Category: LEARNING DAY

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller 🌭

If you’re stupid enough, general knowledge seems like expertise. If you’re stupider still, puppets seem like a trick. If you’re stupider still, you are the customer base for 1987’s How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller. It defies no expectations at all. It’s 24 minutes of basic instructions for putting price tags on garbage along with several tips you couldn’t possibly not already know Starring Phyllis Diller.

The tape already knows you need to have a garage sale by the nature of you owning the least necessary instructional VHS tape. How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE’s first and main purpose is to help you rid yourself of it. You need to turn Trash Into Cashβ„’, Old Into Goldβ„’, and your Precious Time into Pointless Rhymesβ„’!

Besides owning a garage, unlimited leisure time, and a retail store’s worth of unwanted appliances, the tape also assumes you already have a strong working knowledge of Phyllis Diller. Maybe this is maybe something you could take for granted in 1987, but in 2021 most of her jokes sound like code to activate deep cover operatives. For instance, it opens with her screaming, “I haven’t had this many people in my garage since the vice squad raided Fang’s Going Out of Marriage party! Sliiide whistle! Honnnk!” This was a reference to her fictional husband, Fang, who was at all times cheating on her, divorced from her, a pain in her ass, dead, or a loyal friend and provider. From Phyllis’ age and the era you might assume “Fang” had dark, racist origins, but the name was distilled down from an old ad-libbed line about a traffic accident where she called her husband “Old Fang Face.”

This was apparently such common knowledge at the time the producers of How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE figured you knew it, yet needed a VHS tape explaining how to write “25 cents” on a box of coffee mugs.

To be clear: for anyone who needed a celebrity host for a yard sale video, Phyllis Diller was a perfectly appropriate choice. She was the right amount of famous where everyone knew her but no one would say, “How the fuck did they get Phyllis Diller for this?” And as far as instructional videos go, no one has gotten more for their money than these producers. Phyllis Diller brings an energy to this like someone honored to be hosting the Daytime Emmy Awards. And while she does have strong acting and broadcast skills, you can’t fake this kind of enthusiasm. This is a woman with a true passion for the craft of garage saling. She never stops screaming about it. “Who knows more about turning trash into cash than me? I’ve been doing it for YEARS! Wha ha ha!” She had no notes when the script called for her to barge into the room with a trash bag exclaiming…

The video never misses an opportunity to add a joke, and I emphatically don’t mean that as a compliment. For example, when Phyllis suggests you gather unwanted items from around your home to use in your garage sale, she opens a closet full of tumbling props and says, “That was about a six on the Richter scale!” Then she holds up a pair of antlers and a clown nose and says, “Poor Rudolph never saw that land mine!” I’m not saying the video would be better if it was 40 seconds of her growling, “Here is the entire one step to selling old pajamas, you stupid shits.” I’m only saying this is very bad. I mean, for one thing, Rudolph is basically always in the air except at the north pole or on the roofs of non-naughty children. Are you telling me someone climbed onto the roof of a nice family, on Christmas, and land mined their home? An unspeakable act that killed a rare, innocent animal and presumably the magical spirit of Christmas? And this is funny to you, Phyllis!? Before we get to the yard sale, ha ha, let’s fucking molest the remains of Santa’s loyal companion!?

According to Phyllis Diller’s handwritten list, one of the things you need to do before a garage sale is “INSURANCE AND LAWS.” So she calls her insurance agent who recognizes her voice and hangs up on her. She groans, “Wrong number,” followed by a string of words delivered with the cadence of jokes but with all the meaning of a confused reindeer’s final screams. Again, it would be weirder if How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller was good, but it seems a strange indulgence to write the entire script by carving the language center out of a a human brain and transcribing the shrieks of the ravens feeding on it.

Another thing you need to do before your garage sale is call your neighbors to see if they have anything to sell. Then check the paper to see if there are any big sporting or television events that might distract potential customers from your big event. You don’t want to compete for a market share against ABC’s All-Star Salute to Lawns Full of Trash. Also on Phyllis’ list, and this may really tickle you is “TOM SELLECK’S PHONE NUMBER sliiiiiiide whistle.” It’s the second of three “I’m trying to fuck Tom Selleck” jokes in the video, and Phyllis expertly punctuates this one by circling the words “TOM SELLECK’S PHONE NUMBER” several times and nothing else. I feel like I’m not explaining all the subtleties, but she wants actor Tom Selleck to have sex with her and his name is Tom Selleck.

