EAT CHEESE OR BE LOVED! PLASTIC CONSPIRACY HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE YOU’RE IN ON IT I’LL KILL YOU I’LL RIP YOUR FACE OFF AND PRESERVE IT FOREVER IN Y-YOUR PRECIOUS PRECIOUS PLASTIC!

With no one taking Archie’s warnings seriously, he does what every ranting lunatic does– he merges his new anger with his previous frustrations and loses all perspective of the original problem which he was wrong about this entire time and all contradicting facts are evidence of a deeper conspiracy. Archie is now only this rage and obsession, and he declares to a grocery store that sealing albums, wood screws, and cheeses in plastic will lead to the end of all things.

Let’s take another break from the plastic story and check back in with the one where Reggie leapt out of the bushes to sexually assault Midge.

I’m not fucking with you; I didn’t edit any of these panels. The full context is this: Reggie saw Archie running and had an idea: if he blinded and face raped Moose’s girlfriend, it would look like Archie was running from the sex crime! The one hitch in his plan was how he chose to commit this act on a girl in Riverdale, each of whom can identify Archie by taste.

So to sum up, the less crazy story in this Archie comic is one where Reggie ambushes Midge, licks her mouth to frame Archie for sexual assault, it doesn’t work because she doesn’t care, and then it also doesn’t work because everyone licks her mouth all the time, the end. Let’s get back to the plastic thing.

Archie has become so defined by his hate for plastic and so detached from reality by trying to make excuses for it, he is now willing to literally die rather than give any ground in a deranged argument he started for no reason. He’s willing to sacrifice all his dignity and relationships in the name of some unclear vision of the way things used to be. I want to stress again: we have no reason to believe this is a metaphor for American politics. This is ordinary Archie craziness wobbled slightly off its axis to accidentally create exceptional Archie craziness. Assuming this meant anything would be like watching a cat run across a typewriter and thinking it wrote “Help me I didn’t die from heart failure I was poissned you need to solve my murder hi this is mom, *poisoned, sorry typing is hard w/ ghost hands” on purpose.

As if this would end any other way, Archie self-destructs. His plan (to drive himself mad with cheese packaging rage, close his eyes, and sprint into the street) backfires almost immediately.

While Jughead and Betty try to find all of Archie’s neck shrapnel, let’s take a look at this comic’s third Archie feature. Maybe it’s not the troubling work of a lunatic!

Jesus, I’m not glad we did this at all. If I’m following the plot, this story is about Jughead smashing an unattended boy’s toy boat? Who would write that? And why? Surely there must be some kind of denouement that…

Oh. So in the ’80s when a group of strange teenagers broke your toy you… went with them into the open ocean? They didn’t even put a life vest on this boy they kidnapped. They just let him stand on the deck while Veronica cranks that shit into the chop like a racing motorcycle. She’s 15-years-old and her boat doesn’t have railings! There should be another panel of this comic where the gang takes a blood oath to never speak again of the boy, whose name they never learned, who they borrowed without asking and lost at sea.

So now that we’ve finished the backup stories of whimsical sexual assault and well-intentioned child abduction, let’s get back to the final page of Archie’s plastic adventure and see if he learned a lesson.

What the fuck? Archie didn’t learn anything! A fucking ice cream man could have pulled up and said, “That’s why you don’t ignore reason and implode your life over nothing, son! If you want to stay safe, make sure all your products use Real Plastic™!” and it would have been fine. Instead, Archie heard a doctor say the word “plastic” and he recreated the exact circumstances that just injured him. And is it “a long story,” Betty? Or is it, “Our mentally ill friend decided plastic was attacking him 10 minutes ago and we’re children with no means of helping the criminally insane.” And then it just says END after the main character has a mental breakdown and flees from his own delusions.

