If you don’t understand or accept your gay son, you’re probably not used to good news, but I have some: there’s a book called HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT YOUR GAY SON (Even if you’re not sure you can). It’s the perfect guide for someone absolutely repulsed by basic human decency, but also willing to read a book on it.
HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc) spends most of its 155 pages answering tough questions a proudly ignorant person might ask a gay expert. It’s a best-case scenario debate between the world’s most patient person and the bronze medal winner in the Gay Son Hating Olympics. These hypothetical interactions were mashed together into a vaguely book-like structure by a gay couple in… holy shit, 2015!? This wasn’t written from an Arkansas AIDS pandemic in the ’80s? It seems impossible that while we were watching the Night’s Watch and the Wildlings form an uneasy alliance, there were people driving to the suburbs and telling the Barnes and Noble clerk, “Maybe y’all can help me out. I found a penis in the boy’s mouth and, well, before I put him down I was lookin’ for the latest instruction manual on gay.”
Here are, word for word, some of the obvious questions answered by HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc):
You probably guessed the answer to most of these questions is something close to “no,” but much closer to “no, you goddamn psychopath.” The book tries to take irrational hate and fear and respond to it rationally, which is kind of satisfying and seems like it should work, but you can obviously look around and see how it doesn’t. For instance, if you believe a 680-year-old man named Noah built history’s largest zoo on a cruise ship using year 🦴7👁☥ technology, you don’t change your mind when you enter second grade and find out everything about it is fucking stupid. And if “the God” told you your gay son was an unnatural pedophile, you don’t tell that God to fuck off because a book goes, “Actually, in several functional ways that’s not technically accurate.”
My point is, I’m not sure how effective this book will be at fixing bigot dads. Not only because of the nature of the problem, but because these authors might not be experts on gay culture. For one thing, they say in their book there is “strictly speaking” no such thing, but also look at the gay son on the cover. Are you telling me a gay teen showed up to picture day with no product in his hair? And look at how it’s been cut. That’s worse than cheap– this kid stuck his bangs in a carnival ride and told them to let it rip. The gayest thing this kid has ever done was ask his mom if he could buy the WWE 2K Randy Orton DLC. Which means the publisher did not set up a cover shoot with an out-and-proud teen model– these assholes scrolled through stock photos until they found a kid who looked kind of gay. It’s probably as tone-deaf as asking your son if he’s a bottom, and gave me more than enough bread crumbs to find their source.
The cover comes from an Adobe stock photo called “Mother and Son Smiling in an Outdoor Setting” which was also used, and this is true, by a military school for troubled teens and a software company specializing in apps that prevent truck drivers from looking at their phone. And like with all stock photo shoots, the models moved around doing weird shit for a few more pictures. Which means the rest of the article is just this:
Over the decades, the character of Captain America has been imagined nearly five different ways– werewolf, regular, one-armed unfrozen teen, and secret Nazi. It is with great honor I add “man with realistic limitations and personality disorders” to the pantheon of Captain America adaptations with this fun-for-kids coloring book.
Ear candling is precisely, exactly what it sounds like without any caveats. It’s an activity a three-year-old would invent if you asked them to draw “ear candling.” I still feel like I have to say it, though: it’s the ancient science of sticking a candle in someone’s ear. How can you do it yourself? I just fucking told you: stick a candle in someone’s ear. But for those who want to make it a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit more complicated, let’s look at The Practical Guide to Ear Candling (6th Edition(!)).
The “””science“”” behind ear candling is this: hot smoke goes into your skull through your ear hole and it heals you, physically and spiritually. The author of this book doesn’t quite know how it works, and in fact seems terrified of saying anything specific enough to make him liable for injuries. Every page praises the benefits of this historical ear magic invented by nerd Indians and then immediately adds something like, “But, you know, remember: this has only been tested on mummies and you should check with a doctor before you scorch half your face off with authentic Wally’s brand ear products.”
Oh yeah, I should mention the author sells ear candles and a wide array of snake oils you can rub on your ear before and after you put a lit candle in there. This is essentially a 64 page advertisement and liability waiver with a touch of dingbat witchcraft, and I think I accidentally just described every metaphysical book ever written. In your face, wizards.