At this point, the tips come at the viewer fast. You get advice on market values, how to make signs, and why you should wash used clothes. It starts to become pretty clear from Phyllis’ excitement and the numbers getting thrown around that this isn’t about the money. Even in the filmmakers’ wildest imagination, this well-organized and celebrity-promoted garage sale looks like it’s hoping to make about forty bucks. Phyllis Diller would get double the profits if she threw her trash into the ocean and asked her plastic surgeon to use generic dermal fillers. Speaking of, there are eight (8) facelift jokes in this video sliiide whistle, honk. That’s an average of one every three minutes, and please understand they are not a part of a long running gag. They are each distinct and less fun than the last. The side effect of learning how to hold a garage sale is that you will no longer find joy in the skin thinly stretched across Phyllis Diller’s skull.

“WOULD YOU LOOK AT THIS PUP TENT! honk arrooooga,” is how Phyllis uses her dynamic prop comedy to tell you maternity clothes are a hot ticket item at garage sales. And while that’s technically “knowledge,” if I was a new mother trying to get rid of stuff, it might already occur to me to include the clothes I would never wear again. This is like informing someone who already ordered lunch that soup is wet food, like the dripping holes near Tom Selleck.

Have we talked shoes yet? You should be sure to wear functional garage sale shoes. Or as Phyllis puts it…

There is so much time spent on advice you couldn’t conceivably not know they spend no time explaining complicated things. For instance, Phyllis walks past a homemade changing room saying, “You’ll need a ladder, a shower curtain, and a closet dowel from the lumber yard!” And instead of explaining how to MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson, yum! sliiiide whistle) together a dressing room with debris and no fasteners, she peeks into it, shatters the mirror, and screams, “YOU’D THINK AFTER FIFTEEN FACE LIFTS THAT WOULD STOP. AH HA! horrrrn sound.” Hilarious, sure, but the viewer is no closer to knowing how to build a retail space in their garage. It’s fucked up they assume I’m an accomplished junkyard architect maternity dress collector but I don’t understand how stickers work. They’re more confused than Fang trying to order sushi at the Aladdin while the surgical staples behind his wife’s ears detached!

There’s an entire section of the tape about the outrageous characters you’ll run into at a garage sale. It is a perfect setup to comedy hijinx, but instead it’s the least fun, instructional part of this instructional video. It prepares you for the inevitability of hardnose bargaining and petty thievery that comes with turning your home into a flea market. It still has some jokes about how her face is more basketball than flesh and how her genitals are loveless deserts long since abandoned by Fang and never to be explored by Tom Selleck. It’s frankly so far past the point of self-deprecation I looked up the writer to see how he knew Phyllis Diller well enough to dunk on her unfuckable sadness over and over like this.

It was written by someone who only had one credit on an episode of Hollywood Squares, a show Phyllis Diller was on frequently. So this may explain how they got a call with Phyllis Diller’s agent, but not how they had the confidence to hand her this many jokes about her ancient face and vagina flesh. When you’re putting together a garage sale VHS, it takes huge balls to hand your celebrity host a script that says, “I’m a fucking gross piece of shit and here’s how you price used paperbacks.” I should know. I was stabbed 40 times by Rob Van Winkle after he saw the script for Make Your Own Gourmet Sorbet Starring That Asshole Vanilla Ice SLIIIIIDE WHISTLE, HONK HOOOONKK.

One other type of garage sale customer to watch out for is The Nitpicker. He’s the type of person who will yell at you for not keeping your appliances in perfect condition. He w– wait. I think I recognize The Nitpicker. Used (Works!) COOLVIEW TV/VCR Combo, enhance:

No. N-no, it can’t be.

Jesus Christ, it is! IT IS! This is fucking Master Eastwest, from The Magic of Martial Arts! He’s a mysterious being with all the powers of the Orient who teaches children Karate in his cave, and here he is causing a scene over a garage sale’s return policy on a six inch television. He is angry, entitled, and seems to be blaming Phyllis Diller for a series of bad turns his life took. His every acting choice seems to have been made for a revenge movie about a garage sale customer pushed too far. And maybe it’s because a child-abducting Karate ghost is losing its temper on the set, but there is a serious tone change here at the end of How to Have a Moneymaking GARAGE SALE Starring Phyllis Diller. Off camera voices start demanding to use her phone and bathroom and she worriedly explains how dangerous a garage full of deal-hunting strangers can be.