This is a targeted attack against everything you know to be true and right. It’s so deranged the author gave a Story By credit to the abortion ghosts who shrieked it at him in the night and it should have been the last Archie story ever told. The idea of Archie coming back to Riverdale High in issue #299 for another everyday framed-for-facerape story seems absurd. He’s like a wild animal. These kids can’t be around someone capable of assaulting them and running into traffic any time he can’t open cheese. Every issue of Archie after this should have been about the authorities hunting him, END.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: yossarian, who will burn this place to the ground unless they change the Sonic movie back.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Everyone The Wonder Twins Rescued Should Be Dead 🌭

In 1977, the Super Friends introduced brother and sister teen aliens who had the ill-defined ability to transform into any kind of animal and any kind of water when they touched. The “Wonder Twins” had a sidekick space monkey clearly operating under the rules of the wrong cartoon universe, and one last thing: they were stupid as fuck. Welcome to Everyone Who The Wonder Twins “Rescued” Should Be Dead, Episode 001: “Tiger on the Loose.”

Before we begin, there are some governing laws I follow when producing an episode of EWTWTRSBD. I am not allowed to modify screenshots or change the plot in any significant way. When it was broadcast, the events of “Tiger on the Loose” unfolded exactly like this, and all I did was change the dialog to be more appropriate. You’re going to think I’m lying, that there’s no way anyone made something this goddamn dumb, but I promise they did.

Anyway, I’ll get started carefully Photoshopping these jokes onto, oh fuck, 70 images!? I guess I’ll see you in about three days, world!

Categories
NERDING DAY

Jokes For Minecrafters 🌭

What is comedy? Is there a learnable architecture to making others laugh? Yes, of course. Comedy is one thing to all people: elements of the game Minecraft scattered without reason among the last words of a dementia patient. It’s JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS.

Michele C, Jordan P, and Steven M Hollow are the three human names given by the swarm of malfunctioning nanobots who spent 172 pages moving letters around without ever accidentally making a joke. There’s no failure condition for a book like this and yet here we are discussing the Hollow Family’s failure. Jokes for Minecrafters is a humorless cough into the mouth of a baby promised ice cream. It is so perfectly nothing more than the grift of talentless hacks hoping to trick uninvolved grandparents into buying a birthday gift for their little Mind-Raft(?) fan. You’re either an idiot or you already knew all of this the moment you heard JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS existed, but it’s so much worse than it has any right to be.

Courageous hotdoggers, let’s look at some of these joooooookes!

Well, sure. He touched lava in a video game. Or touched lava outside a video game. You know we know lava kills you when you touch it, right? You look stupid as shit acting like anyone will be surprised the guy covered in lava got destroyed. A real joke might have been “What do you call a guy covered in lava? Toast! A hearse! I’m not sure, but he’ll never synchronize swim again! Dead Trevor! A volcano getting to second base! Dead Carlos! Hawaiian barbecue! Anything you want; no one will ever know what happened here!” I mean, I’m an internationally recognized genius, but that took me 20 seconds. You’re three entire people, Hollow family. Have some fucking dignity.

This is a small note for something that deserves a full tear-down, but I don’t really think it’s fair to your riddle receiver to give melted rock intent. And nice word choice. “Numerous?” I thought this was a joke book. You sound like a fucking nerd. You could have said buttload. Or tittyload. Can you imagine if you asked the reader “What starts a tittyload of forest fires?” They’d say, “Smokey the Bear’s wife and oh my god, that’s how he always knows where to be.”

Hollow Family, that bullshit you wrote (Lava!) is just sort of an obvious, sensible answer to a deranged question. And no one would bother guessing it because jokes are supposed to have at least some element of irony or surprise. Maybe you’d know this if you’d ever tried writing one bef– hold on, wait. This is at least the 278th joke you assholes have written. How do you not know this? If I was watching the 19th season of a hospital drama, I wouldn’t expect one of the doctors to say, “My job is called a librarian because I steal hamburgers! Welcome to our: the place where grandma died!”

Boy, I tell ya, I feel like I’m looking at a foot in the game Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting after Player One has selected “Chun Li” and used her “Kikoken special move” but Player Two is “Dhalsim with alternate costume” and they stayed very far back and did a “standing FORWARD attack,” because this video game pun is a real streeeeeetch.

Okay, this has the potential for cleverness. I’ll just keep reading, and see where they go wi– oh, there’s no punchline? That’s the whole goddamn thing!? Hollow family, “synchronized swimming” just means people are doing the same water dance at the same time, so no, the others wouldn’t drown. Unless you think they would break their carefully planned routine, ignore the signs of their friend drowning as experienced swimmers, and finally try to copy his movements in real time? Then sure, they would also die. But I think it’s asking a lot of your audience to imagine such a chain of unlikely events.

