Author: Seanbaby

Categories
LEARNING DAY

The Truth About Power Rangers

The year was 1995 and a secret war was being fought between the Power Rangers and one man. Phil Phillips, named after his stuttering grandfather, received instructions from God to write a book about the anti-Christian messages in children’s shows. He was never told to stop, so he kept doing it. The Truth About Power Rangers is his 10th version of the same book, and we now how what happens after a Christian man is forsaken by his Lord after scouring 200,000 hours of cartoons for signs of witchcraft or Buddhist philosophies.

I want to get one thing off my chest before we start. Phil Phillips is the roiling, unstable kind of effeminate don’t see outside of closeted Christian husband communities. He talks like he’s workshopping a character called Pastor Bottom LaRue: Unmistakable Homosexual. He looks like a counselor who sells amyl nitrate to teenagers at gay conversion Bible camp. His cheeks tell the story of a man who would lose 12 pounds a day if he gave 4% fewer blowjobs. He looks like a pile of dinner rolls brought to life by fairy magic, which is word-for-word how his wife describes his lovemaking as she becomes visibly sad. There is more semen in a Phil Phillips handshake than in four handfuls of semen. If you showed him a baseball he would compliment the stitching and ask if you needed help pulling out the rest of your anal beads.

I’m having fun, but Phil’s secret desires aren’t super relevant to the book. There are a few mentions of the perfect muscle density of the young Power Ranger boys, but that’s barely gay. The Power Rangers keep it tight and they’re looking good. I bring it up for two reasons. One, he sucks and I genuinely think it would hurt his feelings if he found out everyone can tell, and two, I want to establish the conflict and cognitive dissonance raging inside his brain. He has been lying to himself and his wife for decades in order to trick a being he believes to be the omniscient Creator of the universe. It’s possible his thoughts on Power Rangers are tainted by these deranged and inconsistent beliefs. At the very least, all the hours he spends retching at the thought of his husbandly vulva duties is going to eat into his pop culture analysis time.

Like my article about it, Phil Phillips opens his book by pointlessly describing the obvious. At first, it’s just explanations of morphin’ dino powers and episode summaries. As a primer for curious parents, it’s far, far more than adequate. It’s literally 57 pages long. It might be the longest document on Power Rangers abilities ever written. And aside from one complaint about how teaching karate to unsupervised children is risky for lamps (see below), he doesn’t explain why any of it matters. He’s describing every detail of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, a pretty formulaic kids show with positive messaging, as if it’s a given that the Devil made it. As if battling moon evil with karate is such an insult to God there is no need to spell out why.

Phil brings up a good point in this passage. What is the likelihood of children wearing loose clothes, scoff, in an un-lamped area? VERY LITTLE LIKELIHOOD!!! He’s outrageously pissed at the idea of lamps breaking, but then a miracle happens. I don’t know if it was all the time away from the inside out wrongness of his wife’s female genitalia, or if he was simply starting to enjoy the show, but after this section Phil started cheering up. Soon there was no judgement or moralizing– he was just some weird adult man breathlessly explaining all the awesome things he saw the Power Rangers do. His religion-dulled brain and below average writing skills strained to retell each adventure in as much detail as possible. He explained their puns and got so excited when they morphed. For about forty pages, the TRUTH About Power Rangers was how they were fucking sweet.

Fun doesn’t last forever, though. Eventually Phil Phillips remembered God sent him on a mission to destroy these foolish Power Rangers. He knew one of their crimes against His Plan probably had something to do with violence, so he found some questionable studies, interpreted findings in questionable ways, and came to the conclusion the Power Rangers were bad because they didn’t try running away from evil more often. Phil isn’t exactly a pacifist, but he believes you should let only God do all the karate. Here, I’ll let him explain:

Phil’s first argument against karate is that God is supposed to protect you, so protecting yourself is betraying your trust in Him. This is like telling Christians to run out of a restaurant before paying because the Lord said He would provide. It’s shaky logic even before you consider how weird it is to expect the Power Rangers to follow the rules of the religion in your specific leaky brain when they talk to their own dinosaur gods in a different universe. So I guess forget the restaurant analogy. This is like barging into a Bangladeshi house and telling them to throw their towels on the floor so the staff at the Best Western Plus Kansas City Airport knows to wash them. It’s like Phil Phillips getting mad at his wife for not naming her penis Motorbiscuit. It’s dumb and wrong, but only after it’s first crazy.

Phil explores this theory of agency and self-defense being bad for a long time. I highlighted the spot where he accidentally wrote the thesis statement not for the book he intended to write, but the one he did. Phil Phillips has spent so many years trying to figure out how to hate cartoons, he has lost all perspective on the difference between menacing and annoying. All his perceived threats are imaginary, and his imagination can picture hair on his wife’s back and nothing else. When you think punching your enemies is more of a threat than enemies, you’ve played too many games with words. I get I’m under less stress than a man who knows God can see him when he shops online for dance belts, but I think it’s so easy to be this smart. On my dumbest day, 9 times out of 10, I know standing still and letting karate kill you is bad.

