Author: Seanbaby

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Let’s Read: Martial Dance 🌭

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!

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Fuck Will.i.am’s Entertainment Tonight Theme Song Remix

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!!!”

Categories
NERDING DAY

Shaq Fu (The Novelization) 🌭

In 1994, EA published Shaq Fu, a terrible fighting game about Shaquille O’Neal traveling to another dimension to rescue a boy from a kung fu mummy. It’s, to this day, the most bad ideas anyone ever had at once without dying. It’s absurd, but a dark, clinical type of absurd like a birthday clown who can only do impersonations of your grandparents’ last words. Needless to say, I have been captivated by Shaq Fu for many years and adapted it into the children’s book you’re about to fall in love with.

Fans of the game may notice I’ve taken some liberties in The Unauthorized Child Novelization of Shaq Fu in order to help the reader explore what it means to be Shaq on a kung fu rescue quest. For instance, you, the reader, are Shaq. It’s not the first Shaquille O’Neal book I’ve written in the second person, but it is the first one written for someone who was not specifically Shaquille O’Neal. As he, his publicist, NBA great Horace Grant, and several housekeepers already know, I’ve been writing the exciting You (Shaq) & Me (Seanbaby) series for over 30 years.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Develop Your Child’s Psychic Abilities 🌭

You’ve seen them everywhere: adult psychics. They bend our local spoons and hide messages in our worst cookies. But how did they get here? Can anything stop them? Let’s answer your first question first: In 1988, Litany Burn wrote a book called Develop Your Child’s Psychic Abilities. It was so effective I have some bad news about your second question: my parents were one of her customers and I will crush your mind with the spidery legs of your own nightmares.

Litany Burn is a clairvoyant and healer who represents herself with this drawing on the Nyack section of goop.com. Incidentally, the phrase “Nyack section of goop” comes from the sound Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina makes as it is lowered around a hand-dyed ostrich egg. In the intro, Litany claims to be “accredited to teach psychic awareness by the New York State public school system,” but I found no Google results for “accredited to teach psychic awareness” or “psychic awareness accreditation.” This can only mean after she became the first and only “Official New York Public School Psychic Teacher” she then erased all traces of it from our minds. The other possibility, that it’s a dumb fantasy told by an obvious grifter financially incentivized to lie, is simply too impossible to consider.

Before Develop Your Child’s Psychic Abilities, Litany wrote Develop Your Psychic Abilities, and then she wrote each book again. And then wrote the psychic child one a third time. She went five books without ever having a second idea and her first idea seems to be hoping someone will one day be born with powers and then claiming they owe her 15% of them as an agency fee. After thirty years as a psychic teacher in a world with no psychics, the only thing Litany has taught anyone is that hard work and perseverance are pointless if your head is up your own delusional ass. Which itself is just a knockoff of the lesson we already learned from Corey Feldman’s music career.

This is the only time the reader hears about the amazing Kaarlo and this is his story told in its entirety. About a third of the book is little anecdotes like this– definitely made up yet still dull and inconclusive. Litany has a con-artist’s instincts to keep her tales of the fantastic believable. She doesn’t invent a boy named Kaarlo who can fly. All Kaarlo can do is guess who is on the phone and imply it’s supernatural. This makes the reader feel like their good guesses might have been psychic powers this whole time. There’s also a theme of oppression in all of Litany’s stories, as if Kaarlo would still have magical caller ID abilities today if his family wasn’t a bunch of unsupportive dicks. She complains about things like how schools don’t nurture psychic abilities like they do academic or athletic talent. The overall message of the book is how you would have been able to read minds if you had grown up around people who let you try. It’s like saying you would be a centaur right now if your stupid parents got you the horse and sewing machine you asked for.

Litany builds a fortress of excuses around her psychic learning program. She opens the book by saying all mutant children are different and the lessons are only “possibilities and suggestions that aid insight.” Usually a disclaimer tries to waive liability, but I guess when the thing you’re talking about doesn’t exist you waive disappointment instead.