I feel like the survivors would probably stop their swimming and mourn the loss of their fellow athlete. Is that the joke? The absurdity of death in a joke book during an improvised sport inside a video game? Is the joke picturing a fake computer trying to generate grief three layers of abstraction away from what we know as “real?” That, on a fucking cosmic level, might be the most opposite of a joke that has ever been attempted.

What an inelegant pun. Like virtually any other choice would be better than blurting “I lava you,” while she, what, burns alive? Is destroyed!? And is the illustration showing her calmly existing waist deep in the lava… do you think that helps the shitty, lazy pun land or does it create an entire new element of confusion? Hollow Family, do you see the thought I’m putting into this? This is the kind of effort a professional puts into throwing little girls into lava. You unfunny cows gave up trying after your brilliant idea to fleece 9-year-old Minecraft fans out of $7.99. If I met a kidnapping cartel and the publishers of JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS at a party I’d say, “You guys have already met, right? I figured you would have run into each other during your vile exploitation of children. You fucks. You equally loathsome fucks.”

So you’ve stopped trying entirely, Hollow Family. You simply rested your hands on the keyboard and let your minimal understanding of language, science, and video games flow into vaguely sentence-like word arrangements. And this “joke” is the dim echo of what only the most generous observer would call a mind.

First Hollow Family Member: “Selfie sticks are lightening rods aaaaaand done with another one! Jokes are when one person says something after another person does, right?”

Second Hollow Family Member: “Frog lawyers when you think about it, cowboy pancakes! Aiieeeee!!!!“

Third Hollow Family Member: “Lava! Lava! Lava! Lava! AIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!“

Q: Is there anything you can say to prove you’re mentally incompetent to stand trial?

A: If there was a national anthem for Minecraft, what would it be? “I Will Survive!”

So he starved to death like your setup very pointedly led us to believe would happen? Or are you referencing something else? Is “didn’t end well for him” wordplay because there was a well in the cave and he died in it? If that’s the case, and honestly it’s the only thing that would make this anything other than a joyless statement about someone’s death, you forgot to include that part. This isn’t a joke or a riddle or an anything. At best, it’s coy hints on how to play Minecraft delivered to an audience for whom rabid enthusiasm for Minecraft is taken for granted. It’s like finding Michele C. Hollow on Twitter and saying, “Did you hear about the joke with no punchline? It was disappointing!“

She knows! She has to watch the flowers around her die every time she reads one of these to a child!

The lights of St. Neri’s orphan hospital flicker. The last toe falls off the rotting foot of its last boy. Father Opus Hallahan, like he does every night, watches helplessly. Through the pain the child asks, “Father, d-did the Hollow family write another Minecraft joke?”

“Aye, they did. But you’re not one of the dead yet, lad. Rest.” He knows the boy will need to be finished with a silver blade, but he hasn’t turned yet.

Half a world away, Steven M. Hollow dumbly shouts with his stupid fucking mouth, “How’s this one sound, gang: ‘Did you hear about the player who trapped himself? What a noob?’ Guys? Oh, they must be watching blood spurt from the pustules of the damned. I’ll hit save and call it a night!”

Q: Great joke?

A: Great joke!

Sure, that seems reasonable. You know, it’s actually a pretty common joke structure to set up an expectation of absurdity and defy that expectation with banality. If ten of your riddles ended in puns and wordplay and then one ended in childlike bluntness, fine. You’ve technically humor-ed. But if every single joke in your entire joke book is the simplest, most obvious answer to a question, you haven’t made jokes. You’ve transcribed the life of a dull child falling behind his peers in cognitive development. Again, every page of this book is almost specifically the opposite of joy.

I try to imagine three people brainstorming, “Punching trees… there’s a joke there… something about punching trees… punching hmmm… his fists are full of splinters? Is that it? Yes? I think we cracked it!” How irrational is their judgement to think this is comedy? I mean, this family must not even see shapes and colors the same way we do. They are absolutely interfacing with the wrong reality and instead of solving paranormal mysteries they are publishing books no one here can understand. Are they trying to find others like them? Are they trying to send messages home? These simply cannot mother-fucking be jokes intended for laughter.

