Category: LEARNING DAY

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Lost Without a Compass – Neo-Paganism 🌭

The Satanic Panic is one of my favorite times in American History, despite it ruining so many lives for no reason at all. Listen, I know that it did nothing but harm and with absolutely no upside — but it’s the only point in human history where you could scare a church lady by explaining your level 7 Wizard. It wasn’t all about geek hobbies, of course. The Satanic Panic targeted everything from daycare to Heavy Metal, from mild exercise to environmentalism. Christians were completely terrified of the entire world for several years and they were not shy about it. They jumped on television with a straight face and an ominous musical score to warn you about frozen yogurt and tell you the warning signs that your child might be one of The Devil’s Nerds.

The best example of this was the 700 Club miniseries Lost Without a Compass. For our younger readers, the 700 Club was-

Holy shit, it’s still on the air! Their credibility survived this! 

That is culturally invincible. That is TV immortal. The only way the 700 Club survived hours of programming about how scary board games are is if they engaged in secret backstage sword battles to take the heads of lesser TV shows. The Nightly Business Report died so that the 700 Club could broadcast another year of scare specials on Jazzercise.

Lost Without a Compass was hosted by Pat Robertson, who looks like he’s playing through life with bighead cheats enabled. 

That’s not just me being mean. It’s an objective fact that Pat Robertson doesn’t wear hats for budgetary reasons. Amazon, no shit, classifies Lost Without a Compass as a Bobblehead video.

Pat Robertson looks like the vampire that feeds on Keebler Elves and he has the raw magnetism and stage presence of an unwatered fern. Just a dry, droopy, bigoted thing struggling not to die. Yes, I know that weirdly implies that ferns are bigots. It’s not something I can explain, but I feel it to be true. How did this cookie tree nosferatu manage to become the voice of a whole generation of hateful pansies? His impeccable work ethic? His unquestioned credibility? His raw courage in the face of adversity? His none of the above?

Pat says he’s a hardcore marine who saw frontline action, but an actual marine he served with immediately called him out as a rich boy whose daddy intervened to get him easier service. He was actually the officer in charge of keeping the booze stocked at the Officer’s Club. Lieutenant Barback tried to sue his accuser, only to cave at the last minute, pay all the man’s court costs, and publicly admit that all of his medals were for always keeping the mixing station stocked with olives. Courage and credibility are out.

Maybe Pat beefed it on that lawsuit so hard because he only converted to Christianity after completely eating shit on the bar exam and getting laughed out of a law career. Plenty of people fail the bar and retry, but Pat is such a wuss that he abandoned his entire life at the first minor sign of failure and only turned to Jesus to save him from this, the first time he tried something and found it to be hard. So work ethic is out, and credibility is actually out again.

Anyway, that’s our host — a famous coward who lost every battle he ever fought (none). He’s perfect for Lost Without A Compass, which was aired as a miniseries with each episode focused on an imaginary threat that Christianity was still somehow losing to.

Pat opens every episode by telling us that without Jesus we’re flying blind without a compass, in case you didn’t get that from the title. And then, because he’s certain that if you’re watching this, you’re too stupid for metaphors, we smash cut to a long skit about two men flying a plane in a snowstorm — blind, one might say, and they actually do! Repeatedly! Then they crash and start yelling “we’re lost!” 

Get it? 

Like you would be, without a compass? 

You don’t get it.

Luckily they continue to shout “without a compass, we don’t know which way to go!” 

END OF SKIT.

We are four minutes into the episode and we have just explained the title five different ways for viewers presumably so stupid they’re watching this from inside the window display they’re trapped in. That’s the kind of faith Lost Without a Compass has in its audience. Every tape came with a warning not to eat it and then, because that didn’t work, detailed instructions on how to recover VHS from a bloody toilet.

Finally we get to the topic of the day…

This video will be presented to you in stunning 4p. To perfectly simulate the experience of watching a pirated copy of Lost Without a Compass in 1993, I ripped stills from this video using the onboard computer of a Lada, played it on a wristwatch, and then took photos of that screen with a Playskool camera. Underwater. Drunk.

Pat insists America is a Christian nation, despite it being illegal to be that, which is slowly succumbing to paganism. Luckily, that’s his only job here. Pat will now leave the special so he can absorb the essence of several Gelflings to fuel a half-mast erection for nobody. He’s replaced by Chris Mitchell, who would go on to be CBN’s Middle East Bureau Chief, a position exactly as relevant and dignified as it sounds. 

Now, when Chris says we’re losing our country to pagans, your mind goes to goat-masked men sacrificing virgins to old trees, but what we’re really talking about is worse: health fads and dweebs. They can spice up the narration all they want, but they can’t find a way to make this visually intimidating. They cut right from Chris Mitchell somberly intoning that only one side will survive this war… to a bunch of suburbanites laying on the floor in a yoga class. 

They seem to realize this makes them look like huge wimps though, so they jumpcut again to an unrelated third world riot, hoping to imply the unseen dangers of group stretching.

I’m pretty sure that’s a third world riot. It could be a microwave. I guess it might be the opening of an Orange Julius — either way we should be terrified because CBN can barely handle this, or any threat.

To explain these dangers Lost Without a Compass features a variety of increasingly white, milquetoast “experts” like Don Feder…

Who argues that ancient Israel sacrificed their children to Ba’al, just like we’re sacrificing all of our children to the god of “choice” with abortion. That’s why people have abortions – they love the god of choice so much they offer their unborn children to him! Heathens abort fetuses like NASCAR fans shake up and spray a Coors, just a fun sloppy prank to celebrate a victory. 

You need to be prepared for these insane swerves, because it’s like somebody used a broken HAM radio to tell the 700 Club what to hate and the power died before ‘why.’ It’s just wild guesses as to what might be bad about everything, followed by grim declarations of war on diet soda and dry cleaning. 

Next up is Caryl Matrisciana, who was born in India and is therefore an expert on Eastern Religion. Here she is:

Whiter than mayonnaise, sporting a haircut stylists call the MLM and instantly know there’s an expired coupon for. Caryl experienced India from the point of view of an unwelcome invader, where she once observed the locals exercising from carefully beyond spitting distance, and has since dedicated her whole life to a war on yoga. 

That is not an exaggeration.

Caryl made a three decade career out of hyping the yoga apocalypse. Again, not hyperbole — she insists yoga is a literal death cult sweeping the world. It’s like…

You know what? I’ll just let the world’s most coherent source, Amazon reviewers, explain:

Yoga wants you to breathe like they say, and then one day they’ll trick you and say stop! The truth will not be suppressed!

This poor idiot did downward dog so wrong they saw the devil:

They’re not alone! 