Phil especially hates Alpha’s Magical Christmas, the Power Rangers holiday album. Not because it’s terrible, which would be fair to say, but because it implies all cultures “are equally valid and worthy.” A big part of Christianity is thinking how everyone else is wrong even if you’re a chipmunk-looking fucker who has been complaining about cartoons for twenty straight years and thinks maybe we should all leave evil alone. Phil might advocate for pussiness, but at least he doesn’t spend Christmas accepting and loving others like some kind of monster.

One of the funniest things Phil does is suddenly get furious at ordinary story beats. Here he is, after a brief mention of Power Ranger Ryan’s shiny, eye-catching costume redesign, getting furious at the idea of a superhero rescuing his father from cyberspace:

Phil instantly, and for no reason, thought children would see this dad trapped in the Internet and decide it was their job to reunite their divorced parents. He gets there in one goddamn sentence. This is mind soup. He’s mad at cyber superheroes in an action show for staying too busy? This is like writing an angry letter to bowling for normalizing kindness. It’s like campaigning against fish to fight sunshine. I feel like trying to explain this fucker is making me go c-crascorb dibble crouton hat.

There’s a section where Phil compares the Power Rangers to “gangs” because of their colored uniforms and how they defend their “turf” which he reluctantly admits is “the entire planet.” So to be clear, he’s mad at the Power Rangers for defending the planet because that’s the defining characteristic that makes gangs bad. I think smart people call this specific type of dumb argument the noncentral fallacy, but if I had to put it in terms Phil could understand, I’d say this is like calling yourself a good husband because you sometimes ask the hole in the YMCA wall if it has anal thrush. Phil, this argument is like calling yourself a hero because you pant into a Spider-Man mask when you watch your neighbor’s boys play in the sprinkler.

Phil wrote, where everyone could see it, how one of the risks of Power Rangers is it teaches children to call on demons and “What if one answers?” I don’t have a joke, I just love how after all his paranoia about cultural indoctrination and fear of child karate (the only type of karate), he reveals his true concern: he thinks Dinozoid powers might be real. And it’s terrifying to him. To be clear: this man wrote a book about why you should fear Dino Morphin’ Power Rangers and floated the theory IT’S POSSIBLE THEY EXIST.

In his big finish, Phil makes a list of reasons you should never watch Power Rangers, you know, besides their sinister promotion of heroism, friendship, and generosity. First is Low Production Values, and fair enough, Phil: this show isn’t very good. Second is Only Perfect People where Phil whines about how only one cast member wears glasses and even they are sort of hot. Speaking of hot, the third reason is Sexual Overtones where he complains, and I quote, “The teens regularly wear shorts and tank tops, all the better to show off their perfect muscles.” He also gets mad about the show’s diversity, not because we are losing karate jobs to the non-whites, but for reasons never explained. He’s just suddenly also racist on top of everything else.

He goes on to cite the show’s bias against job creators and its disrespect toward authority as reasons no one should watch it. These are all hilariously inconsistent with values he expressed earlier in the book, probably because God doesn’t assign the task of destroying the Power Rangers to his heaviest hitters.

Of all the final reasons to stay away from the show, nothing beats #5: A Heavy Emphasis on Stereotypes. Moments after complaining about diversity and the dangers of allowing any cultures or religions to exist outside the one he was born into, he’s pissed off at Power Rangers for not being woke.

I think we all agree it’s pretty fucked up the Power Ranger producers made the black one the Black Ranger and the Asian one the Yellow Ranger, but I’m not sure the best messenger for this is the sanctimonious idiot who got pissed off at Christmas songs for being too inclusive and still called Asian people “Oriental” in 1995. I am completely exhausted trying to translate this maniac’s God brain into English, but this is like Phil Phillips complaining that his wife doesn’t appreciate his tidiness to the man eating his ass in her van. If you wrote a book called Zero Muslim Hat Ideas for Easter, Phil Phillips would still have written the dumbest, most pointless religious book of all time.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

The Worst Day to Have Sex

Every nine seconds a horny dingbat publishes a book of daily sexual positions. More than any other product cluttering thrift stores and landfills, they serve no audience. They are useless novelties purchased exclusively by the least funny person you’ve ever met for office party joke gifts. Let’s look at three of them:

Sex 365 is a sincere, well-produced photograph series of couples going at it. It seems intended as a sex therapy book for bored lovers, but since each position requires actual human models, about 300 of them are slight variations of the sixish ways people fuck. POSITION OF THE DAY PLAYBOOK and POSITION OF THE DAY: SEX EVERY DAY IN EVERY WAY were both published by Nerve.com, a now-offline sex culture site, and they’re clumsily illustrated, poorly imagined ways a furniture store clerk might picture losing his virginity. Don’t get me wrong, if you have no dick game these books will give you plenty of ideas on how to snap your penis off with an office chair. I can’t think of a single reason for them to exist, and that includes this one: I am going to cross-reference each of the books’ daily sex positions and determine -scientifically- the 10 worst days for having sex. It will do no one any good, it will be very awkward if anyone walks in on you reading it, and let’s begin:

Each book approached January 8th from really different directions. Sex 365 wants you to try “Sneaky Peek” which is where you watch yourself cranking your boner the wrong direction. Playbook suggests “Puppy Love,” which is putting your nose up your partner’s ass. There’s no further instructions, but the book gives fitness stats for each position and it says this one burns 48 calories for both the giver and the receiver. Maybe this is meant to be done during a brisk crawl or while you time push ups together? I mean, obviously you’re not just resting your nose in there, right? How did they test this? Did they have one group of people do jumping jacks while another laid down and clenched their buttholes around noses? I feel like we would have heard about a study like that. Anyway, the last book, SEDIEW, thinks you might like the “Walk Like an Egyptian” which is where you answer the door without taking the inflatable doll off your dick.

