Category: LEARNING DAY

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LEARNING DAY

How to Good-bye Depression 🌭

It’s Learning Day, and you are about to learn one man’s anus can contain more chaos than a thousand hurricanes. It is all you will learn. Author Hiroyuki Nishigaki speaks English like Stevie Wonder playing charades and his mind contains only collapsing anuses. How to Good-bye Depression is not language– it’s a mass grave for words and letters. Hiroyuki Nishigaki is so bad at English he spent his first 7 weeks in America trying to buy a blowjob from a DO NOT ENTER sign. Hiroyuki Nishigaki saw the way Taco Bell could create infinite menu items by stacking the same four cat foods in different ways and he wrongly thought, “I under-Stand how now English am. Book write time Supreme.”

Hiroyuki thinks you can cure depression by constricting your anus and denting your navel many times. I don’t know why he thinks this because he is a crazy person before you account for the language barrier. And the language barrier is outrageous. A lifetime of Nintendo could not prepare me to decode these wild guesses at English. Some things are pretty clear, like how he once met a 70-year-old man who, after 20 years of ass kegels, can now “make fuck fuck three times in succession without drawing out.” Other things are less clear like, “Then, he can shoot out his immaterial fiber or third attention to an object, concentrate on it and attain happy lucky feeling.” Those quotes are from the back of the book, but they are exhaustingly reworded dozens -maybe hundreds- of times inside.

Here’s a page from the book maybe discussing the origins of his theory? It’s about a man “out of a gangster” who thought eating in moderation and the color red were the keys to health. He took any job he could get where he could study sex organs and anuses and it seems like Hiroyuki admired him a lot. There’s really no need to read this or any other page of the book– it’s exactly what you expected after you saw the title:

The word “sticky” appears more than it should and never in a way I’d consider reasonable or coherent. The Good-byeing of depression is the main focus of these butt exercises, but without a doubt there’s some kind of pervert component. I think at least some of times he talks about stickiness he’s ejaculated on something, but again, who the fuck could possibly know. 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.

But I do want to talk about reasons it’s deranged other than the obvious. Hiroyuki opens his book with over a hundred pages he copied from a post he made in a depression newsgroup about make butt squishes for sticky happy life. My whimsy is relentless which makes me a treat, but it also makes me worried you think I’m joking. I’m not. The book doesn’t actually start until page 129. This motherfucker hit print on a depression newsgroup thread, did not edit it for shit, and it is half his book. It started with this post:

Hello

How to good-bye depression is how to strengthen your internal organ and how to grow younger. I think it is effective to constrict your anus 100 times in succession and dent your navel100 times in succession everyday.

Hiroyuki Nishigaki

Spirit bless you!

As you can imagine, when Hiroyuki dropped unannounced into an Internet emotional support community with nothing but an untested butt theory and broken English, he was immediately fucked with. Of the several people who responded to him, none of them considered he was anything other than what he was– some weird guy chewing on an office chair with his asshole. They ridiculed him, made jokes about him, and asked sarcastic questions. Hiroyuki, a fucking idiot, or maybe a robot, or maaaaaaaybe a supremely dedicated prankster, responded to all of them as if they really wanted to learn more about “constrict your anus 100 times.” As if there was more to learn. I assure you, after reading 128 pages of Hiroyuki’s responses, there is not. If there are any caveats to the medical procedure of squeezing your butthole, they are not to be found in this, the definitive guide to it. Consider yourself a grand master. Or a sloppy amateur; there is no difference.

The tangle of sarcastic Usenet posts quoting previous posts and stripped of all formatting then mixed with Internet ads do not make for a fascinating read. But it does help clear up a few things that would normally be ambiguous in a book like this. First of all, this guy’s stupid as shit. I’ve been served enough stuffed cat at Mexican restaurants to know the potential pratfalls, even for a great genius, of speaking your non-native language. But if you think it’s a good idea to open your book with 30,000 randomly pasted words making fun of you, it has nothing to do with language. Jump in a time machine and you’re the dumbest fuck in any room from any culture at any point in history.

Second, this lets us know there’s no secret community where Hiroyuki is some respected guru. Sometimes you can’t know with books like these. For instance, an author talking about power crystals may seem crazy and have some things wrong about the rules of reality, but he also might be a multiple Quartzmancer of the Year winner as voted on by Gullible Shaman magazine. Hiroyuki is a lone madman. He just fucking popped into a Usenet group, got dunked on by six sad people for a couple days, and it’s the closest thing to a peer review study his asshole clenching has undergone. There is no butt kegel community where he mentors young sticky boys. He is as he seems– a troubled, horny man with the confidence you simply cannot find in the non-stupid and an imagination that specializes only in sphincters.

Third, it helps clear up the first question you might have had about the book– did he just run a book in Japanese through an inadequate translator? Well, assuming he did that with year 2000 technology, why would he have presented the nonsense version of it for feedback rather than the original? Shouldn’t he have shown his solid, carefully worded anus theory to a Japanese depression forum and then translated their responses? Then it would have been 128 pages of garbled variations of the comment, “What a sensibly described theory on the benefits of anal flexing. It’s fortunate you were taught this novel idea by the old man who crushes ass with a positive attitude and is always just dripping in semen.” 