Lost Without A Compass later explores Mary Jo Kaiser’s harrowing story, wherein she practiced meditation without realizing the mantra they teach you is not a meaningless sound like they say, it’s actually the name of a demonic entity! That’s the endgame of yoga: gathering enough human energy together, all focused on the mighty lord Om, in order to rip him straight from Yoga Hell so he can walk the earth, contorting his victims into improbable shapes.

Don’t laugh, it actually happened to Mary Jo! She meditated so hard a dark fog of blackness surrounded her and she was nearly lost! Don’t tell her she fell asleep, and that’s what sleep is — it’s far more likely we have a yoga tulpa apocalypse brewing. 

Lost Without a Compass openly wishes we were still burning children for Moloch, because that was easy to root out — just follow the smell of forbidden barbecue. These modern pagans are such a threat specifically because they’re so unthreatening. They’re hiding everywhere, like how Saturday morning cartoons are secretly programming your children to… care about the planet? 

CBN spends an inordinate amount of time being afraid of Captain Planet because Gaia is secretly teaching our kids paganism, when hindsight tells us they should’ve been afraid of SWAT Kats for secretly furrifying a generation. 

Paganism is everywhere! Basically everything the 700 Club doesn’t like is pagan — did you know homosexuals have their own special gay gods? Just ask these lesbian witches…

Chris Mitchell actually says the words “the homosexual movement is laced with pagan practices like that of these lesbian witches,” and it’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. It’s my new smart doorbell chime, in the hopes that it’ll Pavlov me into enjoying houseguests.

Look at this modern world, infested with flexible suburbanites, board game nerds, and gay warlocks. This is it, this is how god dies — not from a huge spear wielded by a 12 year old girl piloting a robot with the soul of her mother, but by a thousand cuts from every genre of melvin.

Chris Mitchell wonders what would happen if we lost this war against everything not featured on CBN. Well, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Commission knows what’s going to happen: Nazis. 

Nazis just like those seen here, in garbled black and white footage that is either a fascist rally or a penguin mosh pit, it’s impossible to say, and I refuse to guess.

For our younger readers, keep in mind this was a long time ago, back when fundamentalists thought Nazis were bad. Now, we all know it’s a hard leap when you imply that your opponents are like Nazis… so it’s a good thing Dickland isn’t implying at all. He says “we’re not doing something like what the Germans did, we’re not doing something similar to what the Germans did — we’re doing precisely what the Germans did.”

Dickland, like almost every single person ever featured on CBN, retired in disgrace. It was only fairly recently, after being called out for his shitty remarks on Trayvon Martin. But not because of the shitty remarks — they loved that — it was because he plagiarized those, and many other shitty remarks, from other pieces of shit. He couldn’t make his own shit, so he crept around to full toilets and stole shit from others. This man is a shit pilferer. 

Pat has drained enough life essence for two more limp sentences, so he interrupts our program to warn us that “what we’ll see next will never appear on the news, because the people who succumb to evil don’t like cameras filming their dark rituals.” 

Oh man, what kind of evil shit are we going to witness? Baby sacrifice, satanic orgies, Dungeons and Dragons? It’s Dungeons and Dragons, isn’t it?

Not only is it Dungeons and Dragons, it’s basically just Jack Chick’s Darkest Dungeon tract as a short film. Uncredited. Maybe they got permission from him and didn’t list it, I don’t know. I don’t have the hard evidence to call them shit pilferers, like Dickland. But even if I give them the benefit of the doubt that means CBN is as, at best, a shit-recycling station. 

You already know the major beats of the story: This nerd…

Steps in a trap and his character dies, which in Fundamental D&D means he’s exiled from the cult. Cults love that, they’re always looking for excuses to kick members out. Then this nerd…

Lands on the right space on the D&D board, which isn’t how any of this works, and becomes Lord of the Little People, which must be cooler than it sounds because it’s literally impossible for it not to be. But his very next move puts his character in peril, and the only way out is to kill a child in real life! Only tastefully implied, of course.

That’s how evangelicals thought Dungeons and Dragons worked: you rolled dice and if you hit a critical failure you had to kill a kid. Every campaign ate through a kindergarten. I played a level 15 Bard and I butchered a daycare for Otto’s Irresistible Dance. I’m not saying I regret it, I’m just saying I do appreciate the rule changes in 3rd edition.

Heavy metal was another blight upon society, and definitely not just music for dorks who could “pass.” This poor teen reflects on his time listening to rock by explaining “I had to carry around little vials of blood and I… I drank the blood. I craved the blood.” 

There is zero chance that haircut listened to anything harder than Air Supply, and if you went vampire for Air Supply then you’re only going to Remedial Hell. It’s like a Denny’s that’s always 86 degrees and they don’t have the whipped cream to do smiley face pancakes. You’ll be all right. Well, you… you might be all right. 

Andrew here fell into the occult and went on to become the head of his high school witch’s coven, like other kids might head up a 4-H Club. But then he began “throwing up blood for no medical reason.” 

Like fuck “no medical reason,” Andrew. I know an Air Supply haircut when I see one.

Lost Without A Compass: Neo-Paganism closes by explaining that, even though wizards run the public transportation system and your kids are eating yogurt for the devil, it’s going to be okay. The 700 Club themselves are on the front lines of this war, which is illustrated by a quick cut to a tired woman sleepdialing through her shift at the phonebank.

And Chris Mitchell promises us that these mighty warriors will not stop until they defeat the terrible forces of the occult. Which is illustrated with a screengrab from a psychic hotline commercial.

So that’s what the moral battle for the soul of our nation is – the heartland’s least effective cowards versus mild exercise — and that’s how the great war between heaven and hell will be fought: rival telephone scams. 

I know which phonebank I’ll be manning… do YOU?

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: 101 THINGS FOUND IN THE HUMAN BODY 🌭

In 2020, a very dumb person had what they thought was a brilliant money-making idea– late ’00 Buzzfeed-style lists in the form of books written in several minutes in a language they didn’t speak! That person was 1900🌭 favorite, Mario Corelli, author of 101 THINGS TO MAKE HER WET! And it worked! I gave him $6.99 for 101 THINGS FOUND IN THE HUMAN BODY: STORIES REALLY HAPPENED EVERYONE HAS GONE ALIVE.

On the cover, Mario chose to print his name in white ink on a white background, demonstrating the kind of incompetence that goes beyond mere stupidity. You don’t think, “nice try” when you read a Mario Corelli book. You think, “haha this dumbass Atari 2600 is trying to come to life.”

The first page of this medical oddities book is a botched sales pitch and the next one is the words, “SCISSORS IN THE ARM.” That’s it! The whole book is that– the names of objects with no context or citation. I’m not saying Mario is lying. This might be a real transcription of a Google search he made, and someone, somewhere, presumably got stabbed in the arm with scissors. I’m saying this is the upper limit on how bad you can be at writing a book. If I held a pair of scissors over my arm and stabbed myself every time someone wrote a worse book than this, my biography would be called THE MAN WITH THE 101 SAFEST BODY PARTS and every page would say “ARM.”