It’s clear from everyone’s January 8th that they’ve already run out of reasonable sex positions. No big deal, though; they only have 357 to go.

On the day before Valentine’s Day, Playbook offers its fifth variation of standing up facing each other, this time with one leg weird. If you’re curious, this burns 117.6 calories for the giver, making it a 245% more effective workout than placing your nose in someone’s butthole. The author of SEDIEW did the sex book equivalent of eating chili right out of the can by suggesting the adventurous “default cunnilingus.” I guess Sex 365 also did the sex book equivalent of eating chili right ouf the can but in a different direction– they tell you to flip onto your partner’s back so he can look you in the eyes while you suck his ass. I don’t think there’s a safe way to get out of this position– you either eat ass for the rest of your life or one of you has to eat a piledriver.

Sex 365‘s position for March 6th is a woman getting nailed while she’s in a lotus position. This is a move you only see after a sex book author thinks, “I have hopelessly run out of ways to stand, sit, and lay down during se– wait, I’ve got one. Cross-legged.” If you’re not interested in tangling all your limbs up between you and your frustrated lover, you can try Playbook‘s idea of awkwardly boning from different chairs. It’s perfect for when they haven’t yet called your boarding group or when a job interview is going exceptionally well. SEDIEW offers “The Chain of Fools” which seems to be two people badly injured in an elevator accident trying to fuck one last time before they die. Don’t have sex on March 6th is their point.

The erotic cave paintings from the Nerve.com books are pretty normal on March 9th, but look at the position from Sex 365. What’s the point of that? I must not be a true romantic, because I would have no idea how long I was supposed to stare at my unconscious date’s tits. Picturing what it would look like from a security camera, I’d say anything more than five seconds should be a sex crime, even if it’s your wife. This seems like a good time to mention how if you’re ever posing for a sex position book and the photographer asks you to get in someone’s lap and play dead, you can say no and call the police. Tell them you are with two strange men, one naked and one dangerous. They will assume they heard you wrong, and it will be a difficult misunderstanding to clear up. Tell them, hysterically, you were posing nude for March 9th. Explain it was the only day left with no ass eating. Tell them to stop telling you to calm down!

One of the things I should mention about Sex 365 is they invested heavily in butt-to-butt stuff. At least an entire month joined at the ass in ways most erections would refuse to go. And before you ask, they are never lovingly sharing a dildo. They are simply rubbing butts for the joy of it. So welcome to April 3rd where one book says touch butts, another says bang uncomfortably in a chair, and the third says mount your lover on your cock for battle. Great job, virgin authors, confused nude models, and terrible artists alike.

It’s April 15th, ladies, and your Sex 365 suggestion is to sit on another butt and get a brief tip of penis scraping against you. As usual, this sex position comes with an apology for how it won’t work for what you and I know as “sex.” The first draft of Playbook’s April 15th position was “fucking on the floor only maybe the lady’s head is under a chair?” They unfortunately never got around to writing a second draft. SEDIEW took a break from sex to include a drawing of two men arguing over a rocking chair and both winning.

Sex 365 seems to have given up on the idea of penetrating women all together. Ladies, you’ve graduated from titillating butt rubs from awkward angles to the ultimate in pleasure– letting him jerk off into your legs while you wait. Playbook suggests oral sex, only dumb, and SEDIEW thinks it might be fun to forget about fucking and battle for a leg lock. If these books set out to prove there are limitless ways to make love, they could not have failed harder. They’ve demonstrated there are only three ways to have sex: normal, on a rocking chair, and not quite getting it in her from a wriggling bundle of stupid shapes. If you gave a pumpkin to Christopher Reeve, today, his legendary and respected remains would come up with more viable sex positions than these three books combined.

Sex 365 assumes you’ve been following along all year and you’re tired from having weird sex a few times and then rubbing butts for five months. So their positions are really winding down. Their June 15th suggestion is a nice hug. Playbook hasn’t quite given up yet, but this idea to pull a cardboard box near the bed so you can rest your feet shows they’re close. SEDIEW has been almost exclusively rocking chair positions since March, which is strange. It’s already presumptuous to think the reader has found a partner willing to break their leg once a day in the name of sex science, but it’s absurd to assume they also own a rocking chair. I’ve been inside over seven homes in my life, and I’ve seen more actual sex swings than rocking chairs. Did the author write this book while he was staying with his grandma? Tell me which one of these makes more sense:

1: I am an experienced love maker who knows all the styles: cowgirl, dog, and with hats. Here are 365 very slight variations on those; most of them are embarrassing, and 200 don’t work. It will be useful for sexually active adults, which again, I promise I am.