You need to understand, any child can be psychic. Litany says psychic children can be “black, white, yellow, and brown” which is a turn of phrase used exclusively by and for the second color in that list. She herself has had a number of ordinary childhood experiences she interpreted as fantastic abilities. For instance, her dad once woke up “calling out the name of his favorite uncle, who was dying in an accidental fire three hundred miles away.” That’s all she mentions about that event before she spends a page bragging about how she sometimes played with a ouija board. Did her dad kill her uncle with deadly fire powers or simply sense him burning alive with useless death-sensing powers? She doesn’t say because she is a dingbat with the storytelling skills of a dog who watched you fall in a well and decided you belong there.

Please remember psychic science is not an exact science. If you use telekinesis to force a coin to land on a certain side, you’re going to fuck it up about half the time. But like all good science, Litany starts by knowing psychic powers work and dedicating her life to making excuses when they don’t. For instance, if Kaarlo guesses Cookie Monster is on the phone and he’s not, it might indicate ley line interference or -and this is a worst case scenario- you’re a fucking idiot. Or a cookie wizard is on your upstairs phone? The nice thing about psychic powers is there are no wrong answers.

It’s fun to imagine every coincidence as a psychic phenomenon, but there is some danger in believing whatever you want and explaining away all your wrongness with conspiracies and the supernatural. For instance, Litany has a large section of the book where she theorizes the rise in learning disabilities is tied to unreleased psychic powers. In other words, if your child doesn’t start levitating, it might cause autism. So if you went into this book thinking you and your kid were going to be doing fun card tricks, the stakes just went up.

It’s 87 pages into the book before Litany finally starts giving us exercises to train our powers. This one has you choose a time, say 6:23 am, and then see if your kid can heal a sick pet or a healthy tourist with their mind. But the line, “Check results when possible,” at the end sort of gives away her lack of confidence in us. If you want me to really believe I’m shooting healing waves into the night, maybe don’t add, “Oh, and if you have time, check to see if you’ve made veterinarian medicine obsolete, magic boy.” Is this sarcasm? Irresponsibility? Is my vet going to call at 6:24 am to say, “YOUR CAT! I-IT EXPLODED! EXPLODED!!! WHAT HAVE THESE HANDS DONE!?!?”

Most of the exercises involve staring at things and panting or telling your baby to place their hands on an object and release their negative energy into it. Assuming your baby understands what you mean by “negative energy” or “hands,” what then? Do I use a tire gauge to measure how much is left? Wouldn’t it require a +1 tire gauge or higher? What if my Jiffy Lube doesn’t have a Draenic blacksmith? Are my baby’s cursed psychic rays the reason my computer can’t ever find the printer? Litany was so certain none of this bullshit would work she didn’t bother answering any of these questions.

In Chapter 3: Invisible Friends and Visitors, Litany suggests imaginary friends are actual beings only your child can see. Holy shit, right? She even proves it by telling this story about someone named Cara who dreamed about a flying coach in a yellow hat. Still not convinced? Well, tough, because that’s the entire story. Look up in the night sky. Every moving light you can’t explain is a shard of Cara screaming upon reentry. You let her leave Earth with the yellow-hatted one before she finished her training and now you must watch her return from the stars in shattered pieces! I– look, I honestly can’t tell the tone Litany is going for sometimes. Cara might be fine.

There are a lot of ordinary things linked to psychic abilities in this book, but being able to point your wheelchair towards the one basketball in the room might be the least supernatural of them all. Is this an unthinkable skill? Is there a wheelchair basketball coach somewhere watching his players shoot off in random directions and shouting, “This is HOPELESS! I’d give my left nut for just one of you wheeled fucks to have a single precognitive mind power!”

Pablo saw his teacher reading a book on developing psychic powers and knew she would believe anything. Then Pablo, and here is the clever part, cheated on his math test. It worked so well the dingbat witch used it as anecdotal proof of metaphysics. “I don’t know what antelopal meat physics are,” said Pablo, “but I know you don’t need to be good at smart to trick a witch. Witches are five out of pizza stupid.”