Whoa, doctors found a ROD FROM FENCING IN THE TORSO? That honestly seems like it would be among the most common fencing accidents. This is going to sound like Mario Corelli’s sex book, but after thousands of stab attempts over the course of many years, it had to have eventually worked, right? This is like being amazed that Shaquille O’Neal’s penis got stuck in an airplane toilet. It was only a matter of time, you fu– hey, you know what? I don’t think running this book through my scanner is properly capturing the majesty of Mario’s incompetence. Let me see what I can do in Photoshop.

That’s better. Ridiculous, amateurish, and ambitious far beyond the creator’s means. These are visuals befitting Mario Corelli’s catastrophic yet museum-quality idiocy.

It is only page 7 and I have no goddamn idea what Mario is talking about. SPIKE FROM THE MALE CHEST? Was someone hospitalized battling a porcupine? Was this exploding man shrapnel? This is such terrible storytelling. Imagine being at a party where someone says, “My buddy is an x-ray tech and he sees all the crazy shit people put in their bodies. Oh, here he is right now. Dude, you need to tell them the story of the guy with the thing? It’s nuts, wait ’til you hear this.” And then his friend says, “SPIKE FROM THE MALE CHEST,” and leaves. That’s more than a bad story. It’s more like random gas escaping a dead body. I think someone at that party is doing some kind of Weekend at Bernie’s Thing. Fun!

So there were multiple teenagers with paper clips in their jaws? Were they piercings? Did they all go down on the same office supply manager? Was their father a stapler? Wait, he only said one paper clip. Was it one big paper clip, and these kids were all hung up on it like fish? Because the police never made those details public. Keep your hands where I can see them. How do you know the victims were found hanging from a giant paper clip, Mario Corelli?

“You will never believe the patient I had! They swallowed a watch battery!”

“Wow! I had a guy come into the ER last week who got hit by an artillery missile.”

“Um, do you mean an alretry missile?”

“Yeah, y-yes. Alretry. That’s what I said.”

Imagine you were the mayor of a small town welcoming TV’s Kevin Sorbo to your local pickle festival. You reach out to shake his hand and just start projectile-shitting your pants. It’s blowing out the top of your waistband and the bottom of both your legs while you cry, and at the same time you open your phone to accidentally show him pictures of yourself burying the body of your missing wife. You scream, “Fucking do something, Lorenzo Lamas!” Well if that happens, Kevin Sorbo can now say, “This is almost as bad as the time Mario Corelli was trying to communicate a medical miracle of survival and all he typed was “CEMENT.”

Like a lot of these stabbing implements, I think I know how a KITCHEN KNIFE could get into the human body, but how did the HINGE get in there? Did someone fuck a door? Eat a door? We should also consider Mario thinks HINGE is the English word for something else, like “dildo” or “sandwich.” In fact, he might have thought HINGE meant “kitchen knife” before immediately forgetting about it and doing another kitchen knife one. At this high-end level of stupid, nothing is impossible.

See? Do you see!?

The last three stories in this book have been HINGE, KITCHEN KNIFE, and HINGE. Fuck the idea of this being bad for a professional author. If your horse was this dumb you’d shoot it.

So someone got naked and stuffed their own clothes up their ass? That’s not so strange. That’s how TV’s Kevin Sorbo would deal with the situation if you started violently shitting yourself.

Mario Corelli might be the most uniquely stupid person alive. He somehow knows what INTESTINES are, but not where they come from or how fascinating it might be to find some inside a human body. I don’t have a cute joke for this– it’s truly deranged in a way too slippery for me to understand. It’s like declaring yourself the guitar of Ohio. The fuck you are! You’ll never be!

This was from a botched gender reveal party where the parents ate the fireworks and revealed their baby was a ladder.

Sure, tractor forks sound pretty serious, but what is Mario talking about with THIRD HAND? Is he counting the two the victim already had, or do they have three hands in their body cavity but only the third one is medically dangerous or noteworthy? There weren’t two other entries for human hands earlier in the book. Wait, unless he thinks HINGE means “human hand?” That’s probably it.

Hahaha Mario is just putting together sounds and hoping they mean something in our language. “PERINEUM FOOT! CHEESEBURGER WRENCH!” What the shit is a DOOR HEATER? Does he mean a house fire? Hold on, wait. Does he think he’s listing Home Alone traps?

“These X-rays are alarming!”

“What is it, doc? What did you find?”

“You already know, you coward. You bitch ass failure. Don’t make me say it.”

“Please… I don’t understand, doctor. Tell me.”

“DEFEAT.“

That sounds terrifying, but at the risk of making light of someone’s head-amount of cancer, where else did Mario expect them to find it? Like, let’s take a step back and remind ourselves this is a book about doctors finding astounding things inside the human body to “DISCUSS FOR HOURS” and this motherfucker wrote “a whole bunch of cancer” with no further details.

Oh, I get what happened here. Finally, Mario manages to tell a coherent story.

Wait a second. I think these two pages are also telling a story.

“Can you get the tree trunk out of me, doctor?”

“Doctor? Buddy, I’m not a doctor. I’m a carpenter. I have no idea how to get that tree out of you. But you know what? Hold still and let me see what I can do.”

60 KILOGRAM BELLY? Is Mario just talking about someone with a big belly? Or someone who sat way too hard on someone’s big belly? And isn’t being inside a human body the natural state of a surgical suture? I think Mario might have mixed up his “objects found in body” notes with his “stomach stapling surgery” notes, but again, these words could be his way of saying “pizza” and “door heater.”

With a gulp, you are thrown down a slippery dark tube. You land with a splash and find yourself trapped within grotesque, wet walls. You see a CHISEL and a UNICYCLE.

If you start chiseling through the lining of what must be the stomach, turn to page 58.

If you ride the unicycle, turn to page 59.

Page 58

Your new chisel ruptures something squirty and important. A pained groan echoes all around you. A surge of fluids flushes you into the intestines. “Wait, what are intestines doing in here!?” you think, before then thinking, “My only hope is to follow them to the butthole.” After a journey that feels like weeks you find the exit blocked. The man who swallowed you also got a BOTTLE stuck up his ass. YOU ARE DEAD.

Page 59

Fuck it. You decide to spend your final moments on a unicycle. You pedal into the next chamber and find BOWLING! There’s bowling inside this guy! He had bowling inside him all along! YOU WIN.

Mario Corelli has been sitting on the story of doctors discovering a tiny creature piloting a human body for 66 pages! Amazing! Or maybe someone’s dick broke off in a flight attendant! Still amazing!