As the introduction says, The Ears May Hold More Mysteries Than We Imagine… but we aren’t saying they do and you can’t prove in court we specifically told you to put something called an “ear candle” into your ear and light it. This activity is for “relaxing, soothing, and entertaining” only, and won’t cure any of these ailments these legends claim they cure. Weirdly, the author keeps downplaying the magical power of ear candles while growing more and more certain in the mystic protection of his legal disclaimers. He is one step ahead of any potential lawsuit. In fact, if you surrounded a lawyer with pages from Practical Guide to Ear Candling, they would be trapped in an endless dance until a scorch-faced virgin broke the circle.
The book can’t even get through the first page of THE BASICS OF EAR CANDLING without debunking the basics of ear candling. These dorks have been melting candles on each other for generations and it’s only recently they considered all this wax they kept finding came from the candles and not a vacuum spell they were somehow casting on ears? This feels like opening up a puppet show by telling the audience how recent science has proven all your talking puppy dogs are mainly socks on your hands. How dumb is your hobby’s community that this was worth saying out loud, and why would you shatter such a necessary fiction for it to function? No offense to your ancestors, but if thousands of years of their ancient healing art can get dismissed by knowing what candles are, maybe they were all stupid and wrong?
The traditional way to ear candle, the one the author admits does nothing and you should never try, involves laying your victim on their side and using a pie tray to keep most of the ash and wax from falling into their head. But since none of this matters, you can go ahead and sit upright. You could even stay home without putting shit in your ears. This book cannot stress this enough– only a few guys in cave paintings have any idea what this does or why it exists. It’s entirely possible australopithecus drew cartoons where people fucked each other in the ear and this entire practice is a wildly misinterpreted take on them.
So after ten pages of explaining this “home remedy” only adds wax to your ear, it says slowly burning two to three candles into a sitting persons’ skull is “just as effective.” Effective at goddamn what? This is indentical to telling a husband having sex with a rotisserie chicken it will help his marriage just as well if he fucks it wearing a 1-900-HOTDOG headband. Neither one are going to clean out his ears, and they both make for less embarrassing photographs than ear candling. People getting their picture taken during ear candling look like they’re getting their brain basted at Sport Clips.
I swear to God this inspirational quote about learning to fly came right after the author again explained how dangerous and pointless this hobby is along with a plug for Wally’s brand “ear oil.” It’s philosophically as far from flying as any activity has ever been. If you were a raccoon delicately eating around the semen on a discarded rotisserie chicken, it would make more sense for someone to recite quotes to you about soaring beyond the confines of your fear.
I mentioned this is a 64 page book, but there is less than a page worth of actual material. They keep rewording the candling process, which I swear I’m not simplifying, and then lowering your expectations, which I swear can always get lower. Repetition can be a helpful learning tool, but this is like watching a sick goldfish discover diarrhea 128 different times.
The “Anecdotes” chapter is a sad, whimpering collection of evidence no one is expected to believe. Make-believe individuals make vague, third-hand claims about the benefits of ear candling after a disclaimer saying they’re all probably lying. This author is way too sheepish to be a grifter. They’re like a breezy heiress who never really wanted to be stuck with her dead dad’s penis enlargement business.
This ear candler is not an expert on anything including this, their useless and ineffective life’s work. The one thing they should be good at is killing time while they wait for candles to burn down to their client’s head, but the chapter “During Candling” is two pages long and only includes a single activity idea: face massage. So if you pursue a life of professional ear candling and small talk isn’t working out and you’ve already exhausted all 7 seconds of the full history of this ancient practice, simply rub your client’s face for the remaining three to four hours. Or hell, why not open plastic bags of cabbage burps or hand them drawings of local cat buttholes? Nobody is ever going to say, “This wax guru held a spirit candle to my ear for most of the day, and then things got weird.”
Like all sex books, 269 Amazing Sex Games has to make some pretty wild guesses where your kink zone starts and ends. It has no idea if you’re shy grandparents or dicks-in-every-hand exhibitionists, so it assumes you’re both. It was written by Hugh de Beer, an erotic board game designer, which you wouldn’t know since 80% of the suggestions aren’t games and the ones that are have frustratingly vague win conditions. This is, again like all sex books, a brainstorming session typed out by an inexperienced lover with a pedestrian mind that reveals only the author’s shortcomings and fruit fetishes. I don’t know how many ways there are to add chance and whimsy to your fucking, but this book proves it is way, way fewer than 269.