Then, in what I think is a coincidence and not a potential murderer gag, a seven foot man emerges from the bargain wasteland with garden shears leveled at Phyllis Diller’s neck. “Three dollars,” is all he says as his hands tremble ready on the handles. The point is, the two unhinged madmen brandishing deadly weapons at the star (garden shears and cave Karate) really drive home the accidental theme of the video: there is no idea worse than having a moneymaking garage sale.

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: How to Become Good at Knife Fighting

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LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: The Best of 2020 🌭

Happy holidays from the very tips of our hot dogs to the large split in your buns. This year you have given us the greatest gift of all: Several dollars. Oh, also your support for this insane website that promises way too many jokes about things pop culture did while drunk and denied the next morning. So we are giving you the greatest gift, the only gift — only anything we know how to produce: Those exact jokes. That’s right, it’s the great year-end retrospective! The internet’s clip show! Where we look back at our own works with a smug sense of satisfaction and say β€œyou’re right, we are comedy geniuses with penises that double as sundials for distant villages.” Every day this week, we’ll look back at our favorite articles from that day’s theme, and if they’re not already free, we’ll make them that way! Today is Learning Day, and you just learned what we’re doing. Let’s get started.

Develop Your Child’s Psychic Abilities

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!

How to Good-bye Depression

This book is a structureless poem about three things: the definitely psychosomatic health benefits of anal constrictions, an old guy he knows who fucks, and stickiness. It’s two pages long and Hiroyuki rewrote it 67 times without ever getting better at English. He included every single draft and the review is done– that’s the goddamn book. Survivors of the Nanjing Massacre call this book the most unthinkable thing Japan has ever done. In sign language you pronounce this book by getting struck by lightning at the top of a staircase.

TRAINS! TRAINS! TRAINS!

Science 4 for Christian Schools

If you presented this book to Joseph Goebbels he would say, β€œZis is close to vat I vanted, but I asked for a ridiculous plan to make ze American children stupid, not a stupid plan to make ze American children ridiculous. Two stars.”

Science 4 for Christian Schools – Teacher’s Guide

Question #7 is: What’s the point of this stupid fucking moon? The answer is, and I’m paraphrasing, to one day turn red and kill you. This is a fantastic type of crazy, and if I’m being honest, I don’t understand how homeschooled Christians didn’t end up being the coolest genre of people. If someone asks me about the moon I bore them to death with crater facts. A graduate of Science 4 for Christian Schools will tear off their shirt and scream, β€œDid you say moon!? Hurry! It can’t see you if you’re nude, wait, who sent you!? Show me the birthmark!”

How to Make Trippy Music

“The eHow logo is like the Nintendo Seal of Quality β€” if you’re lucky it means nothing, if you’re unlucky you just brought home the bronze medal in the Shit Olympics. Here’s our instructor for Trippy Music Class: The least funkadelic person to ever live.”

Troom Troom

“Money laundering for Care Bears? Unethical advertising for a dangerously zany new clown drug? Russian phishing aimed at hungry gay children? Nobody has any proof, only an uneasy hunch based on the grime they feel congealing on their souls whenever they watch a video. Troom Troom feels like a mean-spirited, poorly executed parody of something that doesn’t exist yet and possibly never will. Like a savage takedown of the exploitative marketing tactics deployed by Sparkolchim, the slavic candy giant that poisoned 92% of Earth-14.”

Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler

“Now, be honest with me: in your mind’s eye, is he wearing pants? No, he is not. Is he wearing a jaunty little bowtie specifically tailored for his penis? Yes, of course he is.”

How to Manifest Your Desires

“I love the DIY sensibility of Dark Arts WikiHow. They’ll never just tell you to harvest dirt from beneath the hooves of copulating oxen β€” they’ll include tips for making your own from charcoal and fleshlight leavings. Also it is very good to know that pickles are cursed. I have always secretly believed them to be foul magic by the way they make everything they touch taste like pickles, but I was unwilling to independently research that fact.”

Meet Buster Sales

“He’s our magical training video host. He’s got a kind of off putting mookish presence, and he lives in the TV β€” like if Max Headroom was the manager of a local carpet store that couldn’t keep any female employees for reasons that are not discussed.”

