Author: Seanbaby

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Pokemon That Look Like Sex Toys 🌭

Thank you for coming. Webster’s defines “unnecessary” as “a thesis statement on an article already titled Pokemon that Look Like Fucking Sex Toys.” So get your parents’ permission and cut your 1-900-HOTDOG Pokemon Sex Toy Detection Glasses out of the screen now.

Hi, I’m a handsome stranger approaching you with dildos and Pokemon, so naturally you’re feeling very safe. Forget that feeling. I’ve given you a terrible responsibility– improperly calibrated Pokemon Sex Toy Detection Glasses can sear a permanent butt plug onto a human retina. So put them on and -delicately- look at this picture of Ambipom with no other monsters or sex toys in your eyeline.

If you are wearing your PSTD Glasses over your regular glasses or contacts, there is no coherent second half of this sentence. Visual communication with you is impossible. You’ve made a terrible mistake, though some of it may be my fault, and dildos, dildos is all your visual cortex will ever know. These letters are nonsense things being demolished by pleasure while you listen to a confused eye doctor console your family. For everyone else, it should look like this.

If calibrated correctly your glasses should detect no sex toys. That’s because Ambipom is a sex pervert, not a sex toy. He has six milk-blasting udders flailing from the end of two penises and all of his special attacks are super effective against feet. According to Pokefunpedia, Ambipom is evolved by using a Moist Stone when a Pikachu screams his cock torture safe word. I’m telling you all this because it’s important to remember: these glasses cannot detect criminal perversion in your pokemon. They detect the presence of adult toys in its physiology and nothing else.

Your glasses uplink to online adult retailers, trawl their databases for matches, and will display their exact product names in the red readout on your 1-900-HUD. As you can see, Metapod is a Bug-type Pokemon who is a near perfect match for the asshole of someone named Hot Chocolate Nicole. There is an experimental Kink Shame blocker installed in your glasses’ software, so if you choose to have sex with a turd-colored fake colon that evolves into Butterfree at level 10, your glasses should be incapable of judgement. But I think I speak for your glasses when I say the issue in your dating life is you, and in many ways, your poop thing.

We have another match in this horrible and arguably pointless thing we’re doing! Any good lawyer could make the case Onix owes money to “Sassy Anal Beads,” available for $10.95 at Adam and Eve. If nothing else, know that next time you see an Onix using Rock Throw, an adventurous couple is greasily popping something that looks exactly like him out of an anus together.

Floette is a cute Fairy-type Pokemon who is also, according to all science, an anal plug with flippers. It knows it and it’s happy about it. The entire article is observations like this.

“Imagine a world where fuckable plastic mouths were so plentiful you could find them in every lawn, every park. Stop imagining. The world of Pokemon is here.” – Vice President of Pokemon, 1999

When you meet an Unown, you might say, “Your name does a great job of explaining you, but I still have some questions.” You’ll say the same thing when you meet its real-life counterpart, “Silicone Ball Spreader.” Like how are you so cute when all you are is a nonsense space letter? And how far apart are my balls supposed to be? Ladies, your obsession with very separate balls and this adorable nonsense monster are creating unreasonable beauty standards for us men. Which leads to my last question: what would veteran comedian Andrew ‘Dice Man’ Clay say if he played Pokemon? I think it would go

a little

something

like

this:

Professor Oak: Ash! Sudowoodo is a Rock-type Pokemon with “perfectly contoured shapes for G-spot, clitoris, and back door.”

Ash: I’m nine!

As of this moment, there are 802 Pokemon. That’s a strain on any creature designer’s creativity and so some of them are just a face drawn on an ice cream cone or a flesh light. Snom is special in that it’s impossible to tell if he was born from creative bankruptcy or divine inspiration, but he is very precisely an anus dog toy crossed with a hermit crab. I could try to describe how strange I think that is, but I don’t know how I could improve on this actual user review: “Pretty good little male masterbator… The butthole could look a little more realistic, but the ‘Stroke It Ass’ does feel good. 4 out of 5 stars.” Here’s another one:

Someone named Buzz gave it five stars with only the comment, “Real feel ????” Fun Fact: This means Buzz is so desperate to know what a real butt feels like he is screaming questions at people who have sex with fake ones and also have no means of replying to him. It’s literally the last possible place where he could find answers, which means Buzz has already asked what an actual butthole feels like everywhere else. Churches, police stations, foreign embassies, and anyway, the most exhausting part of being a genius is how every time you read product reviews for fake anuses, your brain notices things like this.