These Amazing Sex Games are all word-for-word taken from the book.
I’ve always wondered why I see so many old married couples browsing the produce section and arguing about which berries are the easiest to retrieve from a human anus.
This book was published in 2005 when it might not have been absurd for a household to own six or more porn DVDs. I absolutely do not recommend trying this Amazing Sex Tip today. I did, and my six choices were Milf Forces Stepson, Son get Mom Pregnint (real), mom/son creampie preview, sister blackmailed thye shouldnt have made this, Make me a “MAN” mom (MilkedGoddess), Ri$e of $kyw@lker full movie link in comments.
If you’re following along in a cute numbered book to spice up your tired love life, you are not equipped to navigate the modern erotic video landscape. I don’t even feel comfortable doing it and I’m personally the reason for three safety warnings on erection pumps. The clerk at my local sex dungeon once told me, “We haven’t found those four inches of your penis, but my boss says you still have to pay full price,” and I would never do something as dangerous as just randomly selecting an erotic video in the year 2020.
“Mmm, that feels nice. Okay, here’s the comments on Son get Mom Pregnint (real). Gapelover_Newmexico says ‘nut nut‘ a whole bunch of times… xXMurdererXx says ‘mommy fat tits lookin good,’ a couple more people say ‘nut nut‘ … this one is a work from home spam… okay, Beefwand19 says ‘FAKE‘ all caps, ‘you can tell it’s not his actual mom that’s Jasmyn Nipple,’ and then there’s a link to her instagram. ‘She has four kids and they are all too old for porn.‘ He spelled all of those words wrong. Oh that tickles, this book is FUN!”
What? Alright, thanks for the banana… slut? I guess a surprise mango won’t make me less likely to fuck somebody, but this feels pretty far removed from both sex or games. What the hell are we doing here, Hugh? Not all of us have a fruit thing. Am I supposed to tell her to put the mango in her butt? And then she marinates an ass mango for five hours depending on traffic? And then we, what? Flip a coin to see who gets to eat the butt fruit? Okay, now that I’ve visualized the whole thing, it is kind of hot.
You know someone has never tried the ideas in their sex book if they think you can give someone a discreet footjob to completion in a restaurant. This is an idea for a giggly teenager with a limited imagination and a foot thing to jerk off to; it’s not an actionable plan for a horny couple. Hugh, did you strain your brain so hard coming up with “stomp on her crotch at Chili’s” that you forgot waiters can see and hear just like you? “Amazing Sex Game” my mango-filled ass. I’m starting to think Hugh learned what sex was from edited-for-TV romantic comedies…
…oh my god, he did. He fucking did.
This is really testing the boundaries of what one considers a “game.” Picking a porn movie name out of a hat was already the bare minimum of gamification, but flipping a coin before you fuck to decide who gets to be on top? Your audience is presumably lovers trying to have fun, not a couple of 8-year-olds settling a bunk bed dispute. And if you’re writing for a reader who considers flipping a coin an idea, do you really want to leave something as ill-defined as “dominant position” in the hands of their imagination? If grandma calls heads, there is a 100% chance she’s going to take this too literally and peg grandpa’s ass berries into jam.
You want me to put together a homemade dick instruction manual? Motherfucker, did you just suggest I draw someone a homemade dick instruction manual!? If you handed your wife a sick rat and said, “For your rotten asshole, you fat monster,” it would be met with the exact same result as a lovingly presented hand-drawn boner manual. If the police found this, they would declare the seventy stab wounds in your corpse an accident and give your widow a medal. Goddamn it, Hugh. Draw your genitals and label where to touch them? It’s like you want us to know you’re dating a second grader but you’re too cowardly to say, “#126: Draw and label that sweet hog on your lover’s alphabet flash cards!”
So you want us to sit naked in plaster as part of a multi-step advanced crafting project so we can eat a chocolate vulva after sex? It’s almost incredible how this spoils every single joy in life. Eating, hobbies, fucking… they all become smeared in misery and sculpting chocolate. And where is the game? Do we roll an 8-sided die to see who breaks the silence to ask, “What have we become?”