There was a time when I would see “SHEPHERDESS” and think, “What could that mean!? Did someone jam a Bo Peep doll up their dick hole? Was there some kind of nightmarish mixup at the lamb chop packing factory?” Now I see it and it’s almost a comfort. Like a senile grandparent retelling the same wrong details in an old story. Let’s let Mario Corelli’s incoherent idiocy wash over us.

Yeah, “LARVA OF FLIES” and  “20 COIN.” Maybe doctors found maggots and about three dollars inside some guy, or maybe this is the first book written entirely during a taser attack. The joy is in the mystery of it.

Sure. “PLUG. SEVERAL PLASTIC CAPS.” Random words you may or may not understand with no details. You’re doing a great job, Mario.

Okay, CHOPPING BOARD. Why not. Wait, what? GOLDEN TOOTH IN A BAG? That’s not random nonsense. These doctors are dissecting a fucking leprechaun.

…
This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, John McCammon: GIRAFFE IN MALE FOOT.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Return of Count Spirochete 🌭

Recently we took a trip through time to see how the Navy fucks. But what to do with this fleet of men newly empowered to romance gentle blondes? Before too long, it was apparent that we had failed to protect these living weapons of seduction; the Great Pox was upon them. That’s why The Naval Institute of Health commissioned The Return of Count Spirochete, a primer in how venereal diseases spread, and why syphilis is their Vlad the Impaler. 

Put on your learning condoms, and begin silently mouthing the word moist; we’re going on a sexual adventure called learning.

Our cartoon begins where most sex ends: with Death! The Grim Reaper is hosting an awards show for atrocities, and it is now, he quips, “the climax of the evening.” Sure, it’s a yuk-yuk joke, but it’s better delivery than James Franco had that one time he was Grim Reaper. Our hooded host announces The Fourth Horseman Award, presented to a panel of plagues who are awfully judgmental, considering they’re not actual judges. They are:

Smallpox: His overbite barely distracts from the fact that he looks like a Rice Krispie treat.

Diphtheria: A moleman. 

Tuberculosis: Definitely a pederast, but also looks like a blackmailer in a Chandler novel.

Scarlet Fever: A perpetual winner at the AVN Awards, Scarlett Fever is—wait, no, this is a spotted piggie. 

Common Cold: A real jabroni.

These nominees(…?) question VD’s victory in our penicillinous age—more specifically, why should we fear Count Spirochete the Syphilis Vampire?

But: drama! No sooner does Death lay out the case than Gonorrhea shows up to object that he infects 2 million Americans a year!

Wow, that’s an impressive number—and this is 1973, America’s least sexy year: bell bottoms were at their peak, only a few barber shops operated illegally as speakeasies, and the oil crisis had crippled our hookup economy after the last bus at 6 p.m. Even Elvis, the national symbol of our desire to gyrate our hips on crying hound dogs, had donned a ceremonially unfuckable jumpsuit and withdrawn to his volcano base in the remote Pacific.

There were only 106 million Americans who should have been having sex back then; if the clap infected 2% of them, just imagine how dangerous sex was before the rise of Disco People.  

Grim isn’t hearing these objections, though. Yes, Gonorrhea is prolific, he says, but “More people die of syphilis than all other communicable diseases in the United States.” Fascinating! If strangely ominous, considering HIV was just about to film its breakout role.

But it was also intellectually dishonest, since only one year prior the U.S. Government, producer of this film, had concluded its four-decade experiment, The Tuskegee Crime Against Humanity. Pathogens are gonna patho, but The Feds were Count Spirochete’s Renfield, clearing a genocidal path through official channels.  

I…I have no jokes about that level of evil, so let’s return to this film’s Saucy History of Rotting Flesh, Vol. I. Come on, don’t look so sad. It’s not all AIDS and racism. Did I mention the cartoon moleman yet? I really think we can still have a fun time. Look right here, I wrote down: “More like Diph-shit.”

Anyway, leaving aside the sponsors of this awards ceremony, Death cannot stop gushing about his buddy Syphilis. Hitching a ride on French mercenaries in the late 15th century, the Count traveled the globe via their “camp followers,” a.k.a. Hooers on the Hoof. 

Our hooded host lets us know this with a wink, cheekily noting that “other types of conquest […] scarred, crippled, killed,” and ate your horny grandparents’ brains. 

Lustily, the specter of annihilation describes the “unbroken, moist, intimate, skin-to-skin contact” that spreads these two illnesses. While Gonorrhea looooves the urethra, any mucous membrane will do. Men will know his burning rage by the leaky pus on their spigot, while women are craftier, and conceal the clap even from themselves like it were ovulation. Why can’t you just tell us how you’re feeling, ladies? 

So of course by now you’re curious about how Gono-Goblin blinds babies. “How are fetuses being bent and broken in this comedy article?” you ask. Well it turns out that the uterus can smear the baby’s eyes with disease while it’s beginning the wondrous journey of life—

Good lord, I…I thought this would be a cartoon telling sailors to wrap it up. I have a whole page of jokes written about “men overboard” and “life preservers.” It was going to be a resonant pun in French! How am I supposed to win back the French readers after their army’s noses fell off? Please let me stop, Mr. Brockway, you can keep the money, I—

Conventional penicillin won’t stop it? Accelerated development? Only effective cure? I—yes, I understand.  

A cartoon vampire with a sword, that’s what I thought we were getting into, dear reader. I am so sorry about this midden heap of fetal tissue. Just trust me, we have to keep going for… *gulp* all of humanity.

The good news is that Dead Blind Baby Syndrome is often avoided by the disease sterilizing the fallopian tubes and whatever their testicular equivalent is. The…sploot chute? Does that sound right? No, clearly it’s something scientific, like the cumduct. Whatever it’s called, hey: free sterilization for U.S. readers looking to save thousands on personal health care. 

Like Clap-Devil, Count Spirochete can be passed on from mother to child, but don’t worry; more often it just kills them in the womb. *g-g-g-gulp!*

Upon invading a foreign body, Count Spirochete establishes a headquarters, a painless chancre where he may lie in his native soil and plot ways to murder babies and laughter. Men, he prefers your dick, but don’t overlook the left hook of facial syphilis. Really, any warm, wet abrasion will do: really bad news for those of you exploring knifeplay with your Renaissance mercenary boyfriends. 

That’s when it’s time for Phase II: Operation Super-Duper Infiltration – The Morpheus Protocol. See, syphilis is known as The Great Imitator, because it can look like many other diseases. This film portrays it as Bela Lugosi, when in fact, it’s Lon Chaney. 

But it is vampirical in that it loves your blood (and lymph nodes, which are the most famous nodes that you have no idea what they do). It spreads throughout your circulatory and lymphatic systems like it’s the really good part of ‘Salem’s Lot when the whole town just vanishes. This is when—

Goddamnit. 

This is when you’re most likely to see umbilical infection of unborn babies, who will likely be stillborn due to congenital syphilis.