Some Pokemon are only temporarily sex toys during an awkward stage in their evolution. For example, Weedle is a 50 Shades of Grey-branded string of anal beads only until he powers up enough to become Kakuna…

Now that Weedle is Kakuna, he’s a Bug/Poison-type Pokem– hold up, now this thing is just a rubber vagina in a necktie.

You may see a self-satisfied pervert with filth dripping from his head fists, but according to the Pokemon Sex Toy Detection glasses, this is not an adult toy. Diggersby is merely a deviant terrorizing its community with sex crimes.

If you’re trying to create an adorable monster or an appealing sex toy, “scattered human remains” is pretty bold choice. I mean, I get why perverts might want a realistic chunk of corpse pelvis you can fuck, but I can’t picture a video game artist bringing a vagina on a butt into a pitch meeting and getting the note, “Can we add a little doo doo pile to one side?” It’s obviously what happened, but why? How?

Dunsparce is an anal dildo who dreamed of flying until he grew wings.

If you asked me what kind of person puts a pig on a spring and squeezes a pearl between its ears, I wish I could tell you with certainty, “SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO JAM IT UP HIS ASS.” Sadly, Spoink is only a partial match for the Performance Anal Pleasure Plug.

Any Pokemon trainer capturing a Hatterene is making plans to masturbate later. It’s absurd to think this swarm of phallic shapes was ever meant to do anything other than vibrate a hole to climax. The Pokedex entry for Hatterene reads, “A formidable dildo already, in its Gigantamax form, this Psychic/Fairy-type Pokemon can hum enemy vulvas into other worlds where they are mistaken for molting Kakunas.” I stand by my decision to write this; all of this.

Any novelty glasses can tell you Milcery is not an adult toy, but he helps test if you’re still capable of surprise when you learn there’s a Pokemon creature who’s nothing more than a contented squirt of semen.

Baltoy is a Genderless Pokemon with the Levitate ability, which is how game designers interpreted the Luxe Wearable Vibra Plug, a unisex ball toy that floats around your body cavity as you go about your day. Basically, they’re both fun things to put in your butt and forget about, and unfortunately that’s only the word “delicious” away from the actual product description’s closer:

…


This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, LaziestManOnMars: Who might be lazy but he made it all the way to Mars. The fuck did you ever do?

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

PoxCo Regional Wrestling Magazine

Mysteries are all around us. What made that noise? How did this wrestling magazine from the wrong dimension get here? Others? Thank you for joining us for another Punching Day at 1-900-Hotdog.

 …


This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, DatFMCobalion: Who once saved two internet comedians from a sexy jet-ski accident and all he got was this lousy credit.

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: The Unwritable

Hi, Hotdoggers, I already regret calling you that. Now that we’ve agreed you’ll be referred to as Foot-Long One-Ninehundriacs, let’s talk about our site and all its great successes. Thanks to your excellent taste, 1-900-HOTDOG is growing faster than any expert expected and we’re one very nearby stretch goal away from hiring guest writers. When it happens, we’ll be featuring an article by “Internet favorite” Jason Pargin’s David Wong writing as Jason Pargin. He has, in fact, already sent it to us. It’s a work of true inspiration that had been trapped in his soul for years waiting for this, 🌭 the greatest joke delivery service 🌭, to exist.

A couple short months ago I came to Brockway with nothing but a simple idea and an eleven tab spreadsheet laying out six years of content and several hundred article pitches. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but my pre-release spreadsheet looked like this and if you held your breath when you started scrolling down, you’d be dead twice before you reached the bottom. If this business model holds, I will be writing about the deranged things found in my library long after my mind has been preserved in the neural matrix of Smart Dildo 2055.

My point is, if Morgan Freeman found this google doc he would tell his partner, “My God listen to this… Week 789: Learning Day: How to Breastfeed Your Cat or Raccoon VHS / Punching Day: Wheelchair Knife Fighting For Two / Nerding Day: Barbie Gardener Racing for Gameboy Color / Fucking Day: Hello, Morgan Freeman— oh, fuck no. Everyone listen! No matter what you hear, do not move in! The hot dog has the upper hand!”