Develop Your Psychic Powers

“The video doesn’t really start until section 4, Clairvoyance. Litany shows you a handy exercise wherein she lays a series of items out and moves them around off-screen, then asks you to use your clairvoyance to predict their new positions.

At first, this exercise was challenging for me, but luckily, Litany said to practice, you could just rewind the tape and try the exercise again! After rewinding the video and working on the exercise several times, I found that I could accurately predict the arrangement of the objects 100% of the time. I did it! I’m Clairvoyant!”

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsors and Hot Dog Supremes: NickH, Matt Reiley, Brianne Whitney, 3 Finger Louie, Hawk, Josh Fabian, toasty god, and Mike Stiles. Winners of the Science Fair, Champions of the Math-Off, and Big Buckaroos of the Biology Bonanza.

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LEARNING DAY

365 Ways to Live Happy 🌭

During 1900🌭 survival training, we are taught to treat every assault on reality like a threat. The most dangerous lunacy is often hidden inside seemingly nice things like Christian joke books or pet massage manuals or the gentle affirmations of a self-appointed happiness coach.

365 ways to Live Happy: Simple Ways to Find Joy Every Day was written in 2010 by self-help author Meera Lester, a woman also not known for her beekeeper detective novels and Biblical nonfiction. She lists no formal education or background in psychology in her author bio, which means she tried to come up with three hundred and sixty five happiness tips using folksy wisdom and gut feelings alone. Let’s see how she did!

(These are all real and unmodified)

I’m not exaggerating when I say this woman sat down to write 365 ideas on being happy and the first one was to be happy. The second one was to smile, and then she ran out of ideas. Display a bowl of smashed flowers? These types of books always waffle between “duh” and “huh?” but this is literally as fast as an author could conceivably demonstrate their inadequacy. If she opens her next self-help book with “My nong is Meero, sorry name is Meera and i’m here two shit sadness into yor moth. Sorry yoo key is broken,” I would still say it’s a better opening than these three entries.

To give you an idea of how much struggle even the smallest thought is to Meera, her idea for #21 was “I don’t fucking know, go to church?” But then it occurred to her not everyone is Christian, so she, with great tolerance for Others, suggested they go to whichever their version is. You know, the beliefs core to you? Pursue those, weekly, is my suggestion as an author, or invent your own? Studies show research experts find there to be scientifical benefits! This dingbat could write about anything she wants, and her unacclaimed beekeeper murder mysteries are proof she knows this, and here she is rewording “go to church” like a 13-year-old padding out a 600 word essay on the benefits of steam power. There is so much unhappiness radiating off of this page of useless advice she might as well have just printed a picture of her favorite dead cat and typed, “only tragedy is forever, follow traffic laws and eat food.”

Holy shit. Meera suggests altering a picture of you to be thinner, less bald, and younger and putting it where you will see it. Where other people will see it. Let’s ignore how she put this in a section called “Be Happy With Yourself” because I think it’s more important to talk about how specific this type of happiness is, and how it only works on someone with the perfect combination of insecurity and lack of reasoning.

When you manufacture a delusion, you’re running the risk of any tiny thing shattering it. For instance, if you’re a balding lady and none of your jeans fit anymore, there’s no happiness in saying, “The joke’s on you, pants! Earlier I digitally unsagged my tits in McAfee FREEpaint and I can PROVE it!” This is imitation joy smeared across a tiny part of your brain and then dedicating your life to protecting it from reality. I have the same therapeutic credentials as this author, so all we are are two geniuses disagreeing, but if you deliberately hang onto a younger, hotter self-image, that’s not happiness. That’s taking out a happiness loan until the next time you see a mirror.

“Hello, police? First off, Meera was right. This does feel good. Secondly? I’ve been stabbed. I’m at the non-denominational sacred ritual meeting place on 36th street, and paramedics will know me by my still very firm and perky young breasts along with the face I had thirty five years ago.”

If this book was an injured animal, you would have bashed it to death forty entries ago to end its suffering. This desperate woman is so completely out of ideas she’s suggesting a key to happiness is “Wash Your Hands.” I feel like you can’t be less wise than this. In a very real way, this is as dumb as a person can be. And while I agree the pathway to true joy is having the least amount of uncooked chicken on your fingers, I can’t imagine a person who wouldn’t already have this as a core belief. I swear this lady is eight entries away from “Don’t Enjoy Poison.”

Meera, no! I was kidding!