I’m not sure what Litany was going for with this story, but who among us wouldn’t trade our intelligence and eating ability for a single moment of knowing when the bus is going to be late? As for Eddie knowing what his mother is thinking, that’s not so incredible. She only ever thinks the one thing: “Must resist! The temptation! To exploit my son’s bus powers!”

After 209 pages of astonishingly pointless stories and ways you can pretend to use the Force, Litany simply ends her book with an unexplained and unnumbered chapter called A CHILD’S WORLD. It’s five letters from kids, absolutely written by Litany herself, about dreams and imaginary friends. The one from “Tony, age 10” is addressed to himself and it’s about riding a big fluing hors with Jonney and then woking up. Why? In what world is this a suggestion of psychic ability? In what world is this anything? You won’t see me wrapping up an article by saying, “I saaw the worlds most stupid psycick lady pretend she wuz the worlbs dummest forth gradest. Uncomfable story nad then book did end.”

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Let’s Read Godek: Romantic Essentials 🌭

During my distinguished career at Cracked.com, I wrote several articles questioning the romantic competence of Gregory J.P. Godek. He is responsible for the best-selling 1,001 Ways to Be Romantic featuring tips like “buy her a pizza with her choice of toppings” and “hire a local youngster to teach you and your lover Nintendo.” Godek rewrote that same book many, many more times, and every single one had tips for fucking near food or the exact words “Go miniature golfing… in your wedding dress and tuxedo!” His mind is a clogged Pizza Hut toilet, but he has the heart of an aspiring clerk who was “a bit too much” for the Hallmark regional manager. You will never love again after reading the 27th version of Godek’s only and dumbest idea: Romantic Essentials – 401 Ways to Show Your Love.

Before we get into Godek’s sexy romantic tips, let’s talk about the cursed lore of my particular copy. It was previously owned by someone named “B. Haechler” who highlighted none of Godek’s ideas for “free backrub” coupons or any of his weird lists of popular love songs. In fact, there were no signs whatsoever B. read a single page. Andrea McMillam, if this gets to you I want you to know your friend “B.” threw your garbage wedding shower present away. You deserve this pain for what you’ve done as a terrible friend and a worse gift giver. It would have been kinder and less confusing if you gave B. a $7 gift card for “Fat Bitch Medicine.”

The introduction says “Hide this book” because it’s your “Romantic Secret Weapon” and its power will be mitigated if your partner discovers you’re using it to cheat at love. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. Romantic Essential Tip #77 is a reminder that women are still horny… still sexual after menopause. Try bringing that up and see if your date cares what the source was. Romantic Essential #300 is just the word “Care.” Is Godek concerned someone is going to find this in your scrapbooking drawer and scream, “Care? CARE!? I knew you stole that idea!” Maybe. He does take for granted the reader is and is dating a cartoonishly nerdy fuck machine with every learning disorder. Still, it might be fun for us both to keep in mind the dumbshit who wrote this thought he was writing some kind of emergency handle you can pull to get out of any romantic trouble.

If a woman wants to sleep with you after you do this, great, but keep in mind you’ve just clinically proven she will have sex with anyone who asks under any circumstances. There is nothing less romantic or sexy than putting a pun on a calculator. It’s what a think tank of geniuses would come up with if you gave them an unlimited budget to define unsexiness. It’s a Hemingway legend from an alternate dimension where he was challenged to dry the panties of a nation in only twelve words.

Remember how this book was meant to be your secret romance weapon in case of emergency? Well, romance emergency lovers, one of the entries is “here are two novelty Three Stooges gifts that exist.” And since he came up with the idea of buying the wristwatch and the necktie, Godek counted it as two separate entries. I don’t care how low your expectations were for a cute little relationship book for squares, but no one could have gone into this imagining “maybe a Three Stooges product?” would be two of the 401 essential romantic tips. If this was a blank page under the words “BITE OFF HER TOE AND PLACE IT HERE,” it would be less strange. 