Brockway loved what most people would call a manifesto, and it was perfect timing. We’d both left Cracked, which had just been purchased by a 17th private equity firm in a month and they aren’t pursuing articles as you and I know them anymore. They decided there was a higher profit margin in brief descriptions of viral events you hopefully missed, but due to the nature of them, probably didn’t. It seems like content perfect for grandmothers who text “what is a tiger king our squirrels are back!❤,” and it’s frustrating because it’s the same idea every other website has tried and it never works. It’s like hollowing out a movie theater and using it to show clips of unpaid prison labor describing their Facebook feed from four days ago.

This seems mean, but it’s not like it matters– anyone who took that shit personally gets paid in exposure for essays on how it’s dumb how Mr. Peanut came back to life on a website with comments enabled. They are numb to disapproval. I actually loved my time at Cracked and I hope it survives whatever all this is, if for no other reason, because I left with a “Cracked Ideas” text file that had grown to 24,078 words. Most of them are hilariously unusable like “X Assholes Only Famous for Being Lonely” or “X Special Education Books I’ll Never Be Able to Make Jokes About.” And this is going to sound fucked up, but I want to talk about that second one so you can understand my struggle.

First off, let’s deal with the obvious. If you’re reading a book on disabled people and it’s not one you’re writing at this very moment, every word in it has evolved to become offensive. Like truly offensive, not “Lena Dunham deadnamed her trans rabbit” offensive. For instance, that book is called The trainable retarded which is fucked, but it’s a course book for something called “behavior modification” which is super fucked. It’s what they called it in the ’70s and ’80s when they tricked a “multiply handicapped” person into overcoming a limitation. Everyone involved in it wanted nothing more than to help people who needed it and if I read it out loud, you would say, “Jesus Christ, I guess not all classic Denis Leary bits hold up.”

I own a goddamn book simply called Retarded Australians. When it was published that sounded medical. Now it sounds like something a livid bouncer would scream at a Thailand night club. The title alone is an adventure in confusion, but I defy anyone to explain why they included medical drawings when they had no idea how to draw and then decided to make those drawings nude. What clinical purpose could this fantastically bad sketch of a naked disabled Australian serve? And why is it in the section about COUSIN MARRIAGES? Do Australians diagnose incest by having the suspect take off all their clothes so a seven-year-old can draw them? Because if they don’t, what the shit is going on here?

Another thing that bothers me about Retarded Australians, though it’s very far down the list, is how there’s no reason for it to have such a punchy title. They’re writing an academic medical document. Who are they being cute for? There is no consumer market for this other than me passing it in a thrift store and gasping. They could have called it Studies in Abnormal Genetics in Oceania, an “Illustrated” Journey or maybe Batman Fart-Train: We Thought It’d Be Fun to Let Them Name the Book. I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t think there’d be enough room to squeeze all that onto this crowded title page:

Another genre of books I have trouble understanding but keep finding is crafting guides for special needs children.

After reading literally hundreds of pages on crafting tips in PLAY ACTIVITIES FOR THE retarded child, CRAFTS FOR RETARDED, and I CAN DO IT! I CAN DO IT! Arts & Crafts for the Mentally Retarded, I can tell you with maybe more expertise than anyone alive, there is no difference in how any of us craft. I’m not trying to inspire you– I mean there’s only the one way to draw a face on a sock. There’s no specialized way to stick your hand up a puppet if your parents are Australian cousins. There was no need to write any of these books or brand them in this way at all. No one could possibly learn anything from PLAY ACTIVITIES for the retarded child. It is what anyone would write down if you held a gun to their head and said, “List ordinary games and nursery rhymes; take your time this isn’t loaded. It’s for a book I’m selling to children with mental disabilities. Hi, sorry, let’s start over.” This book explains the rules of fucking tag for God’s sake. Which means it’s either pointless or I have been playing the retarded version of tag my whole life. And yeah, I hear how that sounds. I mean it in the outdated clinical way.