2: Here are 365 drawings of what I imagine I look like when I sit in my grandmother’s rocking chair and fuck her yarn.

Each of the books is showcasing its signature style on August 21st: pointlessly rubbing butts, fucking like idiots, and masturbating into woman-shaped yarn from grandma’s rocking chair. These are not fun ways to spice up your love life. These are storyboards for a documentary about the struggle of the three unluckiest pairs of conjoined twins. “Many of you, hffff, take for granted things like, say, sitting in a rocking chair. But for me and my sister, a rocking chair, hrrrk, is like Mount Everest times 9/11 with yoga. I love my sister but we both, rrrk, want to die when we are in a rocking chair.”

Don’t ever make love on October 20th. In Sex 365, the position is standing ass-to-ass. The book doesn’t include an exit strategy, but since there’s no way to traditionally finish from here, I assume you leave when the conversation gets dull. Playbook‘s position seems to be engineered backwards from getting the most fluid on the most chairs with no care for spines or orgasms. And finally, SEDIEW suggests this faceless struggle. What is this goddamn nightmare? It’s like clipart you’d put on a prison sign saying NO SEXUAL ASSAULT IN REC ROOM.

Look, I went into this thinking we would have a fun time making fun of pretzelly contortions and bad sex advice. I could not have predicted a museum of butt-to-butt art photos and 730 drawings of unfinished clones fighting to the death for the title of Chair Master. It’s like I say every time I walk into a home with a sex swing: this feels like a terrible mistake, but a boner never lies.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Let’s Read: The Bible, Self-Defense, & Martial Arts

Should a Christian learn martial arts? It’s the question asked by nobody, victims of Methodist spin kicks, and the cover of The Bible, Self-Defense, & Martial arts by David Alexander (2019). Hold on– 2019? No one checked with God if Karate was okay until last year?

The ABOUT THE AUTHOR says “David Alexander is an author of numerous publications focusing on His passions in life. He is a non-denominational Christian and expert in Shukokai Karate.” It’s weird how David capitalizes His pronouns just like His martial arts ethical consultant, God, but it’s probably an honest mistake and not a delusion of grandeur brought on by the high of finishing a 29 page book. If you’re wondering, the other authorings he publicated so numerously were two pamphlets about Chrstianity and a printed pdf file of high block instructions. So “His passions in life” seem to be only those two things, and judging by his “publications,” Jesus would think this guy sucks and could just kick His ass.

The back of the book warns the reader, and it’s not lying, that it only contains Bible quotes. Aside from a two page introduction and a dedication to his mum and dad for driving him to Karate class, it is 40ish lines he found by word searching the Bible for violence. If some apostle ever mentioned blood, it’s in here confusingly, pointlessly, and without annotation. I learned more about God’s stance on martial arts when I held my fists to the sky and demanded to know why He gave me such terrible power. And His only answer was 15 more ninjas, Amen.

But still, we’re here. We’re reading this 29 page book put together by God’s laziest fan and Karate’s most reluctant orange belt. Let’s take a look at which verses he thought explained punching’s place in God’s plan.

This is a wonderful sentiment and the kind of situation that could call for martial arts. I doubt Jesus would say, “You used WHAT to rescue the weak and needy!?” when you came back covered in pulverized wicked. Still, it illustrates how unclear scripture can be. Jesus might have meant rescue them with some kind of stealth balloon mission or political pressure. To make matters more confusing, “The Hand of the Wicked” is the technique I use to pull out a handful of my enemy’s liver. If that’s what you’re up against, you’re fucked, Christian Karate pamphlet owner. The ethics of entering your cat stance will never come up while your eternal soul is floating above your pussy remains. “At least you didn’t try,” the voice of Saint Peter will say. “Anyway, welcome to Heaven, where all Karate moves are high blocks.”

These are the two parts of the Bible you were probably expecting in a book claiming to be about the morality of violence– the time Jesus got slapped and the time God said “eye for an eye.” The fact they were jammed right next to each other without context is outrageously unhelpful. It’s not crazy to interpret this as both “enemies deserve only sass” and also “kill that fucker and keep his teeth and feet.” The only clear message here is Christians can do whatever the hell they want because it’s easy to figure out how God said it was okay later.

You shall not murder? Tell that to my left front kick, Moses. Too late! Guess I’ll tell it to your widow whose name I’ll Google n– THARBIS!? You married a woman named Tharbis? Moses, how are you giving anyone advice when you’re having desert sex with something that sounds like a scoop made for boiled cabbage. Tharbis is the response I’d expect if I pointed to myself and told a rock monster, “Human.” How did you even romance a Tharbis? You can’t order flowers for her. The card would read, “All my love, OUR STORE POLICY FORBIDS THE PRINTING OF FOUL OR DEMEANING WORDS.” Tharbis is like the fart sound in a Greek comic strip. “You shall not murder?” More like, “You shall fuck thyself, Tharbis lover.”

It’s hard to picture anyone failing at their job harder than the guy collecting Bible quotes about Karate and including this one about loving everyone. If you asked a priest if it was okay to practice martial arts and he said this shit, you’d punch him for not listening. This is like checking with your doctor if you can eat red meat and him saying, “Tharbis used to love frisbee golf, Aneurysm Frankenstein.”