So I page my lover with the message “0-1-1-3-4.” And then what? She calls to ask, “What’s so important!? I’m at work!” and I explain “0-1-1-3-4” means HELLO and it is, in fact, quite romantic? And then what? I wait on the line to see which of her ovaries collapse into sand? Godek, did you fucking just tell me to use a communications device to fucking say “HELLO” to someone I’m already fucking!?!? I’d call you a basic bitch, but Romantic Essential Tip #366 has proven there is literally no instruction manual for a beeper more basic than you. Tell your lover HELLO? I need you to take a look at yourself here, Godek. You’re worse than a failure. The government should tie you to playgrounds to prevent local child predators from ever getting in the mood.

One of Godek’s worst features, and he sucks hard, is his inability to distinguish between “romance” and “anything.” Suggesting pizza is romance. Saying HELLO on a pager is romance. A Three Stooges watch is like a dear friend watching you slap his wife’s tits from the other couch. In only the second tip of this book, he’s taking some troubling trend in American employment scheduling and duct taping it to the concept of love with the unsupported desperation of a YouTuber explaining why Alita:Battle Angel disproves feminism. Give an extra calendar month to your lover? Godek doesn’t suggest how you might achieve this in even the broadest strategy. He simply suggests you work 160 hours less every year and spend that time at couples pottery classes or walking tours of the Cuyahoga Falls historic downtown district. How!? With what shall we slow the passage of time, Godek? A Three Stooges chrono-lamp “eye gouge! silly face!” available for only $79 at timecandles.com?

Godek does this a lot. And when I say “this,” I mean he starts talking about really crazy shit as if you were already in a conversation about it. I’m not leaving some transition out between Romantic Essential Tip #2 and Romantic Essential Tip #3. He went from time sorcery to heart waffles and linked them with the words, “and then, of course.” These things aren’t related, Godek. You can’t shriek, “Time is a construct! Quit your job to pork and furthermore: did you know breakfast can come in shapes!? Visit appliances.com and put in offer code SLOW-TIME-AND-THEN-OF-COURSE-HEART-WAFFLE.”

Godek learned Pun as a second language so he could seduce Laffy Taffies. He sits at his desk with a bowl of candy penetrating cubes of banana after whispering to them erotic homonyms. “What’s the best day of the week to open your wrapper, my sweet?” he asks. “Hump day!” he giggles, playfully not giving it enough time to answer. “And what cut of meat did the romance writer buy Bazooka Joe? Chuck steak- wait, no, I meant ‘fuck’ steak. ‘FUCK‘ stea– no, don’t leave, bowl of candy! Did you see my note? Check your wristwaaaatch!”

Sure, go for it. It’ll help remind your lover which one of you is always needy and horny and which one of you does chores.

Jesus Christ, Godek. Maybe attach a note to your face: “Fuck me and everything about me.”

The world has a few empty slots it will always need to fill for the role of “romance guru.” For instance, every daytime talk show or radio station needs a love expert in their media contact database to give sexy Valentine tips or explain which anal beads make the best Grandparent’s Day gifts. Any, any, horny idiot with a passing knowledge of cultural stereotypes can stumble into this job. And once you have it, Godek demonstrates how this job has no fail condition. You can’t “debunk” folksy romance wisdom. Oprah is never going to grab her love expert guest and scream, “Imposter! Virgin! These are all cliches from edible arrangement packaging!”

When you start to believe you’re smarter than everyone else, you lose your grip on what’s wisdom and what’s too obvious for anyone who has ever lived to disagree with or not know. Godek maybe isn’t stupid when he says, “Women are not men. And Men are not women.” But, and I made a similar point earlier, say something dumber than this, Godek. It’s impossible for this to be anything other than duh to anyone. Pick any words about any subject and arrange them in a less necessary way. If you spent 30 minutes explaining how you always give farts Halfling names like “Elevator Cloudberry” or “Pop Beandigger” it would be no more or less wise. It would simply be a different kind of pointless fart noise.