So 99% of these activities and art projects are indistinguishable from what you’d find in any grade school classroom or summer camp, but CRAFTS FOR RETARDED offers one clue why they were written. Let’s look at project C-4-C:

That’s right, this book wants your special needs child to construct a swastika drum out of soaked goat skin. What is this nightmare ritual we are completing? I guarantee you if someone built and played this drum, every beat would pull the life from a faraway baby to be consumed by Ta’xet Tom-Tom. I don’t think you understand– I have, right this very moment, proven ancient death magic exists and it is being smuggled into our realm by disability-themed crafting books. I think a medal or at least some panicked screams would be appropriate.

The other thing about these books is they seem to be written specifically for people who are caring for a large number of special needs children but who are also completely unfamiliar with them. They explain broad, basic things it seems impossible to not know. Is there no training course or educational program before you’re put in charge of vulnerable kids? In 2005 I entered the approval process of becoming a Special Olympics coach and was pleasantly surprised they had some questions before they handed me a little league team and told me a couple of them were allergic to blueberries. It was the exact situation these books could have theoretically prepared me for, but can you imagine if I had said, “I have no college credits in Special Education, but I have read I CAN DO IT! I CAN DO IT! and I’m qualified to show them how to make a pretty sweet Nazi drum from the wet flesh of the goat.”

These books are such remarkable failures along with being so weird, and I, wait, hold on. I think I might have accidentally written the unwritable article I was complaining about 8 paragraphs ago. And I’m not even sure if I tricked you or myself. But speaking of weird books, we will soon be honoring the top tier 1-900-HOTDOG patrons by mailing them each one of these infamous cursed artifacts from the site:

If you’d like to receive your own one-of-a-kind treasure personalized by me and possibly KIM CANAVAN, you have until June 1st, 2020 to upgrade your pledge. Why not? Money is imaginary anyway. But ramming lit candles into your ear and expanding your tits with your mind powers– those are real. And sincerely, whatever your level of support, thank you for helping to create this perfect website I’ve been training my whole life to make.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme,Neil Bailey: The undisputed shogun of Kansas City (Missouri, not Kansas; that is GapeWulf territory).

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: How to Get Along With Black People 🌭

A lot of hyperbole gets thrown around on the Internet. You may have heard, even from me, how a movie is the worst ever or a video game is an actual AIDS golem built by Hitler’s colon polyps. So I understand if you don’t believe me when I tell you this is the most problematic book I own. You aren’t ready for it. It’s “Upsetting Day” on a comedy website built by two men who grew up in an era where a stand-up special was just Denis Leary coughing into a crippled person’s mouth for 40 minutes and calling it Learn to Walk, Wheelie: The World Fuck You Tour, and there’s still no way you’re ready for it. Okay, unprepared readers, let’s look at How to Get Along with Black People.

You may already be worried this book was written by two whites who have spent enough time around African Americans that they think they have permission to say it. About that, I can set your mind at ease. It was written by two intelligent, sometimes silly black women who graduated from Ivy League law schools. But it was published 49 years ago, and we don’t even have adjectives left in circulation to describe how different racism was in 1971. In 1971, you could still get a near-mint Whites Only trampoline. In 1971, the government could still ship black neighborhoods to Vietnam. And in 1971, people still asked Bill Cosby to do the foreword for their book. This is going to sound like I’m making a weird joke, but he starts by helping you feel more comfortable with racial slurs, then encourages you to try them out when firing black subordinates. I personally wouldn’t listen to him, but I’ll let you decide for yourself:

When you’re writing a book about race relations in 1971, you need to approach it with tact and understanding. This one opens with a rapist using the n-word, so if fixing racism has any kind of a fail condition, these women are charging pretty hard toward it. There is no way to safely test this theory, but I don’t think you would get along better with any black people by telling them, “You might think I don’t understand your struggle, but as Bill Cosby once said, gulp, THE N-WORD WITH AN R, you’re fired!”

The least a white can do is try to be self-aware of all the racism built into us and work to undo it. You should be constantly annoyed at the racism you find in dusty corners of your neural map. For instance, when I go to Habesha restaurants, I always order kitfo, a traditional Ethiopian dish that makes all American dishes look like stupid pussies. It’s a pile of raw meat served on a pancake with a side of cheese. I would eat it every meal. But still, after all these years of overeating kitfo, when I hear “Ethiopian food” the first thing my brain conjures is not the hundreds of delicious raw meat pancake tacos I’ve stuffed into myself– it’s Michael Jackson and Kenny Rogers singing together so crates of grain make it to desert baby hobo camps.