This entry, stay away from poison, is peak Meera Lester. See, she’s not smart, but the thing that makes her magical is how she presents ideas with so little depth or nuance, she can’t even flesh them out. When forced, by herself, to elaborate on “Avoid Exposure to Toxic Chemicals,” she clarifies, “avoid exposure to all kinds of toxic agents.” That’s not helpful to anyone other than the person making sure you’re a fucking idiot.

A less-happy author might have thought, “Okay, maybe there’s nothing here, maybe I should explore more about crushing flowers,” but Meera pressed on. She suggested reading the safety instructions for all your chemicals including the ones for “your garden, lawn, and landscape.” Humans or fans of humans might recognize these as mostly the same thing, household chemically-speaking. By that I mean, when you finally find your lawn poison, you don’t scream at your wife for putting it with the goddamn landscape poisons.

Not all of Meera’s book is made up of impossibly general knowledge followed by babbling paragraphs of text re-explaining it several times. Some of it is based around wishing on things very hard, like a small child or a Jedi might do. On entry #101, she suggests setting aside five minutes every night to pray to be famous. But wording a wish this poorly is giving your monkey paw the easiest day at work it will ever have. Are you sure you want to be famous? Are you, Meera Lester, positive you want people outside your community of almost poison-drinkers to know about your work? I only ask, Meera Lester, self-help author (joy, religion, motivational, spiritual) whose lack of an Internet presence leaves her Google results extremely pliable, because someone failing in an ironic, spectacular way is a more compelling story than a struggling writer continuing with an unremarkable hobby. I’m worried, Meera Lester, author of 365 ways to Live Happy, that a careless pursuit of fame could lead a person to become known for something like… I don’t know, The Woman Who Accidentally Wrote the Saddest Happiness Book of All Time. Something to think about, motivational writer Meera Lester (net worth nude feet).

It’s pretty clear Meera’s mental health isn’t going to survive 365 happiness tips, but about a third into the book  she thought of a pretty clever way to shave a few off. She could just ask you, the reader, to come up with your own! Maybe your favorite music? She doesn’t know– you’re the you expert, asshole!

Sometimes people are sad because of finances, and realizing this unlocked a secret reserve of inspiration inside of Meera. It occurred to her if she could fix your money problems, she could fix your unhappiness, but how? Wait, never mind, she’s got it: wish for money only stupider than that sounds. And then, and this one also counts toward the 365 entries, guys: wish for money on paper. So now she has you taping a picture of money you’ll never have next to a picture of the face and body you never did have. I’m kind of serious when I ask this: does she think it counts as happiness when she makes everyone around her sadder by comparison? I mean, a lot of mental health professionals ask me how I stay so positive, and I guess it’s because putting my most pathetic delusions on display at my work space is a fun conversation starter! I also invented wishing! You’re right, I should write all these thoughts down in a book! Speaking of joyful wisdom, I’m going to go scream into a pillow.

Ha ha ha, holy fucking shit. Meera wrote an entire page about weeping into a pillow and then kicking its ass. And her hot mental health tip is to maybe buy a new one and fuck that one up too. A thing that legitimately brings me joy is imagining Meera Lester meeting a real therapist at a cocktail party and saying, “In my own way, I’m in the same line of work and I tell my readers, ‘patients’ if you will, to shriek into their bedding. There’s no way to know, but I imagine I’ve had some promising results. Do you also tell your patients to fix their tits and hairline in Photoshop? It’s so good to have a meeting of the minds like this, don’t you think?”

Everyone needs their community, so don’t be afraid to ask your friends for help. Any number of helpers is great, but five is how many Meera needs to become a bronze tier member of the NutriBlend Organic Salves Sales Force.

Things are really not going well for Meera’s multi-level salve business, but she has been assured, like she is assuring you now: a dream doesn’t become reality until you incubate it, and wait! Come back, you’re not done yet, also let it take flight. There’s really not much more to it than that!

Except, of course, sure– give the dream some rocket power. I feel like this one doesn’t need an explanation or a joke. You get it. It’s a dream with rockets. But back here in the real world we really need to start growing our downline of salve associates.

“I know I’ve talked to some of you about this opportunity before, but the money you’re leaving on the table by not investing early in this top quality salve business you can run from your home with unlimited growth is… it’s why I– why you’re unhappy. Excuse me, can you hand me that pillow please? No, this isn’t part of a pitch, it’s just a little happiness trick I came up with. I’ll only be a  moment, please enjoy the crushed lavender ₐᡒᡒᡒₑₑₑₑₑₑ!!!!! β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘β‚‘!!!! Now, who is ready to sign up for an Elite Salve Founder’s Kit? Who here is ready to live this kind of joy every day?”