Maybe… sure, sometimes? Was there a study to discover how often this is true? And if not, how is this more helpful than saying, “When I fart on my wife I call it Eggsy Hogpen!” And speaking of Godek’s wife, he has one, so he’s only really scientifically tested his love expertise on the one subject and its cervix gets wide when exposed to pizza or calculator puns. That’s no challenge, Godek. And whatever, get after it, stud, but it means your entire identity is no different than entering a kitchen for the first time, following the instructions on a Hot Pocket, and declaring yourself a master chef. Incidentally, readers, microwaving a Hot Pocket counts as foreplay in Godek’s house if you hiss, “Nyuk! Nyuk! This is only the first warm crust of cheese my tongue will tickle tonight! But first meet, hrrnhh… Poofnik Proudburrow!”

Okay, dickhead. Feel. Thanks, I’ll try this one while I look at the Three Stooges necktie you told me to buy. Oh. Oh god, is j-joy? I feel like I understand heart-shaped waffles. Oh, god, I get it now! The note on the wristwatch! Everything!

Fucking why? Are we trying to outsmart the ghost of a dead florist? Is this type of Garfield-in-sunglasses zaniness honestly easier than developing a personality? I get you’re only 25 entries away from finishing your book, but have some self respect. This forced goofing like a robot intruder pretending to understand the hu-mor of a novelty tennis mug. This is cuteness black face.

It’s in every book. Every fucking book he has ever written. To Godek, there is no single piece of wisdom or act of affection more worth mentioning than this, his idea of playing miniature golf… while dressed in your wedding gown and tuxedo! If tomorrow you watch your roommate scald his dick on 45 different Hot Pockets, you’ll now be able to say, “I’ve only seen one other person be so certain a dumb idea was a brilliant idea this many times in a row.”

Thirty five entries ago this pizza fucker thought I didn’t know what a woman was, and now he’s just tossing me four blank lines and telling me to go crazy? Fine.

“An authentic boomerang?” Bitch, only you would brag about how interesting you are for buying yourself an airport gift, but I do admire your bravery in writing a note this unlikeable on something designed to be thrown at you.

If I wrote this note on a boomerang it would also say, “Consider this note part one of your PUN-ishment for touching my weapons. Part two is duck. Too late. This was not my only authentic boomerang and the rest of this note is now for the people who find your body. Hello Mister Police duck. Too late. Why do you idiots keep thinking I’m out of boomerangs? They’re like four bucks at any gift shop!”

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Arcade Masterpiece D.D. Crew

Technically, by editorial mandate, arcade games fall under the umbrella of NERDING DAY. But you know who never starts their sentences with “technically?” A goddamn hot dog. “Technically” is a word for carrot cakes and tomatoes. And today we are speaking from our beefy loins about no ordinary arcade game. This is the first entry in a new feature called…

The early ’90s were a Golden Age of street gang punching video games. At any pizza parlor or bowling alley you had your choice of Double Dragon, Final Fight, or Vendetta. Or Burning Fight. Or Combatribes. If you were unl- oh shit, Bad Dudes! If you were unlucky, your local arcade had D.D. CREW, a game worse than everything it was ripping off in such a blatant, intentional way. This game is like barging into a man’s house nude with a copy of his wife made out of garbage bags, and then failing to perform sexually with it. Which is to say it’s so brash and confusing in its failures there’s no elegant analogy for it.

Let me try to explain better: this game is a work of unexplainable lunacy. If you asked the animator of D.D. CREW how to punch, he would put one leg over his head and swallow his own face, which is how he thinks you shrug. If you asked the writer of D.D. CREW what the fuck is going on in the plot, he would say, “Unspeed police diarrhea,” which is how he thinks you say, “please repeat, slower.” And if you asked the designer of D.D. CREW how this game happened, he’d say, “They turned that into a game? I thought we were designing software for analyzing police diarrhea.”