David doesn’t always let weird Bible verses fester unexplained. In a few cases he’ll come in like this and offer his interpretation. And I think I’m being fair when I say what he took from the Book of Chronicles was this: God doesn’t condemn you for killing, but He would prefer it if someone else built that church. That, a minor restriction on religious structure building codes, is the closest thing to consequences this goddamn idiot found for karate murder after a lifetime of theology and a digital Bible with 2019 search technology. So if you’ve spent this entire article with a tiger claw strike hovering above your enemy’s heart and waiting for the go ahead, go ahead. Even by the least generous interpretation, God baaaaaarely gives a shit.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: BE A CLOWN!

Instant Clowning– it has been a dream for generations ever since man learned you could mask pain and homicidal intent behind colorful make-up. But it wasn’t until 1989 when BE A CLOWN! – The Complete Guide to Instant Clowning was published that it became possible to clown at home without an expensive degree. Ha. I’m kidding with humor, of course, which is one of the tools I acquired from this book. So let us get ready to clown and I hope you are ready for more laughter and also that your body will have enough skin to make my clown wings. Ha, more clown humor kidding.

BE A CLOWN! was written by someone named Turk Pipkin which means his only real choices in life were Clown Author or Hobbit. He chose this, which is an unmitigated disaster. My copy was DISCARDED twice from a Canadian elementary school where it was, according to its library card holder, never checked out. When published, the cover had an actual clown nose you could stick to it, which was probably thrown away by a frustrated librarian immediately. This left a rotting patch of adhesive which has been trapping dust for 31 years and makes it look like a clown was left to die in the frost and only most of him came back. “Honk if you love clowns!” he cackles as the remains of his nose mash to chunky gore between his black and missing fingers. You try to scream, but the sound comes out of the creature’s mouth instead. “No! How? Turk Pipkin is dead!” he shrieks in your voice. You look down at your hands and see they are juggling. “No. B-better… to… die,” your voice tells you from the lipless mouth of Turk Pipkin. This is how all clowns are born. This is how you are born, Turk Pipkin.

Again, I’m using humor jokes to create a reaction of laughter, a technique frequently explained in BE A CLOWN!. Let me show you how it works with a Q – U – I – K T – R – I – K called Balance a Ping-Pong Ball on Your Nose. Someone with your clown training is probably ready to go from the title alone, but what if you’ve never heard of joy or showmanship? What if you are a sadness golem wearing the nose of a dead man underneath the nose of a clown? Turk Pipkin didn’t want to bet on you being anything other than the last one, so he wrote his “wacky” book as if it was coffin assembly software for an industrial robot.

Comedy is a tough thing to teach. There is a kind of science to it, but the more clinical you get about it, the less fun it is. It’s like training a gorilla in taekwondo. After years of hard work you can sort of get it to mimic a spin kick, but that gorilla would have been so much tougher if you just explained how it’s possible to kill things with feet and let it go with its instincts.

Speaking of killing, this book never addresses clowns and their need for blood even in a defensive way. Turk Pipkin should have but didn’t write a chapter called “THERE IS NO NEED TO FEAR US.” He never reassures the reader, “Believe me, putting your tongue through a napkin is quite humorous because of the good surprise, and also believe me: most clowns are not murderers.” I mean, he obviously mentions the first part, but not the second.

It’s possible we weren’t all participating in the running joke about scary clowns in 1989. It wasn’t considered a common enough phobia to have its own name until a year or two later when psychologists coined the term “coulrophobia” which means “fear of stilted men” because ancient Greeks had no word for what today’s missing children know as “clowns.” In 1989, these napkin-tonguing entertainers were apparently perceived as harmless. So harmless, in fact, it wasn’t weird at all for a clown to just be holding a knife on page 11 of your Instant Clowning book with no explanation.

There is no story of how early English clown Joseph Grimaldi would carve meats into joyful shapes for children or how he was always ready to open your mail. It’s simply a picture of a vaguely man-shaped thing in a romper holding a knife next to a basket of human ears. That’s the end of the early English clown history lesson. I actually checked the book’s index to see if there was more information about Joseph Grimaldi. There wasn’t. His only appearances in this book are this picture on page 11 and page 11. I don’t know why it’s listed twice, or why one of them is in italics, but I don’t like it. It’s way too goddamn close to this book winking at me.

And while I’m on the subject of creepy clown book indexes, Turk Pipkin thought fingering someone’s palm during a handshake was something you might be looking up.

For a clown, a “Tickling Palm with Finger” handshake is a quick way to let your new friend know you’re going to do some weird sex stuff with their body before you dismember it. Even Turk Pipkin knows this is pretty fucked up. So after he explains how to do it, which isn’t complicated and takes way longer than you might imagine, he tags it with a one-word sentence: “Creepy!” This is a rare moment of self-awareness for Turk Pipkin, who doesn’t often notice the creepiness of invading people’s personal space in monster make-up to perform mechanical comedy routines. And even when he does consider the creepiness of what he does, it seems to be in jest? Here’s a great example: in the section helping you pick “a good clown hat” by making sure it is “any hat that feels good on your head” he warns the reader not to get into The Cabbie’s car, presumably because he’s dangerous. That’s it; that’s the entire bit. It’s a fucking weird book and sometimes it knows it is the point I’m trying to make.