Finances can be a tricky thing, so let’s go over what normally works. Did you try wishing for money? Okay, good, but did you picture yourself as a cartoon magnet money couldn’t resist? You tried that? What about writing down the number of moneys you want and putting it somewhere conspicuous? Well, it sounds like you’ve tried everythi– wait! Have you considered purchasing a magical money amulet?

You might think it’s a sign of low intelligence that it took Meera 182 entries before she remembered there were magical money amulets, but I think it shows her brilliance. She knew if she opened her book with unlimited wealth, you’d stop there and miss out on the rest of her advice. And what good is money if your hands are covered in toilet germs and you’re eating landscape poison?

So in the last ten entries, we have let our dream fly, given it rocket power, asked 11 friends to help, and celebrated it with a witchcraft totem. Now all that’s left to do is plan the victory party and make a list of what we’ll buy! Who knew being happy was as simple as being dumber than anyone who has ever lived and faking a dissociative disorder until it works? It reminds me of that movie The Matrix where the good guys knew the secret to paradise and were only trying to share it with everyone.

I’ve roasted Steven Seagal over two hundred times, but I’ve never ended an article more certain someone I made fun of is going to try to kill me.

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LEARNING DAY

Heal Your Cat the Natural Way 🌭

Owning a cat is like saying, I want a pet, but also I want it to hate me. So, owning a cat that you heal entirely with holistic medicine is like saying I want a pet, but I also want it to hate me and be extremely ill.  

I’m not here to tell you that holistic medicine is total bullshit. I’m sure it’s just as effective as writing “I hope I get better” on a piece of paper, setting it on fire, and throwing it in the garbage, but oh no, that’s not a garbage can; it’s a barrel of gasoline, and now your arm is on fire a little bit. That’s exactly how effective I think holistic medicine is– leaving you probably a little bit worse off than before you tried to treat yourself.

The fact that Heal Your Cat The Natural Way is written by a respected veterinarian is proof that the term “respected” is relative. Like, I’m highly respected among the butt and weiner joke community, but that doesn’t mean anyone should listen to anything I say. 

For ease of discussion, I would divide this book into two categories:

1.) Things A Cat Will Absolutely Never Let You Do To It or “Un-paw-nted Meow-lestation!”

At the top of this section is cat acupuncture. I can’t even begin to imagine the iron cast genitals on a man who would try to give acupuncture to a cat. After listing the main advantages of acupuncture, the author notes, “Disadvantages are few, mainly some cats are anxious when needles are inserted,” which seems like a pretty big disadvantage to sticking needles all over your cat’s body. 

Included in this section is a diagram of acupuncture points for cats. Please pay special attention to number’s 31, 18, and 20.

Go stick a needle in a cats butthole is going to be my new way of telling people to fuck off.

Cats are known for looking uncooperative in advertising photos. For example, there’s this fluffy cat bed whose occupant is planning your murder. 

This cute lil police officer who just ominously turned his body cam off.

But no cat is as miserable and angry as the model for kitty electro crystal therapy. Electro Crystal Therapy is “a technique pioneered by scientist Harry Oldfield of diagnosing and treating energy imbalances in the body.” Don’t worry. The cat is not being electrocuted. It just wishes it were. 

Electro Crystal Therapy simply sends electricity through the headband to create an energy field that interacts with the energy field of the patient, aka your cat, to stabilize energy imbalances. It’s a dumb hat full of electrified rocks that your cat has to wear for ten to twenty minutes. Anyone who has ever tried to put a Santa hat on their cat for a Christmas card knows how well that shit is going to go down. 

The entire book is filled with vague references to “energy.” You should have energy but not too much, and if it gets out of balance, hoo boy, you better lookout. There’s no explanation of what is being referenced by the extremely vague term “energy,” but then, I wouldn’t expect a lot of specifics from a book that prescribes the color blue to cure diarrhea. We all know if that worked, every Taco Bell on earth would be preventatively painted blue.

The color therapy section fucking rules because it does have to mention halfway through that cats don’t actually see color. 

It’s like the author wrote this entire section, then remembered that cats couldn’t see color and didn’t want to delete it for word count reasons.