Like everything in D.D. CREW, the opening cinematic sucks so hard it creates a masterpiece. A man in an orange Party City pimp costume calls the LAPD to say, “YO GOTTA BOMB IN YA PARK !!” and an empty carnival explodes with no injuries or damage of any kind. It’s sort of cute, like the karate heroes asked their kids to put on a play about what they thought their daddies did at work. The bad guy never gets a name and if any of the characters are the second draft of an idea, I will eat five evidence bags of police diarrhea. The theme song is a mashup of audio samples that, and I swear this isn’t a joke, go, “SHUT UP, ALREADY. DAMN. SHUT UP, ALREADY. EVERYBODY FUCK IT!” Your first guess might be it was chosen randomly by someone without access to a Japanese-to-English dictionary, but the lyrics describe D.D. CREW’s design process a little too perfectly to be a coincidence.

Most fighting games have you leaping around the screen in a whirlwind of kicks and baseball bats. Here, you waddle stiffly and poke your hands and feet in every direction other than horizontal. It’s an entire system of martial arts designed around showing new smells to your dance partner. For example, one guy’s main attack is a high five. Do you have any idea how deeply you need to penetrate the space of your enemy to hurt them with a high five? Depending on your penis length, exactly one penis.

No person involved in the making of this thing gave a shit. All the technical parts of D.D. CREW  like “collision detection” or “controls” or “not making 25% of the enemies Wario” fail, but it’s a weird kind of failure like it was done on purpose. It’s not impossible SEGA hired a staff of real muscle men, Warios, and carnival murderers to make this more authentic and they turned out to be poor programmers and project managers. The enemies all look like a total badass drew sarcastic character designs and said, “This is how a pussy draws leisure wear! Ha ha ha! Put it in the game, you fuckin’ nerds!”

The first boss you encounter is a nice man with sticks and a mustache who shouts “YOU’RE IN FOR SOME ROUGHIN’ MAN!” because everything in D.D. CREW is expertly wrong. There was obviously a big, wobbly gray area between super tough and anal play that 1991 was still trying to figure out, and “YOU’RE IN FOR SOME ROUGHIN’ MAN!” is such a perfect thing to say to eliminate any certainty you thought you had about whether this stranger came here to fight or fuck.

The second boss is Bruce Lee because once the D.D. CREW writer came up with “my dad with sticks,” he was out of ideas. Try to imagine saying something dumber during a martial arts video game brainstorming meeting than, “I have an idea: Bruce Lee!” Maybe you could just blurt out, “A karate guy,” but that’s ridiculous, right? What kind of a creatively bankrupt trun would think “a karate guy” was an idea? And who would have such a generic take on such a tired joke structure to build all this hypothetical “karate guy” outrage for a limp reveal every reader will see coming?

D.D. CREW is constantly pushing the boundaries of what your brain will accept. After you beat the third boss, the main bad guy shows up in a helicopter, shoots you with a bazooka, and drops you twenty stories onto the back of your neck. You’re the same flimsy clutz who has been dying every three punches for 12 dollars worth of quarters, but you get up from this certain death instantly and break into a full sprint. By any logic, real or digital, you should be dead. The machine should charge you three tokens just to look at your closed casket. It should be a game over screen with a forensic dentist looking for your teeth in a bog of gore presented by SEGA. Look at this fucking insanity:

Speaking of falling, here’s something the antidepressants industry doesn’t want you to know: the key to happiness is fighting an enemy near the edge of something and knocking them the fuck off the world. If you add up all the hours I’ve spent waiting for video game bad guys to walk between my kick and a pit, I could have read eleven books on being happy and all I would be is dumber and sadder. The only reason anyone is miserable, ever, is they haven’t thrown enough Abobos off a conveyor belt. D.D. CREW tried to include this, the best element of video games and life, but like every other thing in D.D. CREW, it’s so maniacally stupid. There are holes for enemies to fall in, but they seem to have no idea they’re there, so casually stroll to their death without any involvement from you. It’s fun, but fun like a vagina made out of pizza– a wrong kind of too much fun. It’s a video promising only NASCAR crashes that also follows each driver to the hospital to watch his widow cry. Maybe it’s both. D.D. CREW is a vagina crash racing a pizza widow.