Chaz Wilson combined dance with fighting in a way deadlier and sexier than it sounds. His fluid, powerful movements dazzle enemies then dazzle them several more times: leg lift, elbow move, buttock flex! Congratulations, reader, you’re already at least a pink belt in Martial Dance: total fitness with martial arts aerobics.
Normally, if you were teaching students a high-energy aerobic spinkick dance routine, you’d make a video. Chaz, instead, wrote a book. A book with a shark-eyed man nudely leering at you as he forms stiff shapes. Congratulations again, reader, as you feel the shirtless rhythm of Chaz.
Like I assume most Chazzes do, Chaz fancies himself a philosopher. He opens the book not by telling you to stretch, pick your favorite music, and most of all– have fun!, but with a meandering history of how dance has always been linked with martial arts. He offers three examples: Muay Thai, Wrestling, and Capoeira. And look, I’m not history’s greatest thinker. I once wrote an article called The 8 Most Impossible Impacts from Dumb Fucks Falling Down. But it is with some expertise I can say this: if you only have two examples of fighting sports where guys sometimes dance and the one dance fighting thing everybody already knows about, you don’t have a Top Bizzare Kung Fu Dances (You Won’t Believe Can Kill You!) list. You don’t have a book intro. You don’t have a conversation starter at a cocktail party for The Institute of People Who Have Never Heard of Fucking Anything. So I started this book worried Chaz was only a pedestrian idiot and not the oiled, majestic lunatic on the cover. I was happy to be proven wrong immediately.
The first 60 pages of the book are Chaz’s thoughts on spirituality and the expressive power of dance along with every photo of himself he has ever taken. Without exaggeration, there are 17,000,000 of him on the same beach rock, putting his karate hands in slightly different directions. If the worst person you’ve ever met hit print on their Facebook profile, it would look exactly like this but with less menace. Chaz knew you wanted to start kick, kick, chopping your way to fitness, but he couldn’t live with himself if he let you do that without a full understanding of the internal arts and what the bow used by students in “Dojos” represents. And speaking of shirtless, muscled martial arts masters who write exhausting, pointless intros, hi, I should really get started showing you some of these shitty dances (You Won’t Believe Can Kill You!).
Sorry, there are 40 more pages of basic moves before we start dancing. For an example, here is the explanation for a Left Uppercut, in its entirety. If you’re a boxer, have taken most of a boxing class, or once heard boxing get described by your octopus wife who sometimes visits the surface, you might recognize Chaz’s punch as very bad. If you were teaching a blind person how to throw an uppercut, this is when they would ask for their money back. Like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chaz uses a system of fighting designed for only three things: flexing your muscles in photos, buns, and dick basket.
Whether he is coming after you on the dance floor or on the mean streets,
there is no safer place in the world than right in the crosshairs of Chaz Wilson. It honestly seems impossible to see someone this bad at moving their body who hasn’t lost an eye in a chopsticks accident. Aside from outrageous funnymen mocking it 32 years in its future, who the fuck could this book have been for? It turns out I know.
The copy I own was first purchased by the Unification Theological Seminary Library in 1988. And if you’re wondering how a religious school’s library categorizes a book about the spiritual power of karaterobics, they considered it -and I swear I’m not kidding- “Science & Technology.”
After six years, a clergy-in-training finally checked out Martial Dance. He was the only one in the library’s history to do this, had an unusual Filipino name, and this was more than enough to find him online in five seconds. The book’s only other reader is a Tong Il Moo Do master from New York, which is a Korean martial art combining taekwondo with other things, most notably the power of Jesus Christ. So if you want to know what kind of person unironically reads books like this, their kicks are infused with God’s power, they’re quick to accept Facebook friend requests, and they do NOT respond to private messages about aerobics books they borrowed from a seminary school library in 1994.
For 100 pages Chaz sets the reader up for this to be a soul-igniting expression of your warrior spirit. And then it’s finally time to unleash your dance and he’s like, “WIGGLE WIGGLE, YEAH! Then the other side. WIGGLE WIGGLE FUCK YEAH! Now, with all your strength: WAVE: BYE BYE!” Chaz carries “dad lost in an electric slide” energy with him even when he’s alone in a studio. The man who brags about advanced martial dancers performing impossible feats of sweet, improvised moves looks confused in the two-step routine he himself invented. Chaz is a robot developed by ’90s stand-up scientists to archive how white people be dancing.