The final thing the book tells you to do, which I don’t think your cat will ever let you, is tape random shit to it to make it feel better. Suppose it has a wart? Tape a banana peel to it.

Cat got a wound? Tape some Geranium leaves to it!

Look how sad this cat is. He’s clearly battled his master for the right to his dignity and lost. Now all of the other cats in the neighborhood are going to call him Geranium legs for the rest of his life (which will be mercifully short because his owner taped some leaves to his gaping holes instead of taking him to the vet).

I was going to say the second part of this book is stuff your cat will let you do to it because it is nothing, like placing some amethyst stones nearby as a pain reliever or locking it in a room with a lavender aromatherapy candle to make it less horny. However, this article can’t be five thousand words long, and I want to talk about the many discussions of cat horniness in this book.  

2.) Much Ado About Cat Balls or “Pseudoscience: The XXX Purr Parody!”

There are little side stories in each section called homeopathy case studies. They each contain a fun little anecdote about a cat successfully treated by cat sorcery author, Richard Allport. The longest one is the tale of a cat who was so angry about getting neutered that his hair fell out.

Imagine the seething rage of this terrible cat. It was so angry; its own hair ran away from it. Then it just sniffed a plant and was like, you know what? Balls are overrated. I need a prescription for Staphisagria because that shit must be good.

Richard Allport didn’t always make terrible cats less terrible, though. At least once he took a cat that had become briefly more agreeable thanks to an injury to its balls and stupidly fixed its balls, releasing the terror once again on the world.

It sounds like someone did their civic duty by kicking this cat in the balls, and this nerd went and fixed them. This is not an adorable anecdote about how homeopathy worked. It’s a crime!

Under the subheading of Male Reproductive Issues- Hypersexuality, there’s a little section full of a bunch of different homeopathic remedies for cats I call the “Oh God I’ll do anything just, please make him stop” section. My favorite of these is the suggestion to massage your super horny cat with lavender oil. What!? He’s totally going to think you’re hitting on him!

A LOT of research has obviously gone into this topic. There’s way more about cat balls in this book than cat cancer. Cat cancer gets two pages that basically say, wow, cancer is a bummer. Maybe have your cat sniff some Rosemary? Also, how are its balls?

Please don’t ask Lydia about cat balls on Twitter. 

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Lose Weight Now: VIDEO HYPNOSIS WITH SUBLIMINALS

They cured obesity in 1987 and you fools missed it. I’m, of course, talking about Lose Weight Now: VIDEO HYPNOSIS WITH SUBLIMINALS, a VHS tape from the series Dick Sutphen’s Life-Changing VIDEO HYPNOSIS. For $19.95, viewers could allow Dick into their brain to reprogram them to be thinner in a half hour. It was never harder than that, yet here we are 33 years later inventing larger and larger sizes of pizza to satisfy you. Giant? Screaming Cowboy Giant? Life Raft Party Pie? We Let You Eat The Delivery Car? Come the fuck on, people. Let Dick Sutphen’s bewitching video cassette into your mind so he can help you replace these pizza names with Dick.

The cover Dick chose seems to be a human butt floating in a dream. I like this because it seems like something a sarcastic person would say if someone asked, “Does anyone have any ideas for the cover of this hypnosis weight loss tape?”

The copy on the box is less elegant. The back has 400 words about what hypnosis is, what subliminal messages are, a full transcription of the video itself, and a description of weight loss. Its stated goal is reprogramming your mind to lose weight which sounds unlikely, so the most important thing to establish to your audience is that you’re not fucking crazy. This does not do that. I’m not even sure what the title of this goddamn thing is. Going by AP Stylebook, Dick technically named this: “VIDEO HYPNOSIS Plus Audio & Video Subliminal Suggestions Lose Weight Now Generates an Eyes-Open Altered State of Consciousness. Two Kinds of Hypnosis and Two Kinds of Subliminal Programming Make This The Most Powerful Self-Help Programming In The World.” If it takes you that long to name and 40 times longer to explain an idea no more complicated than “weight loss hypnosis,” my first instinct is to not trust you to rewire my brain.