I’m pretty sure when I first heard the words “Ethiopian” and “restaurant” together I pictured a kitchen filled with starving toddlers heating up UN rice in disarmed landmines. My point is, this racism was branded onto the inside of our skulls as children and we have to always be watching for it. And it is with this vigilance I stopped reading How to Get Along with Black People every few paragraphs to think, “I am fundamentally more racist after reading these things.” My daughter said her first words to me during this book and they were, “Honkie, this advice is going to backfire.”

For the first 25 or so pages, How to Get Along with Black People is a light-hearted comedy routine about stereotypes which I recognized as a trap. Giving white people permission to laugh at racial stereotypes is how we got Zach Braff. Plus, this book’s authors are lawyers, not pioneering voices in comedy. They can’t navigate the complexities of these issues like someone who has, say, seen Dolemite 2: The Human Tornado 68 times. And as that someone, I have a note. Don’t call one of the chapters in your book on racial harmony ‘EENY-MEENY-MINY-MO (WHAT TO CALL “THEM”).’ I typed those words one sentence ago and I’m already getting targeted ads for Jordan Peterson videos and something called “Lawn Cross brand lighter fluid.”

The most unbelievable part of the book, and I haven’t forgotten about the Cosby hard R n-word incident, is “The Integration Index.” It’s a list of all the types of blacks, how “white” they are, and how you can spot them. They’re each categorized by a silly name like a READY RICHARD, who is a middle-aged man “found with whites when he can manage.” The READY RICHARD, and please understand the rest of this sentence is a direct quote, “prefers ‘Negro’ but will answer to ‘colored.’ He tends to be lighter-skinned.” This reads like a handbook for a Kentucky militia to help distinguish between enemy hostiles and the good ones, but it was published by educated women of color in an effort to undo intolerance. Which is very much like writing a book called Safe Woodworking Projects and only including knock knock jokes about sawing your dick off.

The other “portraits” in the Integration Index are HUSTLIN’ SAM, a dark-skinned huckster who can trick the whites into thinking he’s one of them. There’s also KWAME JONES who adopts African traits but can be found in all-white corporations. GHETTO JIM is a servant or a day laborer– “the black whom whites know best– and least.” I could feel every syllable of it making me a worse person; plus, I have no idea where I’d apply this knowledge. Are these conversation starters? If I meet a black stranger am I supposed to say, “I’m an Aquarius, so I get along best with a GRANDMA CHURCH-HAT or a THUNDERCOCK JENKINS. Which are you on the Integration Index? Or, oh! Oh!! Can I guess!?” It’s becoming more and more clear I don’t understand any of this, but I remain confident you shouldn’t open a book intended to make white people more inclusive with a funny 4 Blacks You Meet At Every Cookout list.

As the book goes on, there is a pretty serious tone change. It starts to complain about the cliche things caucasians do and say to them and absolutely stops even trying to be cute. Discussing and researching the subject matter seems to have exhausted the authors’ patience for our white bullshit. And fair enough. There is a tiny Zach Braff inside each of us, desperate to get included in a complicated handshake or given permission to wear blackface for a Scrubs cutaway. So I get we suck, but look at what that contempt for us did to this book. It turned an artifact of pure insanity into an academic study of the harsh truths of our hypocrisies:

In the end, this book promising you an exciting life of diverse friends turns into lecture on all the ways you’ve hurt people with your ignorance. It makes a strong case for how the well-meaning white is nature’s most obnoxious animal. Even assuming every white person was trying to not be racist, and history has shown this to be closer to the opposite, there were about 178 white Americans for every 22 black Americans when this was published. Which means in 1971, every African American had to be someone’s first black friend eight different times. They had to field the same stupid questions and hear about the same stupid Scrubs gag eight different times– at least. Meeting nice caucasians seems like running into a different crazy ex at every party you go to, and not being able to talk to anyone else until you’ve fixed them. Maybe? The one thing I definitely learned from How to Get Along with Black People is no one likes it when white people offer observations like this. Anyway, happy Upsetting Day to people of all colors from the obnoxious well-meaning whites of 1-900-HOTDOG!