Anybody? The A-aristocrats? No? *sigh*

For two years, Count Spirochete will pop up in your body as a “rash, sore throat, fever, bald patch, and sores” before he achieves total system dominance. Confronting him in his castle, you will seek to stake him with a penicillin shot, but you feel his hot breath on the nape of your neck or inside your uterus. You are now blind, crippled, insane, and dead, all at once. You are strigoi mort, the syphilis that walks. 

While Gonorrhea is tough to beat on its own, says Death, vanquishing Count Spirochete requires either a Weapon X-grade healing factor or antibiotics.

The count flees to Death’s sick-ass Castle Grayskull, but the embodiment of ultimate truth consoles him: the US is too repressed to brag about having sex to their doctors. At the time this film was made, it would be several years before antibiotic-resistant strains became a problem, so the biggest threat to sexual well-being was the stigma of thinking you might be unclean. Americans only began to admit having sex after President Kennedy visited Dr. P.C. Hughes to boast about skindiving Marilyn Monroe.  

Let’s take a look at some of the other superstars gracing our Syphilis walk of fame. Why here’s…

Wow, Bobby Kennedy too! Look out, Marilyn! 

And guy who was still frying ants with a microscope in high school! He gave syphilis to…your friend’s mom, and that explains a lot about your friend’s learning disability! She passed it on to… Chamber of Commerce secretary who’s really rediscovering himself after the divorce! Who else?

June & Johnny! Cool sunglasses girl who looks mean but is just smarter than the stupid small town she’s stuck in for another year! The swinging couple and the swinging couple they just gave the syph to! And these two people but you’ll never guess which one slept with a French mercenary! “OH GOD BARBARA PLEASE LET ME EXPLAIN WHY, THE PLUME UPON HIS SALLET WAS RESPLENDENT!”

Yes! Yes, all have been turned in Count Spirochete’s genitally undead army! Bring on more children of the night–figuratively speaking of course! Doing laps around this sexual victory parade, it’s… 

Guy whose dune-buggy gets him laid, like, all the time!

Far out, gang, I don’t think we talk enough about how prevalent dune-buggies were in all the non-hippie parts of ’60s culture. The bouncy chassis turned these hydrodynamic fuck vehicles into livery service for syphilis. 

So there you have it. Don’t be afraid to tell your doctor about your dalliances with the French and other syphilitic races, like the Belgians, Swiss, Algerians, Moroccans, Congolese, and of course, three-quarters of Quebec. Help is available. Unless your partner owns a pike, ranseur, or plançon à picot, in which case it’s safe to assume your baby is already blind.

Brendan once proved why Thanos will never get syphilis.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: How to Be Weird 🌭

Every WikiHow page is actually a great guide for something other than the lesson they’re actually talking about. For example, How to Reupholster a Chair is actually a great guide for stapling yourself to yourself. And How to Be Random was actually a killer guide on how to forget the sensation of human contact. 

What I didn’t impress upon you at the time was that How to be Random was merely a seminal work in the genre of ‘becoming hated.’ For some reason, How to be a Fucking Dickhead is a very popular subject on WikiHow. There are people out there who desperately want to be disliked, but every time they open their mouth it’s like pulling up to the prom in a camaro with a tiger in the passenger seat. If that’s you, if you hate being liked, if you can’t deal with all the love in your life and need every ounce of it destroyed, check out How to be Weird. 

How to be Weird promises that it will draw the fine line between kooky and crazy, which I always thought was ‘biting hard enough to break skin,’ but I guess it’s more complicated than that. I’m not sure what the ‘loose cannon’ line is about. I guess even Wandoms have a threshold. Like you can run around licking people’s elbows and screeching that you’re the Spork King, and that’s fine – stompable, but fine – but god forgive you if you hand somebody an unprovoked banana. Then you’re off the force! Turn in your squirtgun and candy badge and never quote Rick and Morty again.

Here’s something WikiHow loves to do: start off with pretty reasonable advice, then realize it only takes up a paragraph, and fill the second one with barely related words chosen in a blind panic. 

“Try to develop your own sense of style using different patterns and vintage pieces!” Then, after checking the word count: “Uhh…. also wear vampire teeth like Nicolas Cage in Vampire’s Kiss! It worked out great for him! I presume! I didn’t see the end, no spoilers!”

How to Be Weird makes this clear early: The guide is not about finding your true personality and expressing it. You might actually hate being weird. You won’t like the clothes you wear, or the person you become. That’s not what this guide promised. This guide only promised that other human beings would avert their eyes and find things that suddenly needed to be in the seats next to them whenever you got on the bus.

If you accidentally have friends, don’t worry! Try fucking up their names intentionally. Or better yet: Give them diminishing nicknames, like they’re not human at all! Everybody loves that, especially minorities! Call Teshawn “Big Snickerdoodles.” Call him it in front of other people! Let’s see how punched you can get in one day. Sanjay becomes Sorbet! Those noises he’s making are how his people say “I find this endearing!” They also spit at your feet when they think you’re being especially hilarious. It’s a weird culture — hey, take some notes!

Hey, remember when How To Be Weird expressly promised us we would not look like a psychopath? 

Because “frequently talking to inanimate objects” is definitely a diagnosis point in the DSM-5. 

“Don’t do it all the time, you’ll look crazy!” WikiHow warns us, as though anybody ever said, “No, Marlene’s just kooky – she only talks to the toaster every third silence.”

Do me a favor: Really try to look at that piece of shit through the cracked monitor that you just reflexively punched.

That’s art. That’s what art looks like.

Listen, you’re not supposed to like art. You’re supposed to feel something. Burning, non-directional rage is a viable emotion. Really look at his puffy painted vest. The tinted glasses. Really take in the smugness of that smile. 

I’m NFT’ing this right now. I looked up “how to do that stupid NFT shit” just for this one and only thing. When the artist dies, the value of this piece will skyrocket. 

Wait, this is WikiHow. I should say “when somebody reports the smell and the authorities finally find the body, the value of this piece will skyrocket.”

Every WikiHow creator is just an unclaimed corpse that hasn’t stopped moving yet.

About half of this guide consists of dire warnings about turning back. There are less severe warnings in How to Fuck a Shark (No Condom), I checked, purely for work reasons.

And I’ll never say this again: WikiHow is right. 

If you teach yourself to be a dickhead, you might not remember how not to be a dickhead. You could be stuck in Dharma and Greg vests and Burger King crowns forever, lamenting the beatings you no longer even get erect for, totally willing but physically unable to stop screeching Invader Zim quotes. 

Basically, pretend to be mentally disabled. 

Take a notebook down to the Helmetless Motorcycle Injury ward and watch what the husks do when something with too many colors comes on the TV. Then, try it on your friends! 