If OJ Simpson wrote a book combining couples therapy with hiding a body and called it Repairin’ & Dismemberin’, it would not be stranger or worse than Martial Dance. You are better off studying the movements of a LEGO figure being passed by a toddler. Chaz dances like a cheerleader getting kicked out of try-outs for being sarcastic and fights like a cheerleader getting kicked out of try-outs for being a pussy.
It’s almost remarkable how little explanation Chaz includes in his book. “Figure 1A: Lift your foot,” is his idea of kick instructions. “Lift your foot (see figure 1A) and compress your asshole to the sounds of Mister Mister,” might be an entire routine. If my new Facebook friend really tried to martially dance back in 1994, he would have had to make up 80 to 90% of it on his own. Chaz shows the reader a few incomplete dance numbers, then ends with 30 pages of a woman posing in a leotard. There is no text explaining what the hell she’s doing, and it’s pretty clear no one even told her what kind of book this was. Chaz set out to create a hybrid of dance, martial arts, and fitness, and after saying nothing for 60,000 words, he ended his book with a sad woman just doing non-threatening jazz movements. And speaking of shirtless, muscled martial arts masters who do shit like that, bye!
Art is subjective and fluid. It’s transformed by intent, viewer, and hindsight. So when someone says, “That’s the worst art ever made,” even if they’re right, it won’t be true for you or when put into any other context. Until 2012. In 2012 a vast, well-funded undertaking produced the worst piece of art ever under any circumstances and for all time.
I’m of course speaking about the time Entertainment Tonight commissioned Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas to remix their theme song.
At the time, Will.i.am was a touring, Grammy-winning pop performer and by the show’s estimation “the biggest star in music,” so he was certainly paid well for this project. The show put the full might of its publicity engine behind it teasing it over and over and over with behind-the-scenes segments. Yet with all these motivating factors, when they asked him about his vision for remixing the song, this is all he had prepared:
He was fine with that take and didn’t suggest a second one. They aired it on TV. I don’t think anyone should put their full heart into a behind-the-scenes look at their Entertainment Tonight theme song remix, but this fucker didn’t even think about what he might say during the town car ride to the studio. If he gave a single thought to a single talking point in the make-up chair before the shoot it would have been more professional and coherent than this. He was given hundreds of thousands of dollars, weeks of lead time, and all he had to offer when asked about his remix was “REMIX,” and “WASHED OFF. BUBBLE BATH.” If a birthday clown left with one of your sons and drove into a river, you would say, “There goes a man better at his job than Black Eyed Peas frontman, Will.i.am.”
All videos associated with this monstrosity, especially the finished song, are scrubbed from the Internet as quickly as anyone might link to them. If you’ve never watched it, it’s a grim humiliation. Entertainment Tonight spent so much time and money to make a functional utility jarringly unlikeable. They would have been better off developing a food delivery app that adds “Go back to Mexico” as a special request whenever you order from a Brazilian restaurant. So instead of embedding a video that will be gone before you read this, I’ll be telling the story of the Entertainment Tonight Will.i.am remix through trading cards.
Seriously. What the goddamn shit was Will.i.am talking about with the FRESH manifesto? It’s like an evil gamesmaster put a camera on him and cackled, “Mr. i.am., the bomb you are sitting on is set to go off if you ever stop saying words you loosely associate with FRESH. And your powers are already waning! ‘BUBBLE BATH? FRESH GETTIN’ READY TO GO!?‘ Nonsense! Imbecilic nonsense! Your time is almost u– wha!? The rest of the breakthrough sensations The Black Eyed Peas!? Fergie! Taboo! apl.de.ap!? H-how!? I saw your Best Friends Mystery Van fall into the crocodile chamber!”
To make matters worse, this corny fuck delivers every word with a fruity sass that seems carefully designed to conform to the least generous expectations of an Entertainment Tonight viewer. He drags out each vowel with a head revolution like Whoopi Goldberg reading for the part of “Impatient Airline Passenger.” Is that what he thinks Nebraska grandmas find fresh and def? Because it’s hard to believe Will.i.am walks around all day doing a mean-spirited Jackée impersonation.