So few people have ever been this bad at anything without dying. There should be a warning label on every object in the Hollow Family home not to mix words without supervision. You might be a soulless piece of shit if you’re doing the Jeff Foxworthy joke structure backwards and without a punchline. If you forced wrongfully convicted prisoners to write poetry about the day their family stopped coming to visit, it would have a more light-hearted tone than JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS. This book is the struggle of three minds incapable of even the smallest intellectual task. What they are doing is not hard. Jeff Foxworthy’s last living fan could populate a taffy wrapper with riddles, and this family couldn’t put together one coherent joke after hundreds of uninspired misses. If a horse wrote this its grave would say, “Here lies a garbage horse whose book wasn’t even a nice try for a horse.”

Wait, what the fuck? This is a limp yet competent joke, and it’s not about Minecraft? It could definitely use an exploding watermelon, but… you know, I want to check something. Give me a minute…

Jesus goddamn fucking Christ, Hollow Family. Google gave me 92,700 hits on this joke. Every spider that crawls into your mouths while you sleep dies less funny than when it entered. If you typed this entire book in front of a CAPTCHA, it would never be more certain something was a robot. The Hollow Family, in its entirety, contains all the wit and delight of a can of bean dip at an unattended assisted living center orgy. If a second grade teacher said, “I introduced JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS into my curriculum hoping the suicides would reduce classroom size,” it would be the first functional use for this pointless failure the least funny family alive called a humor book.

There’s nothing cute about how not funny this is. It’s troublingly supernatural how not funny this family is. When a member of the Hollow Family farts, their butts just release the sound of holocaust survivors burying their pets along with a puff of whatever the least funny smell is. 

The scent of a turkey wrap being ignored by a Big Bang Theory editor choosing a font for an in memoriam title card? I don’t like how easily that came to me. I… oh God, my brain can only think in the opposite of happiness now. We have to stop talking about JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS before all my mind can conjure is a tiny Bangladeshi girl’s hands painting G on the BAZINGA shirt of a Sheldon doll. G, again.

Only G.

G, again. G, G, G, her thoughts, G, wander to the failing health of her mother,

 ❡.

Oh no. The assembly line stops. Her mistake was not missed.

S-shit. Is that… how I say goodbye now?

AtinyBangladeshigirl’shandspaintingGontheBAZINGAshirtofaSheldon hrrrkdoll. G,again.OnlyG.G,againGGnoooooGherthoughtsG wandertothefailinghealthofhermother❡OhnoThe assembly linestops.Hermistakewasnotmissed!

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Let’s Read: How To Be Cool

Godless nerds, listen: for only $7.99 you can own a book containing all the secrets of being cool. This guide on being cool was published in 2018 and it’s called…

There has never really been a book like How To Be Cool by Todd Marcell. This is more like a hastily written speech for a preacher speaking in the background of a Tyler Perry scene. It’s fifteenish random bits of wisdom an uncle you’ve just met would say to you at your middle school graduation. It’s only 36 pages long (I had to count them by hand because there are no page numbers) and five of them are completely blank. Todd then used one page for a dedication, four to list the names of jobs, one for the table of contents, one for his email and actual home address, and one for a picture of a street sign at the intersection of Success Ln and Failure Dr. If you had every country in the world send their 50 coolest representatives to some kind of international council and they voted on the coolness of every picture ever taken, I firmly believe the fucking intersection of Success Lane and Failure Drive would be declared the least cool thing possible by Earth’s duly-elected Cool Council.

If you’re looking to un-nerd yourself, step one is looking at this radforsaken image and recognizing it as the opposite of cool. This is a PowerPoint slide in a presentation made by Satan for dead murderers who hate PowerPoint presentations. A person capable of opening a book called How To Be Cool with the least inspired business stock photo should not be trusted with adjectives. If this man calls something “sexy” you should assume that could mean anything from diarrhea to yesterday’s diarrhea. For a Coolness Author, dedicating an entire page to this picture is functionally no different from dedicating an entire page to a story about getting sent home from camp after a lifeguard had to pull a Garfield pool toy off your dick.