This is such misery. You can’t dress how you like, you’ve carefully trained obnoxious affectations into every part of your daily life, and now you can no longer eat the foods you enjoy. You must give up every inch of yourself to the Weird. 

This reads like a ritual handbook for people who want to host a demon. If you want to be a proper vessel for Leonard you have to be pure. There can be no happiness or joy left in your body. You must destroy everything you like and replace it with the hate of others. Only when your very cells have forgotten the memory of love will Ol’ Goose-Legs give you the erasure you so desperately crave. 

“Always wear hats” seems a little out of place. 

How to be Weird is about commitment. It’s about the total destruction of a life. Imagine reteaching yourself human language with extra syllables and exclusively clothing yourself in the reeking cardigans and cigarette-burned Cosby sweaters of the Goodwill discount bins only to meet a guy who thinks he’s on the same level as you because of “always hat.”

Again we see one good piece of advice — “try exploring lesser known hobbies like pinata-making!” — followed by several lines of advice specifically designed to get you a Priest-only funeral and a murder nobody is petitioning the sheriff’s office to investigate.

Here’s your Shark-Fucking warning: “Make sure you have loyal friends who won’t ditch you for being weird.”

If you reforge yourself as ‘the pet rock guy’ and your friend actually sticks by you, you need to cancel your life insurance immediately. Nobody loves anybody that much. You are going to be found in a lake.

Yeah, here you go: Give up language. Words are only meant to help you connect to and communicate with other humans which, again, is something we’re trying to burn out of ourselves. You’ll never be properly Leonard-lubed until you replace all of the meaningful conversations in your life with Jar Jar Binks impressions. 

Feign moderate dementia! 

See, all your time in the Helmetless Motorcycle Injuries ward paid off. If you wanna get rEaLlY weird you better practice faking brain damage. For bonus points, try soiling yourself without noticing. You know who gets a lot of attention down at the ol’ HMI? 

Half-head Herbert! 

Half-head Herbert NEVER has a dry diaper, and all of the nurses think he is just the most! Even his wife agrees! “He’s so much,” she whispers, when she thinks nobody is listening. “He’s just so much now.”

Again, remember that we’re supposed to be pulling up just shy of crazy in this guide. But pretending to be the President or Napoleon are the joke examples the DSM-5 uses in their word problems. 

“President Tic-Tac and Big Black Napoleon are 50 feet apart, they have their genitals out and are approaching one another at a rate of 1.5 feet per second. If this rate stays constant, how long will you have to rapidly flip the lightswitch before they touch tips and their families file a gross negligence lawsuit? These are joke examples, of course. Nobody is Hollywood crazy like that. It’s mostly compulsive masturbating. Show your work.”

The artwork in this guide promises that, at best, one person will laugh at your antics, almost certainly out of nervous pity, while everybody else in the crowd will visibly wrestle with their barely constrained hatred. 

At best. That’s your best-case scenario: That one person out of twenty will feel bad for pushing you in a river.

Hey, muscular giants with distended pulsating necks and crazy Zooey Deschanel eyes, by all means accost women on the street with unhinged questions and wild accusations. They love it! Grin while you do it – wide, so wide it splits the human face you keep on the phallic shaft even now unspooling from your torso like Wilford Brimley in The Thing. Paw at your unraveling human crotch, ask them “what is… banana?” from your warping voice box. They’ll find it charming! Look at those women! Look at their faces! They clearly find this very charming!

Go to work and for the whole day just do your worst Chinese accent. I mean the whole time. All fucking day. Everybody loves that. Everybody will love that. They will not punch you straight in those novelty teeth that have taken on a whole new connotation now. They will not kick you until their ankles break, destroying their own bodies just to harm yours. Do it. Also wildly screech at maximum volume while you do it. Just go ahead and do that. That kind of pure hatred is like a bathrobe straight out of the dryer for Leonard. 

I’m going to show you something, and you’re not going to believe it. You’re going to think I wrote it, and deserve some kind of award for channeling pure unlikeability so well. A little trophy shaped like Ben Shapiro, or the kid from The Babadook. Every sentence is worse than the one before it. It’s such distilled despicability you might be able to drink it. Pure Hateahol. Mix it with sweet vermouth and bitters and have yourself a Manhatean. 

Anyway, do all of this awful shit and make the world a worse place just because you think any attention is good attention, but do try to refrain from drooling, as SoCiEtY perceives it as “creepy.”

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Josh, who is/has always been Human Meats/human, please follow to vessel/van.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Ghost Hunting for Dummies 🌭

If you ask me, every Ghost Hunting book is for dummies, but Ghost Hunting For Dummies by Zak Bagans just comes right out and says it in the title.

The book opens by stating one in three Americans believes houses can be haunted. Basically, it makes the argument that if ghosts don’t exist, why do so many people think they do? It’s an argument that doesn’t take into account how people are stupid.

I should probably state my biases before discussing this book. I am the two people out of three that does not believe in ghosts, and here’s why: being a ghost sounds lame as hell. You can’t eat, you can’t read, and you can’t tell what’s happening in a show when you’re crawling out of the TV. You’re just an invisible person living in someone else’s house, watching them masturbate. Thus, by Bugg’s Masturbative Property, all ghosts are perverts.

I don’t want to live with the possibility of impending ghosthood hanging over my head. And I really don’t want some guy wearing a big silver medallion and too much hair gel trying to convince me I should be concerned about it. To believe in Ghost Hunters, you first have to believe there are extreme powers of unseen evil on earth, and then you have to accept that the only guy who knows how to deal with them also manages a Hot Topic.

If you think this man looks trustworthy, I should probably start by telling you he was accused of plagiarizing a bunch of this book. Ghost hunting is a small community, and apparently, something like 20 pages were pulled word-for-word from another ghost hunting book. Eventually, Bagans tried to cover for this by saying he worked with the author he was accused of plagiarizing as an uncredited researcher for the book. The author had previously told a blogger that Bagans or, more likely, his ghost-hunting ghost-writer, had plagiarized him, but they must have come to some kind of settlement because here he is, tweeting a very normal scanned picture of a typed statement contradicting his previous statement:

I may not believe in ghosts, but I also don’t believe this story. So, who is Zak Bagans beyond the most trustworthy man on the planet? He’s the star of the 24(!) season-long television dynasty Ghost Adventures, a show running on The Travel Channel since 2008. It’s spawned multiple spin-offs, including Ghost Adventures: Serial Killer Spirits, Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks, and of course, Ghost Adventures: Quarantine.

It’s insane that a show can run for 24 seasons without my knowing about it until I see the face of the lead on a book in the bargain occult section of a used bookstore. Even though this book was published in 2019, it went into the bargain section FAST. This was probably partially due to the plagiarism scandal, which wasn’t a big deal to us super smart normals, but might have been a big deal in the aspiring ghost hunter community. Or, it could just be because the book is really, really dumb and bad. Or so good the first few hundred readers hunted all the ghosts?