Categories
NERDING DAY

The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle Joke Book 🌭

In 1990, a London publisher put out a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle joke book and it ended up being a mass grave for concepts that once brought children joy. It took riddles and made them meandering, barely explainable things. It stole classic, well-known jokes and crammed pizza and Krang into them by any means necessary. It ground up words into mangled piles of hyphens to form limp, desperate puns. Through a combination of author failure and British slang, it’s 96 pages of confusing mess, only a sad confusing mess like a pile of human feet or abortion paperwork. Okay, I think you’re ready for The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles Joke Book:

This is an example of both the keen sense of humor of the author and the lengths he’ll go to to make a pun. Sure, as wordplay, “sewer-cide” is fork-your-own-eye-out clumsy, but more notable is how he has no problem killing a man with sadness to get to it. The book is called “Teenage Mutant HERO Turtles” because they didn’t trust kids with the word “ninja,” but they’re going to show them a man who chooses to die in shit rather than suffer this cruel world? And let’s not play games– the fall doesn’t have a prayer of killing this guy. At best he’ll break his legs and die from toxic shock in five days, and that’s only if he remains undiscovered and resists calling for help. So I guess I’m saying this gag wouldn’t work even if the premise was better than “what about a guy ending his life in a sewer?” And speaking of sewers, does this joke take place in a universe where manhole designers get one shot at writing “SEWER” and that’s fucking it? Go ahead and add this goddamn manhole to the list of reasons this isn’t very good.

I don’t think it’s splitting hairs to mention pizza is not served with mustard, “waiting for mustard to cool down” is not a sensible punchline, and masks don’t get black eyes. This is like walking up to a man in pants, asking why there are bite marks on his penis, and him replying, “mayo no mistake– the cool cat relished a bite of my hot dog!” It asks you to make so many accommodations for important details being left out and weird mistakes left in. By the time you’ve asked someone to imagine a mustard pizza only it’s a special kind of mustard too spicy for a ninja to eat and also he’s the kind of ninja confused by the very concept of spiciness, your joke might as well be, “Please laugh; all my children are dead. Hot mustard is something my boys will n-never again… please, I’m begging you to remember: hot can mean two different things.”

All it takes for this routine to work is for one turtle to have never heard of bees and, unrelated to that, have no peripheral vision. The issue I have is not that this is absurd, it’s how the punchline isn’t. A bug on a pizza, whether it’s funny to you or not, is something so much more conceivable than everything leading to it. These extraordinary circumstances ramped up to nothing. How many laws of our universe had to break for this author to get a bug on some pizza? It’s like watching a wet madman fall from a hole in the sky and saying, “Hey, the cloud next to that guy’s portal sort of looks like a boat. It is Wednesday.”

There are, without hyperbole, several too many jokes about insects on pizza in this book. Something happened to this author, probably seeing an insect on pizza, that caused him to find insects on pizza outrageous. This information isn’t particularly interesting or funny, but when someone does something as strange as drawing this many bug-infested pizzas, I take detailed notes. It might make for a bad comedy article, but it will definitely help catch the man authorities will one day call the Papa John’s Killer.

This is legally a joke. I could see a pair of armadillosaurs deliver these lines to each other after Fred Flintstone ran them over. But like everything else in this book, it’s only the faint echo of comedy from a dark void of inexplicable decisions. Raphael is completely disfigured by the car accident, but seems to be relaxing and having a conversation? Why was the line about how he was feeling given to Leonardo? Raphael must have been delivering this punchline in an earlier version, which –holy shit– means the author made at least a second pass on this book. Holy fucking shit, it means he was trying.

Finally, a clear concept without any confusing missteps by the author: the other three Ninja Turtles want to cook and eat Donatello. And they illustrated this with Donatello cheerfully thinking, “My hungry pals want to skewer my flesh! Hey, my own bo staff might do the trick!” Again, it’s not a great joke, but this will be a useful document to one day inspire a detective to think, “My god, what if the Papa John’s Killer and the Night Kebabber are the same person?”