Entertainment Tonight knew the final video was him with his hands in his pockets looking like a dumb shit while he listens to the now worse Entertainment Tonight theme song through headphones. And they thought you wanted to see how they made that! Well, guess what, flyover states: they stuck him in front of a retractable green screen while he looked like a dumb shit. Hollywood magic revealed.
Normally when a show gets a new intro song viewers think, “Hey, is this a ne– oh, what’s this any other thing much more interesting?” Entertainment Tonight doesn’t have that same healthy perspective. Entertainment Tonight will bring on three guest hosts for a panel about Dean Cain building a snowman and what it means for the rumors of Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s new Malibu bicycle. They do not have a handle on what’s interesting or important. Obviously, since they thought “Asshole adds drumbeat to theme song” was worthy of weeks of content.
But no one has ever misjudged potential value quite like this. If you left Hooters thinking your waitress wanted to both marry you and invest in your Brazilian food delivery app, you would be better at gauging other people’s interest than Entertainment Tonight‘s producers. These sneak peeks into each and every moment of Will.i.am’s creative process revealed a man attacking a project with all the passion of a Chuck E. Cheese chef assembling a full pizza from unfinished ones. Dogs watch their own gallbladder surgery with more enthusiasm.
“How can I take a piece of American culture and… translate it ’cause you know, that-that theme song… represents families sittin’.” – Will.i.am
The relentless interviews with this bored man each revealed less than the last. There was almost a courage to it, like watching an old man fight his way out of an iron lung to excavate the empty mine that gave him emphysema just 713 more times. But it was also cruel, like holding a gun to a baby’s head and demanding it write a three act play about its filthy diaper. No one should know with such certainty that Will.i.am is an empty-souled idiot, yet Entertainment Tonight spent outrageous amounts of resources to demonstrate only that.
Every few segments, Will would turn to camera and talk directly to the viewers to try to help them wrap their heads around exactly what he was doing. You see, he was taking a theme song, which is a fancy term for a piece of music specifically for a TV show, and making small changes t– you know, I should let him explain. Here’s how he put it (weird pauses are his):
“Nah’m… the re-mixer. Producer. Reeee… flipper? … Spicer-bringer.
For this great.
…
E.
T.
American. Anthem.” – Will.i.am
It’s important to remember these events were not suddenly thrust upon Will.i.am. He knew this entire procedure would be under scrutiny. He knew he would be expected to speak on the topic of his musical and remixing abilities. But the man is incapable of expressing a single coherent thought about what should be his main area of expertise. He is so bad at this. If Will.i.am and a gorilla speaking sign language were up for the same music teaching job, not only would the gorilla get it, every administrator who came into contact with Will would forget why they ever loved music in the first place. Over the course of these 13,000 behind-the-scenes interviews the only thing I learned about Will.I.am’s artistic inspiration is that it’s functionally the same as flatlining on a toilet. When you are hungover and waiting for a Pop Tart to come out of the toaster thinking, “Almost Pop Tart, headache, butt itches…” you are operating at a higher level than 22 Will.i.ams.
After the editing vultures had picked dry the skeleton of Will.i.am’s stupid fucking sound bites, Entertainment Tonight moved on to the scrapbook slideshows. These were literally severals of photos of people taking pictures of Will.i.am in the same tiny studio as all the interviews. So like a more stationary version of what they’d already shown you, but without any sound. It’s the very limit of what a human mind might call “something.” And to anyone unironically interested in the photos taken during the talking about the making of the 28th revision of an entertainment news program’s theme song: how do you function? Is everything your manatee mind looks upon a fascinating wonder? When you see a triangle do you stop for hours to wonder what it is and how many men it would take to count all its many sides? Will.i.am fans, I am ashamed of my disgust for your effortless contentment.
All of this, all of it, led to the final reveal: forty seconds of an embarrassed man dancing off-beat to a tune you never considered could be ruined. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours were spent on a journey to get a bored channel surfer to think, “Nothing good is o… wait, was that always the song? It sounded shitty as f- oh, rad: Bloodsport! And the kumite hasn’t started yet!!!”