A stunning majority of Ghost Hunting for Dummies is just a history of ghosts and ghost hunting in America that employs an extremely limited vocabulary on the topic. Everything in this book is the most haunted. On page 169, Zak says The Lemp Mansion “has become known as one of the most haunted places in the country.” On page 174, “The Crescent Hotel “is considered one of the most haunted places in the country.” Chapter 19 of the book is called “America’s Ten Most Haunted Cities And Towns.”

Nothing is ever just a little bit haunted. Zak, or the people whose words he stole, never say, “There’s a ghost here, but his name is Kyle, and he’s honestly super chill.” Zak, or again, the uncredited and unaware ghost hunting author writing as “Zak,” rates everything on a scale of most haunted to most haunted.

When he does finally get around to giving actual practical advice for ghost objects, it’s so basic it’s childlike. And, sure, so is writing a book about playing make-believe, but let me give you an example. Chapter eight is called “Where Ghosts Are” and it’s just a list of all possible places. It looks like a Family Feud board after Steve Harvey asks, “Name a location.”

No shit, ghost towns are a good place to look for ghosts! Hospitals and old insane asylums might have them too? Thanks for the hot tip, Zak! Um, I guess I should cancel my plans to open a trampoline park in the old Saint Mary’s Home For Partially Lobotomized Psychotic Witches? I mean, I don’t know where else I could put it other than the theater that was built on top of an ancient burial ground for baby murdering prisoners with hook hands. Oh, I guess you’re going to tell me that’s hAuNtEd too.

You start to realize how little material Zak had for this book when you get to page 119, and it’s just a long list of his favorite horror movies. Again that’s on page 119, and this book is 408 pages long. I mean, you try writing a bunch of words without just listing movies you’ve seen The Adventures of Milo and Otis.

This has big, “Oh shit, that’s due tomorrow? I’m three pages short” energy. It’s also a bit telling that he’s listing fictional movies rather than historical ghost hunters killed by ghosts. And when the information in Ghost Hunting For Dummies isn’t incredibly basic or giving away the grift, it’s incredibly dumb. There’s a section on triggering ghosts using trigger objects you think they may respond to based on research into the ghost’s suspected life.

“Since I’m investigating the ghost of the nunchuck murderer, I’ll go ahead and leave these nunchucks out here to see if I can trigger any ghostly activity. Oh no! Who could have seen that this would go so terribly wrong.” – A thing that Zak Bagans thinks could happen.

Part of me has to think Zak Bagans doesn’t believe a single thing in this book, and sometimes he slips up, and you notice it. For example, Chapter 10 is called “The Dangers Of Investigating,” and the number one thing listed in that chapter is Allergies. I must urgently reiterate this: THE NUMBER ONE THREAT TO GHOST HUNTERS IS ALLERGIES.

“The Dangers of Investigating” begins with a section called “what not to do as a ghost hunter,” which is only about not trespassing. The law does not recognize ghost hunting as a reason for you to be in another person’s home. Then it lists ghosts hunting’s greatest dangers as:

Allergies

Dust and mold

Histoplasmosis (a disease caused by a fungus that grows in material contaminated by bird and bat droppings)  

Asbestos

Carbon monoxide

You may notice none of those things are ghosts, which you may remember are the tormented spirits found in “Homes, Ghost towns, Battlefields and crime scenes, and Hotels.” Later in the book, under a section called “When Spirits Attack,” Bagans says, “Many people will never understand that attacks are more than physical grabs and pushes. These entities can inject pure fear into your spine and let you feel this inside your body– something you cannot feel yourselves watching on television.” So the man who believes that’s a thing was asked to list the dangers of ghost hunting and fear injected into the spine was lower on the list than allergies?

I also particularly enjoyed the section on how Zak Bagans once touched the famous cursed doll Annabelle from the movie Annabelle. The Raggedy Ann doll is supposedly so demon-possessed that it’s kept in a case surrounded by alarms because demons respect alarm systems? Seriously, though; do doll demons trigger alarms? And say they don’t. How would you convince their service representative you weren’t kidding? Like, okay, say demons erupted from your doll and the alarms did nothing. And you know it wasn’t you because your grandson, the computer one in the family, helped you set it up. Do you ask for a refund? Is there a technician who can put the demons back into the doll? Because without the demons, it’s just some doll Zak Bagans touched. Yes, the Zak Bagans. Famous doll toucher, even when doll touching is warned against:

Zak claims he was sensitive to the layers of dark energy around Annabelle, and she made him touch her. As a woman who has touched many museum paintings as a child, I can tell you that’s not dark energy controlling you. It’s called poor impulse control due to attention deficit disorder, Zak. Or, probably, unpaid Travel Channel intern writing as “Zak.”

Zak’s audience was upset he touched Annabelle, not because it was rude and he was told not to, but because they were worried for his safety. He’s fine. Well, he’s a fucking dumbshit, but otherwise fine.

After I read about the Annabelle encounter, I started to feel more on Zak’s side. Could I be feeling a kinship with this scatterbrained doll poker? Am I finding a common gr– wait, what’s this part about his haunted museum and extensive Charles Manson collection.

Zak bud, this isn’t the brag that you think this is. Are you a ghost hunter or just a creepy guy with a creepy hobby?

Is anyone who calls themself a ghost hunter actually a ghost hunter? You can’t catch a ghost. What we call ghost hunting is just looking for evidence of ghosts and writing about it, which is a very kind way of describing people getting scared of creaky floorboards in the dark, and more like bird watching than hunting anything. I guess no one is going to watch a show called Chickenshit Ghost Watchers International so we’ll let Zak have this one.

Lydia is on Twitter, and following her guarantees, you will be haunted. 

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Alpha Scientist Javo, who once heard a toilet flush upstairs in an old Bed and Breakfast and did NOT piss themselves. Did NOT.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurer’s Club 🌭

Here’s a short list of some of my favorite comedy resources: 

-When a corporation decides to do a comic book. 

-Long roll calls of characters by people who ran out of ideas before they started. 

-Boring organizations deciding it’s time to get “badical… to the extreme!”

-When somebody wildly overestimates their own value and plummets straight into the dirt. 

Every one of those things, on their own, is a recipe for hilarity. Now meet all of them rolled together: The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurer’s Club!

“This can’t be exactly what it looks like,” you’re thinking. “There’s no way you found a superhero comic about staple crops.”

And you’re right. Tragically, you’re right. I did not find the comic books. Those were all lost to silo fires and farm suicides. I only found the promotional material for the fan club of the comic books. This is a new type of sadness scientists have been working on by nesting layers of sadness atop one another until they form a strong and flexible weave of despair. They call it Sadophene, and it’s so durable they’re using it to hold together Elon Musk’s quivering ego. 