“Welcome to my bathroom, Turtles! Too bad for you, I’ve made a CLEAN getaw– oh, shit. I see what I did, Turtles. I mistook an idiom for something literal and then ignored the important half of it. I did the opposite of it, in fact. So really, what I’m doing doesn’t even make sense in the internal logic of my buffoonery. This is like if the Family Circus was less coherent, Turtles!”

Before any of them are cool but rude or doing machines, the defining personality trait for each Ninja Turtle is their love of pizza. The author knows this. A third of his goddamn book is the word pizza. So why does this Ninja Turtle not know how pizza works? And it sets up no clever snap– Michaelangelo is simply describing the event which should not be happening and has no reason to. Functionally, it may as well have been this:

You don’t so much have to plan on explaining this joke as you do committing to a series of apologies. Fuck you, Ninja Hero Turtles Joke Book. Fuck the pain and mistakes that caused you, and fuck the God who watched it happen from the stars and did nothing. If an entire civilization fell into the ocean whenever a child laughed at “turn turtle and run,” the survivors would watch from the shores knowing the suffering was deserved.

This is a masterclass in betraying a joke structure for no payoff. The idea of a riddle is that abstract thinking will lead you to a satisfying answer. So why does Krang file his teeth? Maybe because he keeps losing them? Maybe he thought he was looking a little long in the tooth? The answer will never be funny, but at least a clever one will be something close to cute. The answer, “So Krang can bite tin cans!” is nothing. It’s a stupid toddler’s guess from a realm where there are cans but no can openers. And the “joke” here, that space genius Krang doesn’t open food cans before eating them, is only vaguely suggested, and not by the joke teller but the joke recipient? The author, Peter Eldin, got every detail of riddles wrong not to defy our expectations but because 72 pages into his 110th children’s riddle book, he still has no idea how they fucking work.

This is too wordy to be coherent, but if you were delivering a baby and stuffed a cat up the mother’s ass, this Krang joke is what you would show the Guinness committee to avoid the world record for Wrongest Dumb Fuck.

This one is special because the illustration undermines the joke’s entire conceit by showing at least one situation where a turtle can absolutely get mashed, but I mostly picked it to illustrate Peter’s other approach to riddles. Before I make another case for this book being quite bad, I want to say I’ve got nothing against this comedy structure. For instance,

How is this book the same as naming your snake “Pussy Magnet?”

Because every element works independently to perform the exact opposite of its intended purpose.

Peter Eldin doesn’t do that. He asks a question that seems like it has some kind of puzzle element, but instead of a solution, the answer is an idiot’s first guess. It would at least be a swing at a fun surprise among coherent, normal riddles, but when all of them are like this, it reads like a transcription of a long car ride with a four-year-old. In fact, one tiny change makes every line in this book suddenly make sense:

Some jokes, like the one about Krang eating tin cans or the guy killing himself, are illustrated since they wouldn’t work without seeing the unopened cans and existential fear in the man’s eyes, respectively. However, most of the illustrations are generic TMNT clipart slapped randomly between lines. And as you get further into the book, as the jokes become more desperate, the clipart starts growing in size. Soon, a recurring picture of a tiny turtle eating pizza might take up an entire page. It’s the punchline to the unspoken setup, “What’s the dumbest way a hack author can satisfy his publisher’s demand for pages?” Anyway, here’s an irrelative word from our sponsor:

Categories
LEARNING DAY

How to Protect Yourself on a Cruise Vacation 🌭

Imagine all the things that can go wrong on the ocean. Double it and add vomit. Now picture a judge ordering you to pay Royal Caribbean’s legal fees for all of them. You are still not ready for the horror of HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF ON A CRUISE VACATION: SAFETY TIPS THAT MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE.

Let’s begin with what you’re already thinking. Cruise ships are gross. They are all the bacteria of 15,000 catering pans of Subway’s new Kickin’ Chipotle Chicken ™ sealed on a boat with a sewage treatment plant and a generation of people who never understood the need for condoms. You know what old people do with a tissue after they’re done sneezing or having unprotected sex? Trick question– that tissue still has some good bits left. Slide it up your sleeve for later.