One thing I learned about clowns, aside from how they tongue napkins in a surprising and side-splitting way, is how they like a struggle. In the chapter on AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION, Turk Pipkin shows how to stage a wacky tug-of-war or human centipede (pictured), and the most important advice he gives is to find people who don’t want to participate. There’s no fun, no sport in that. You want them reluctant. “And don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” This fact wasn’t included in the index, but it’s absolutely true that no clown can get an erection unless someone is begging their colorful penis to go flacid.

Again, I am doing comedic joke gags on the idea of clowns being sex criminals and murderers. Like an overly licked napkin or comfortable hat, it is very funny and wins sure laughs, but is there truth to it? Let’s find out by building a test we can take at home. First of all, I think we can all agree anyone explaining satire and parody is a psychopath. And I think you should always be worried if someone’s first instinct when asked to explain something is to pull out a gun. So with these rules established, if I was to show you a page from a clown book explaining satire and parody and immediately doing so with a handgun, you would have to admit something was wrong. Well, checkmate, clown apologists:

What the fucking fuck are the circumstances where someone sees a clown pull out a gun and thinks, “Oh, fun. A comedy marksmanship show at my child’s birthday.” You think there’s a punchline at the end of that worth sticking around for? The punchline is your children are shot. This is the stupidest way to die. When the police find out you didn’t run away when the clown pulled the gun, they write up your death as a suicide. I went into this thinking, “I am a unique voice in the Internet hilarity landscape. I certainly won’t do anything as basic and predictable as make 1300 words worth of murderer jokes about this clowning book,” but are you kidding me with this shit? If you’re telling me Turk Pipkin, the author of BE A CLOWN!, has less than 15 dead people in his freezer, I will tell you to count the parts again and you will say, “Oh shit, he’s right– this is way more than 150 fingers.”

Categories
NERDING DAY

Golden Age Legends: Marvo the Magician and Tito

In the Golden Age of comics, there were several characters every publisher had– the punching man in a flag, the punching astronaut, the punching masked detective, the punching jungle explorer, and the one no one remembers– the magician who punches. They were all exactly the same and no one was nerdy enough to care, but in 1940, Sure Fire Comics created, probably accidentally, the greatest version of the punching magician the world would ever forget: Marvo the Magician and Tito.

There was never an origin story with Marvo. We never learn how he can conjure illusions of any size or why he’s best friends with a super-intelligent monkey. They presumably had a stage show at one point, but now they have nothing. Every issue makes it clear– these two are just driving around looking for shit to do. And I don’t know if this was bad storytelling, a commonplace horror of 1940s America, or some kind of dark monkey instinct, but they ran into a woman in a red dress being attacked every place they ever went. Immediately. It’s how every one of their stories started. Here are some completely unaltered Marvo the Magician and Tito openers:

This was Marvo and Tito’s very first adventure and all the preparation readers received. An ordinary superhero show today will take 3 episodes to establish a character, 5 more to explain their powers, 3 to figure out their costume, and the season will end with them finally meeting a villain. Audiences in 1940 were so much more sophisticated. You could have a magician and a monkey drive past a woman in a fistfight and everyone was like, “Oh, I get what’s happening here.”

“Oh, look– a magician with a monkey on his shoulder driving a bright green convertible right in front of me. All I have to do is wait for them to go before I grab the gi– oh, I fucked this all up.”

I wasn’t kidding when I said all their stories start like this. The moment Marvo puts his foot on the gas he hears a woman scream. His car has two miles and 18 gallons of kidnapper blood on it. He didn’t get to finish a single sentence in this issue before a woman was attacked in broad daylight. And thank God, because there’s no way a 1940 man would start a sentence to his monkey, “THIS IS THE CHINESE SECTION OF THE CITY, TITO…” and not end it with something racist. He was about to tell that monkey, “BY THEIR SAVAGE IMAGININGS, YOU ARE A MENU ITEM” or “PROSTITUTES OF THE ORIENT LET YOU PEE ON THEM FOR A HA’PENNY, MY LOYAL FRIEND!”

Marvo didn’t even get to start a sentence in this issue. The very first line is “LOOK, TITO, THAT GIRL IS BEING HARMED” while an entire carnival abducts a woman. If you ask me, it’s happening too frequently. Another lady being abducted in front of countless witnesses? In the same red dress? I’m starting to think Marvo and Tito might be causing this somehow. You might already have these instincts, ladies, but if a magician ever approaches you, and he has a pet monkey, run.

A slight variation on “running into a woman in a red dress being abducted” is “running into a woman in a red dress crying.” The artist knows this isn’t very compelling, so whenever it happens, they compensate by drawing the craziest goddamn shit they can think of. In this case they went with terrifying banana pygmies sharing a snack with geese who have guns for asses. I don’t care how indifferent you are to the hysterics of women, I think most people will sit through a few tears to get to the part where whatever the fuck that is happens.