The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurers were like The Avengers for 4H kids who’d been kicked in the head and left their imaginations on the hoof of a milking cow. The goal of the Adventurers wasn’t to get kids into farming, it was to show farm kids how awesome their lives already were. They did it through pogs!

If you’re not familiar, pogs were… 

Wait, what the fuck were pogs? No, I lived through this. I should know this. I had pogs. They were a game or something, right? Y-you pogged? Did we pog each other? Holy shit why did we buy so many circles of cardboard with pictures on them?

Imagine the child these pogs were made for. The bowl-cutted, overall-clad, ricket-afflicted boy sitting alone in a windblown field in central Canada cupping a soggy King Wheat pog, his most treasured possession. If I was making an arthouse film about hell that’s how I’d show you the Fate of the Unlearned — the section of limbo where good people who just never heard of Christ go, to suffer in the absence of something they never knew was missing.

Hey speaking of obscure parts of hell, imagine the poor freelance comic book artist who took this job and actually had to pen character arcs for barley. They sure knew their demographic, though. They didn’t call these things activity books:

They were called “Things To Do When You’re Bored Books” because they knew calling these sad time-killers “activities” would be an actionable false advertising claim. In Quebec they were called “La Mort De Ennui” and to this day Montreal existentialists write bitingly ironic ukulele songs about them for their six YouTube subscribers.

Those are your villains: The various molds and insects which can spoil a harvest. These are comic books for children about wheat fighting mold, and I don’t know a single better way to tell a kid that you lied when you said they could be anything they wanted. You could say “I’m sorry Young Callum, you’ll never be an astronaut. You’ll go to the University of Regina for two semesters, and then you’ll move back home and drive your daddy’s pickup truck when he dies,” or you could just give him a Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurer’s Club membership and let his dreams wither naturally on the vine. 

Look at these thrilling Things To Do When You’re Bored!

-Discover “the Mighty Sprout” in a powerful science project!

-Check out the “A-MAZE-ING” Wheat Story!

-See inside a seed cleaning plant!

Hand a boy these and he will forget all about hope. He probably won’t even dream in color anymore. If you toss a kid one of these books and he has an absolute blast “seeing inside a seed cleaning plant,” then you need to get out of the house, barricade the door, and burn it down. An alien has cuckoo-ed you and tricked you into raising their offspring. Young Callum is excited about learning these processes because you are the crop, and the harvest is coming.

Let’s explore another of my favorite things: Roll call time!

Wendy Wrangler is a country singer whose tunes ‘wrangle’ her opponents. Yeah, okay. That scans. Good work, anonymous Saskatchewan freelancer. Buy yourself a pint of Everclear and drink it straight, you earned it.

Fantastic Flax can “blend in like a chameleon,” which is… is it because you can mix flax into so many things and it just kind of disappears? I’m being very generous by doing that legwork for this comic book, but okay. 

Now, following this template, what kind of powers would you say the Oat guy has?

Awesome Oats can see into the future? Like… oats, do? Is this why it’s impossible to get the drop on a bowl of oatmeal? Is it because the only reason people eat oatmeal is they have the foresight to realize they’ll struggle on the toilet later if they don’t? It is not explained!

Bearded Barley is from Asia! All of Asia. Still white, though. He can talk to animals! Like barley can! And his horses pull his chariot at the speed of light what the fuck? Where did that come from? 

Maybe I’m not giving this writer enough credit and they’re sourcing these powers from Asian (non-specified) folklore about the ancient Barley gods, or maybe he only knew two things about crops and hoped everybody else knew less so they’d just roll with the horse stuff.

Canola Crusher is from South America! Like canola! That’s why all of his dialogue sees him slipping into and then clumsily explaining basic Spanish! (Spanish is what South Americans call Mexican. -Editor)

Penny Pulse uses the secrets of herbs and spices to heal, just like the Middle East taught her. The middle east of Ireland, by the looks of her. Yes, she harnesses all the exotic healing spices of Dublin, like “salt” and “fried.” To be fair, 1990s Saskatchewan wasn’t exactly brimming with diverse life models. It’s entirely possible they thought ‘redhead’ counted as a race.

Let’s jump over to the villains:

Grasshopper overeats, which is totally in line with the theme, but right at the very end they tack on “thinks he’s better than everybody.” You know, like those arrogant fucking grasshoppers.

Rustin infects plants with her corrosive touch, which makes sense — she’s supposed to be leaf rust — but then she’s also a super genius? You think leaf rust is smart? You think farmers hate leaf rust because it’s a liberal? This is a weird dig to slip into a children’s educational comic no matter how little respect you have for dirt folk.

Blotch is the natural enemy of Bearded Barley, which he communicates by threatening to “get my sticky disks into your beard.” I can only assume “disks” was a typo there. His bio goes on to explain he’s “a great athlete, but a jerk. He stays up too late at night!” I’m not sure what it adds to the character, that we now know Blotch likes to facefuck bears and also has a sleep disorder, but there was only enough space for like four sentences and these were deemed two of the most vital.  

Ergot is a master hypnotist which — once again being super generous here — I guess could be an allusion to the hallucinogenic properties of ergot? Also she lies, cheats and steals just like that no good degenerate fungus. Oh, holy shit, wait: she replaces baby wheat kernels with her own evil children!

Your weird plantchild who loves the seed cleaning process – you’re being ergotted! Tell Young Callum to fetch his favorite toy (the shovel) from the basement and start pouring the gas. I know it’s hard to start over, but Lord knows it’s not your first fungusboy, and if you don’t plow and rotate the ashes it sure won’t be your last. 

We’re so desperate for new comic book properties you’d assume the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurers would be slated for a September release on Disney+ already. But no, somehow they went under despite all of their massive early success:

23,000 members of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurers Club! That’s officially an army. A whole army of grainwashed children willing to die for your wheat consortium. And led by a madman so zealous he began to dress as King Wheat! What could have derailed this unstoppable phenomenon? 

Nothing but a modest fee.

A grain conglomerate asked children for their attention — at a time when video games and television and just much better comic books existed — and by some miracle they got it. And then they also thought kids would pay for the privilege? $10 is an extremely modest fee, it’s true, but what family would get that bill and happily pay it just so junior would never again be without his seed cleaning plant tours? Only a family already ruled, absolutely devoured by Ergot Cuckoos could be tricked in this manner. 

And if you were counting on the Ergot Brood’s loyalty in exchange for including Queen Ergot’s seed packets in every Things To Do When You’re Bored Book, then the joke’s on you: She cheats and lies! Like all rye-based fungus!

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This article was brought to you by a hot tip from the Hot Dog Tipline, and by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Nick Ralston, also known as the heroic RADICAL RICE whose superpower, of course, is CYBORG FINGERS.