My point is, imprisoning yourself in a sewage squirting, pollution-belching germ preserve is disgusting and the most notable danger of cruise ship travel. This book was written 9 years before the coronavirus and the author still didn’t get out of the intro without reminding the reader how cruises are just plague ships featuring Jonathan Taylor Thomas in Home Improvement on Ice: An Interactive Experience.

Before she starts a single chapter on swindlers, pickpockets, or high-sea murderers… before the pages even have numbers, Yvonne wants you to understand these boats are gastrointestinal death traps. She also reminds you staff will be less interested in protecting you than they are the cruise line. Again, she has not started the book yet, and everything on the ship from the crew to the salad bar already wants you dead.

The book is called HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF ON A CRUISE VACATION: SAFETY TIPS THAT MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE, but after this initial diarrhea scare it is 71 pages of advice about travel agents, packing, insurance, and import/export regulations. For 18,000 words, the only thing this book protects you from is the deceptive wording of your refund policy. But when things finally pick up, they pick up fast. The “Fire Safety” section explains how quickly a fire on a cruise ship will kill you from crowd panic and smoke inhalation before you worry about the inescapable flames, and she supports her warnings with a recurring feature she calls “Real Case.” It’s where she describes actual cruise ship deaths found during her research. Yvonne collects gruesome cruiseliner facts the way other women her age collect owls. She writes with the dark fascinations of a person wearing another woman’s dentures who often stops typing to ask a mirror, “IS THIS HOW THE WORLD TASTED WHEN YOU BURNED ALIVE ON THE STAR PRINCESS, GLADYS?”

Of course, not all of the safety advice is about terrible things happening to the innocent. Yvonne also has some warnings for people trying to hide their heroin from police dogs.

There are so many things either indifferent to your suffering or directly causing your suffering on a cruise vacation. Because of this, Yvonne rarely spends more than a page or two on each one. Her advice somehow always ends up being both obvious and inadequate like “Don’t fall overboard” or “Watch out for passengers who want to push you overboard.” These quick reminders of man’s fragility and capacity for evil are followed up with another Real Case and then she’s on to the next thing.

Real Case: “I made peace with God.”

Yvonne’s noble attempt to include every tragedy that might ever befall someone on the high seas makes most of her sections weirdly short. Well, except for the one on sex crimes. She has 14 pages worth of things to say about the subject, second only to the 15 page section on Legionnaires disease, Giardiasis, and Norovirus. Which means, statistically, cruise travel is represented by this unappealing pie chart:

You might be wondering why so much of this book is taken up with sexual assault. What makes sex crime survival on a cruise different from whatever rape prevention you’ve been doing for the first 70 years of your life? Holy shit, so much. Once you get four feet outside the borders of “countries,” you are governed by raw capitalism. Our laws mean nothing to ocean rapists, and cruise lines have a financial incentive to make sure no one calls them that. Plus, thanks to byzantine maritime paperwork, every cruise ship employee legally counts as a Panamanian horse corpse. Try prosecuting one of those for alleged crimes it committed in the Bermuda Triangle 31.7👽🧜-90 years past the statute of limitations.

Every page of this chapter is a nightmare. Here’s one where a ship crew member assaulted a teenage girl and escaped criminal charges because of the deranged terms of her ticket contract. Oh, also, about 10 passengers vanish without a trace every year. Yvonne doesn’t come right out and guess what happened to them, but she includes this mystery in a chapter called “SEXUAL ASSAULTS AND RAPES,” not “CHANGING YOUR NAME AND STARTING AN ADVENTUROUS NEW LIFE.”

I learned hundreds of things from this book, all of which can be summed up in the six words “never get on a fucking boat.” If I had twenty words to work with, I’d say, “If you simply must kill each fortnight to silence the Devil’s insistent whispers, get a job on a cruise ship!” And if you gave me zero words, I would expertly pantomime puking overboard while I poop my pants and get murdered, then act out a judge explaining to my family how he can’t do anything about it and, in fact, the terms of my passenger contract means my remains are now wholly owned by Carnival Cruise Lines’ signature fajitas. And every single person watching would guess, “Oh! Oh… Oh! T-the plot of HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF ON A CRUISE VACATION: SAFETY TIPS THAT MIGHT SAVE YOUR LIFE!”