It’s insane that bumping into a woman in distress still surprises Marvo. He was 14 words deep into a conversation with his monkey. He had to have known he was long overdue to find a grabbed or sad woman. And since it was only the second one the artist knew he had to tease the story with something extra. So yes, it’s all lady drama right now, readers, but later: Man-Blasting Laser Cat! This all so clearly rules. It’s stupid to me how we aren’t all rating our top ten Marvo the Magician movies while we eat Tito shapes in tomato and “cheese” sauce.

You’re probably wondering… what did Marvo do when he found the source of these ladies’ distress? He did the same two things every time: he destroyed their concept of reality and beat them mostly or all the way to death. For instance, in the middle of a fight, he might distract his opponent by convincing him, with total certainty, that Santa Claus is real.

No thug survived a Marvo encounter with their sanity intact. There was no effort put into world building, but he and Tito seemed to inhabit a universe where sorcery did not exist and the press does not report on supernatural assaults by monkey owners. No kidnapper in a Marvo comic ever said anything close to, “Our guns have all become snakes! It must be da work of dat monkey prestidigitator from da papers!” But still, it was 1940, a time when doctors were using radium water to treat martian bites one day and learning cigarettes were a better cure the next. They adjusted to new information quickly, is my point. Let me show you what I mean.

He turns these men to vegetable-faced monsters, and there’s no fainting or panicking. Within seven sentences they settle in to their new reality and come up with a sensible solution. Marvo had the bad luck to be given fantastic illusion powers only in an era where no one was confused by anything. They were wrong, sure, but wrong with confidence in directions Marvo could never predict. Like this:

Marvo probably expected that man to freak out about his knife turning into a snake long enough to get hit in the face. Instead, the man agreed with reality that, sure, sometimes knives become snakes and he instantly gave his attention to the new problem– this place is filled with snakes! He needs to leave! It’s somehow both not enough and too much of a reaction, and this kind of thing happens to Marvo all the time. He was not a master of human psychology. He was a master of doing weird shit and punching his way out of the unexpected results.

This ambushed man has discovered men and monkeys can exist without heads and his immediate reaction is not wonderment or denial. He just assumes these creatures can somehow earlessly hear him and he wants to know what the fuck they’re doing in his office. Marvo’s illusory horror show bought him zero seconds at best. In fact, all it did was cost him the element of surprise. If he had walked in with only a monkey and a sashed tuxedo and they both had heads, that guy would have no idea anything strange was happening.

Marvo’s main backup plan was Tito. Tito was a smart monkey–smart enough to not overthink things. While Marvo would be concocting some grand illusion to maybe distract you, Tito would cave in your skull with a fucking fire extinguisher. Here’s a good example of the overly-complicated-pig-nonsense way Marvo handled things:

And here’s how Tito did it:

When Marvo wanted to kill you, he’d do something like create a fake flood to get you on the roof and then conjure police boats to scare you into jumping into the water which he would remove right before impact so you would see the ground and die feeling shame.

Tito, on the other hand, put holes in you with monkey strength and weapons until you stopped twitching.

Tito saved Marvo from certain death at least once a page, and besides being the brains, brawn, and comic relief of the team, he was also the charm. They didn’t have a term for this in 1940, but Tito was a pussy magnet. Women loved him and wouldn’t shut up about how adorable he was whether they were sinking in quicksand or awaiting execution. Plus, he and Marvo were the first guys these ladies had ever known who didn’t crush their feelings or throw them in a trunk. So they fell in love every time.

Each adventure ended with the rescued woman desperately throwing herself at Marvo. By 80-years-ago standards, they might as well have been tearing off their pantyhose and screaming, “I don’t care if the monkey watches!” But Marvo always had somewhere else he needed to be. You probably see where I’m going with this, but the only thing we know about this man is he has no schedule, plan, or responsibility and turning down casual sex with beautiful women is how he says goodbye. There’s also the little mustache, the beauty queen sash, and theatrics as a superpower. He wasn’t out and proud, but by 80-years-ago standards, he might as well have called himself the Scrumptious Presto Blowjobbo.

In a perfect world, Marvo the Magician and Tito should have made Batman and Robin look like Urkel and Urkelbot. Anyway, in honor of my new favorite crime fighters, I’m going to end this like every one of Marvo’s adventures– with a magician and a monkey shutting down horny women with no gaydar.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

How to Good-bye Depression 🌭

It’s Learning Day, and you are about to learn one man’s anus can contain more chaos than a thousand hurricanes. It is all you will learn. Author Hiroyuki Nishigaki speaks English like Stevie Wonder playing charades and his mind contains only collapsing anuses. How to Good-bye Depression is not language– it’s a mass grave for words and letters. Hiroyuki Nishigaki is so bad at English he spent his first 7 weeks in America trying to buy a blowjob from a DO NOT ENTER sign. Hiroyuki Nishigaki saw the way Taco Bell could create infinite menu items by stacking the same four cat foods in different ways and he wrongly thought, “I under-Stand how now English am. Book write time Supreme.”