According to the sprawling wall of text on the back, the viewer will be hypnotized two different ways. One is with mesmerizing instructions and swirling colors. The other is with quick flashes of text commands. And even assuming these techniques are a real thing, I worry Dick doesn’t have the brevity required for subliminal commands. For instance, if he wanted you to “KIDNAP THE MAYOR” he would flash the words “My Trusted Love Companion Has Betrayed Me and Left Me for the Corrupt Mayor, Three Psychic Curses Upon His Penis, Which is to Say I’d Appreciate It if By Force You Brought Him to Me Using Ropes, Alive (Ropes are Like Rocks But Softer and Longer).” Jesus, am I still talking about just the box? I think Dick might already be in my head.

Nothing has ever been as exactly as you expect it as this VHS tape. It is some spiraling stars and shapes with Dick, an untalented voice actor, doing a bland take on psychotherapist cliches. And in true Dick fashion, he opens with several minutes of unnecessary explanation of how the fuck to watch TV. Want to hear his helpful tips! Look at the screen and “feel as you normally do when watching television.” It seems like there can’t possibly be more, but there is. He explains how TV watchers have clear minds fully open to alpha waves and subliminal messages, which is absurd because in 1987 TV watchers had frantic minds wondering what trouble Alf would find himself in next.

I suppose there’s no way to get around this since hypnosis is an exact science, but the first ten minutes of VIDEO HYPNOSIS Plus Audio & Video Subliminal Suggestions Lose Weight Now Generates an Eyes-Open Altered State of Consciousness. Two Kinds of Hypnosis and Two Kinds of Subliminal Programming Make This The Most Powerful Self-Help Programming In The World., which I’ll abbreviate to VHPA&VSSLWNGAE-OASOC.TKOHATKOSPMTTMPS-HPITW. from now on, is nothing more than “relaxing” breathing instructions. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen too many Super Friends fall prey to this, but when I hear a very slow, affected voice commanding me to obey, my first instinct is to attack before they can raise their psychic shields. It’s why I’ve never woken up in the middle of a bank robbery holding bags of cash while my eleven partners whisper, “One of us has left the hive. Find him.”

After 10 minutes of this, I’m starting to worry the pounds might come off too fast. I can’t wait to tell people the secret to weight loss was right there in front of us for 33 years– telling your TV to moan about relaxing until your brain is stupid enough to learn the dangers of food. It makes me wonder if Dick ever got bitter after he saw our sloshing avalanche into a national obesity crisis. Or did he feel responsible? Did he think, “This is all my fault. I should have made the tape that could have fixed all this a more inviting $14.95 (Higher in Canada).”

Thanks to the power of technology and my immunity to, kidnap the mayor, hypnotism, I was able to capture one of the video’s subliminal messages. In VCR Settings font it says “YOU EAT SMALLER PORTIONS AT MEALS” That’s it? Why not hypnotize me into hating ham? Or liking the taste of amphetamines? This is such a waste of unlikely sorcery. One other message is  “YOU NOW CONTROL YOUR WEIGHT,” which seems like the only one I’d need. It also commands “YOU QUIT ALL SNACKING,” but you don’t need a degree in monkey paw studies to see how reprogramming a brain to be incapable of a common, ill-defined thing could lead to danger. If I’m on a hike do I have to bring candles and place settings to eat a granola bar? If it’s 3pm do I need a psychic notary to declare a sandwich a “late lunch?” Is anyone else’s mind screaming? Excuse me, is anyone else’s mind screaming, mind screaming?

Most of the messages are basic diet advice reconditioned for hypnotic commands, and when I say basic it seems virtually impossible to say anything dumber about dieting. If you grunted angrily at a plate of nachos any nutrition scientist would say, “That is the exact level of fitness expertise demonstrated in the hit hypnosis film, VHPA&VSSLWNGAE-OASOC.TKOHATKOSPMTTMPS-HPITW..

Despite owning probably more books and tapes on hypnotic suggestion than any living person, I wouldn’t say it’s my area of expertise. That being said, I don’t think this is good hypnosis. Dick jumps between first and second person a lot, which seem like big differences when your subconscious is planning a mayor kidnapping, excuse me, weight loss, snackless weight loss. He also seems to have no care for keeping a steady pace or tone. He’ll often stop and say, “That’s right!” as if he just blew the viewer’s mind with his idea of wishing really hard to be thin. And one of his subliminal commands is “THIN IS YOUR KEY WORD FOR CONDITIONED RESPONSE.” What the shit does that mean, Dick? That is merely the promise of future menace. What is going to happen to me when I am commanded to “thin,” Dick? And don’t say kidnap the mayor because, how did I get here, the mayor is already in my trunk! I am very thin and the mayor is in my trunk!