We haven’t actually started the book yet, and already you see two of the other notable features of How To Be Cool. The first is that Todd Marcell isn’t quite sure how to use punctuation or capitalization. In a time of ubiquitous spellchecking, in this “Revised Edition” of what is effectively a 23 page book, he randomly throws commas and capital letters into walls of misspelled words like the coolest kid at camp scattering tears onto the Garfield pool toy that won’t let go of his penis. The other thing you might notice is how Todd managed to stretch his very brief thoughts on coolness into 23 pages by using the biggest font the church computer had. If one more kid in this article fucks a Garfield toy, I will have written more words about How To Be Cool than the author included in How To Be Cool.

Weird Fact: Todd Marcell dedicates this terrible mistake to his father, William Smith, which is the same name of another author who wrote a book called How To Be Cool. Will Smith’s is a sarcastic “funny” book about dorkiness because anyone deciding to call their book How To Be Cool has no goddamn idea what that means. A book called How To Be Cool is like printing “Pussy Destroyer” on an XXXXXXL Cleveland Browns jersey. The product, by the very nature of its existence, will always be a ridiculous lie.

If you were hoping we’d eventually get to some tips on impressive ways to cross your legs or uncool condom flavors to avoid, sorry. This book is mostly about God. That might not sound super crazy, but let me remind you the first sentence in this guide on being cool is demanding the reader join the author’s religion, and the second is the author asking the reader what “cool” means. Assuming the picture of the intersection of Failure Dr and Success Ln only counts as one strike, STRIKE TWO, Todd Marcell.

The intro was about “Finding You,” but Chapter 1 is all about “Finding Self.” This is done by dropping whatever you’re doing, right now, and asking yourself who you are for the one million and first time. It’s not too late. I’m not sure something this poorly thought out deserves a joke. This is the first draft of a script where Tony Robbins swaps bodies with Adam Sandler. You would cut away from this rambling nothingness to a shot of Tony Robbins getting fucking annihilated at Adam Sandler’s rodeo clown job.

Chapter 2 is all about Confidence. I think Todd said it best in the first words of his chapter on Confidence, and I quote, “Confidence Confidence what is confidence? Confidence.”

Everyone has their own idea of cool. And while I don’t think anyone should define too much of their personality by this type of thing, I’m Generation X, so coolness to me usually means an ironic silliness that exposes the hypocrisy of a tired, broken establishment. And it’s hard to get a more elegant example of that than a religious author praising the power of “Communication” with 8 inches of incoherently punctuated gibberish. I think I have to take a lot for granted regarding the author’s intent, but this, by my own rules regarding silly irony, is cool as fuck. I dream about the day I’m cool enough to type an entire page without thinking about it or proofreading it and then end the whole thing with In the

If you want to know how uncool I am, I spent thirty minutes adding and removing a period to “In the” and thirty more worried you’ll discover that little boy with his dick in a Garfield was me.

I mentioned earlier how four pages of this is a list of jobs, but it’s important you know there was no more to it than that. He finishes the final chapter by saying, and I quote again, “I’m telling you it is a feeling like no other and that’s real talk so being cool isn’t so bad after all uh,” and then there is suddenly a bulleted list of jobs under the header List of Careers. So if the man who made 11 spelling mistakes in his 700-word chapter called “Educate Your Self” has inspired you to start a cool career, maybe check out Glazier or Lodging Manager. Or Customer Service Representative! Travel Agent! Derrick Operator! Chef! Even Cook!

Since Todd took this strangely short list of jobs from a Webcrawler search of “all jobs ever please +cool,” they are underlined like hyperlinks. Well, except for the two he clicked on before he copy and pasted them. Apparently Todd was interested in being a Ski Instructor and a Veterinary Technician. I normally wouldn’t bother including such a useless, jokeless observation, but in addition to forgetting where, to put commas I have no idea what’s cool anymore probably ski instruction? Anyway, thanks every, one and In the

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PUNCHING DAY

The Penetrating Saga of The Penetrator 🌭

There’s a popular book series called THE PENETRATOR, who is sort of like if the Scottsdale police tried to make their own James Bond out of plumber DNA. The books are so short and readable that two PENETRATOR novels are often collected in one paperback the publisher calls a DOUBLE PENETRATOR.

That’s the only important thing you need to know about THE PENETRATOR, and the rest of this article is just examples of how insane the PENETRATOR novels became once they got into the high 100s.