Hiroyuki thinks you can cure depression by constricting your anus and denting your navel many times. I don’t know why he thinks this because he is a crazy person before you account for the language barrier. And the language barrier is outrageous. A lifetime of Nintendo could not prepare me to decode these wild guesses at English. Some things are pretty clear, like how he once met a 70-year-old man who, after 20 years of ass kegels, can now “make fuck fuck three times in succession without drawing out.” Other things are less clear like, “Then, he can shoot out his immaterial fiber or third attention to an object, concentrate on it and attain happy lucky feeling.” Those quotes are from the back of the book, but they are exhaustingly reworded dozens -maybe hundreds- of times inside.

Here’s a page from the book maybe discussing the origins of his theory? It’s about a man “out of a gangster” who thought eating in moderation and the color red were the keys to health. He took any job he could get where he could study sex organs and anuses and it seems like Hiroyuki admired him a lot. There’s really no need to read this or any other page of the book– it’s exactly what you expected after you saw the title:

The word “sticky” appears more than it should and never in a way I’d consider reasonable or coherent. The Good-byeing of depression is the main focus of these butt exercises, but without a doubt there’s some kind of pervert component. I think at least some of times he talks about stickiness he’s ejaculated on something, but again, who the fuck could possibly know. This book is a structureless poem about three things: the definitely psychosomatic health benefits of anal constrictions, an old guy he knows who fucks, and stickiness. It’s two pages long and Hiroyuki rewrote it 67 times without ever getting better at English. He included every single draft and the review is done– that’s the goddamn book. Survivors of the Nanjing Massacre call this book the most unthinkable thing Japan has ever done. In sign language you pronounce this book by getting struck by lightning at the top of a staircase.

But I do want to talk about reasons it’s deranged other than the obvious. Hiroyuki opens his book with over a hundred pages he copied from a post he made in a depression newsgroup about make butt squishes for sticky happy life. My whimsy is relentless which makes me a treat, but it also makes me worried you think I’m joking. I’m not. The book doesn’t actually start until page 129. This motherfucker hit print on a depression newsgroup thread, did not edit it for shit, and it is half his book. It started with this post:

Hello

How to good-bye depression is how to strengthen your internal organ and how to grow younger. I think it is effective to constrict your anus 100 times in succession and dent your navel100 times in succession everyday.

Hiroyuki Nishigaki

Spirit bless you!

As you can imagine, when Hiroyuki dropped unannounced into an Internet emotional support community with nothing but an untested butt theory and broken English, he was immediately fucked with. Of the several people who responded to him, none of them considered he was anything other than what he was– some weird guy chewing on an office chair with his asshole. They ridiculed him, made jokes about him, and asked sarcastic questions. Hiroyuki, a fucking idiot, or maybe a robot, or maaaaaaaybe a supremely dedicated prankster, responded to all of them as if they really wanted to learn more about “constrict your anus 100 times.” As if there was more to learn. I assure you, after reading 128 pages of Hiroyuki’s responses, there is not. If there are any caveats to the medical procedure of squeezing your butthole, they are not to be found in this, the definitive guide to it. Consider yourself a grand master. Or a sloppy amateur; there is no difference.

The tangle of sarcastic Usenet posts quoting previous posts and stripped of all formatting then mixed with Internet ads do not make for a fascinating read. But it does help clear up a few things that would normally be ambiguous in a book like this. First of all, this guy’s stupid as shit. I’ve been served enough stuffed cat at Mexican restaurants to know the potential pratfalls, even for a great genius, of speaking your non-native language. But if you think it’s a good idea to open your book with 30,000 randomly pasted words making fun of you, it has nothing to do with language. Jump in a time machine and you’re the dumbest fuck in any room from any culture at any point in history.

Second, this lets us know there’s no secret community where Hiroyuki is some respected guru. Sometimes you can’t know with books like these. For instance, an author talking about power crystals may seem crazy and have some things wrong about the rules of reality, but he also might be a multiple Quartzmancer of the Year winner as voted on by Gullible Shaman magazine. Hiroyuki is a lone madman. He just fucking popped into a Usenet group, got dunked on by six sad people for a couple days, and it’s the closest thing to a peer review study his asshole clenching has undergone. There is no butt kegel community where he mentors young sticky boys. He is as he seems– a troubled, horny man with the confidence you simply cannot find in the non-stupid and an imagination that specializes only in sphincters.

Third, it helps clear up the first question you might have had about the book– did he just run a book in Japanese through an inadequate translator? Well, assuming he did that with year 2000 technology, why would he have presented the nonsense version of it for feedback rather than the original? Shouldn’t he have shown his solid, carefully worded anus theory to a Japanese depression forum and then translated their responses? Then it would have been 128 pages of garbled variations of the comment, “What a sensibly described theory on the benefits of anal flexing. It’s fortunate you were taught this novel idea by the old man who crushes ass with a positive attitude and is always just dripping in semen.” 

No, he chose to write this book in English, mashing the words sticky, anus, and compression together in different orders and hoping one of them would unlock the key to happiness. I have no idea if it ever worked, but I like to think Hiroyuki’s receiving the care he needs from mental health professionals while he waits for the right time to bite through his restraints with his butthole, laughing and ejaculating as it digs at incredible speeds toward their new life at the center of the Earth.