No, he chose to write this book in English, mashing the words sticky, anus, and compression together in different orders and hoping one of them would unlock the key to happiness. I have no idea if it ever worked, but I like to think Hiroyuki’s receiving the care he needs from mental health professionals while he waits for the right time to bite through his restraints with his butthole, laughing and ejaculating as it digs at incredible speeds toward their new life at the center of the Earth.

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LEARNING DAY

Troom Troom? 🌭

There are many things on the internet that I do not respect, but I do understand — furries, men’s rights advocates, the cam girls that cater to furries and men’s rights advocates. But there aren’t many things on the internet that I do not understand, but still respect. It’s pretty much just The Iron Sheik and Troom Troom. If you haven’t heard of Troom Troom, good. That is a perfectly reasonable way to exist. It is far more unreasonable to recognize the reality of Troom Troom — the space its riddle will occupy in your brain will doubtless show up on an MRI 20 years from now when a grim-faced doctor tells your heartbroken kids he’s finally found the epicenter of your Wacky Dementia. 

Troom Troom is definitely a YouTube channel, but everything else about it is an argument. It might be a craft channel, but one that doesn’t make anything for any purpose and somehow still does so poorly. It could be a prank channel, but from a dimension that only received the setup part of comedy, while the concept of ‘punchlines’ was lost to a quirk of alternate evolution. It’s certainly from the Ukraine… by way of a splintered multiverse where the Breadbasket of Europe lost a war to Lisa Frank.

By far the strangest part of Troom Troom is that every single video has monster traffic, like possibly more viewers than there are people in the world, which means they’re either the only tutor allowed in Russian reeducation camps, or else Troom Troom is deploying a whimsical bot-network for sinister purposes beyond comprehension.

There are definitely too many thumbnails of women sucking on tubes for this to be entirely clear of a fetish thing, but it is in no way delivered upon in any of the videos, so how much of your business model can really rely on tricking horny elves suffering from short-term memory loss?

Even the fanmade Troom Troom Wiki has no idea what they’re actually fans of, and seems reluctant to guess:

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. 

Any screencap you try to pull from a Troom Troom video winds up oversaturated on every level save for one terribly wrong object which somehow stays rendered in disgusting detail.

They’re filmed in this off-kilter color palette that makes everything look both sinister and delicious:

…like a laughably obvious trap laid by fairies which is actually just there to give the illusion of safety so you don’t spot the real trap, already sprung and closing around you.

Troom Troom videos have the budget and cinematography of midgrade pornography but spend all of it on rough-salvaged Saved by the Bell costumes.

Every clip is full of bizarre transitions at strange times, so you’re just constantly being blindsided by wipe effects purchased from the impulse bin at Ikea.

“Illya, here to apply Storkimbop then NO! NO, ILLYA! Storkimbop is NOT Hepflrod. What, is your first day? Is your last day! Ah, here is Yegor, a man who does know. Give me that sweet Storkimbop action my best man!”

The things Troom Troom fails at are made all the stranger by the things it pulls off: Their Disney-obnoxious narrator will execute a flawless translation of some complicated idiom, then swing and miss at basic syntax with the idiot fervor of an America’s Funniest Home Videos toddler playing wiffle ball next to dad-crotch.

Here’s a prank video where they explain all of the steps in passable English, then switch to Strokese at the last minute:

And all of their pranks are just inexplicable vandalism, without even the desire to draw laughter. A Troom Troom prank doesn’t want mirth, it actually shoots for ‘baffled annoyance’ and the weird part is they show that in the videos. You can see every wacky prank victim quietly thinking “is it worth it, to know this person?” and the director does not cut away. You get to watch friendship die in their eyes. 

Prank videos are almost never funny and always infuriating, but usually the prankster doesn’t know that. What are we doing if all parties acknowledge that this is a bad idea to be met with a terrible reception? Are we just openly advocating for minor hatreds? I’d expect that kind of фігня from a Sparkolchim Goomi-shill, but have we learned nothing from the Plague Culls?

Troom Troom videos operate in an entirely separate logic-bubble, full of strange repeating motifs like smuggling food into various situations where food should be allowed anyway, and in ways which ruin both the food and an unrelated product:

This girl chopped all of her pencils off at the top so she could hide a chocolate bar in her pencil box, then took the chocolate out of the pencil box, now tasting like pencil shavings, only to have it immediately confiscated because it still looked like chocolate when she tried to eat it.

This one comes from a video advising children to first craft notebooks that look like food to bring to class, but a key component is that they can’t really look like food, or your teacher won’t allow them.

Then you swap in real food for the notebooks, and…? 

You hope your teacher malfunctions and assumes that the things that did not look like food but now do look like food are still not food, and also it’s cool if you eat notebooks? I’m not sure who this Jenga-brained ruse is for, but if you are starving, Ukrainian children, please cry for help in a less obtuse way. If you’re trying to tell us you have to playfully smuggle food under the Crayola warlords’ noses just honk your trembita twice and we will send aid.

This gif is from a video on how to secretly cover a banana in glitter. This is for nobody. To do nothing. I suppose it could prepare you to fight back if forced to give Captain Planet a blowjob, but there can’t be an audience in the hundreds of millions for that, right? Just mark this ‘for Linka’ and stop turning a blind eye to abusive men in power, Wheeler.

What are you looking at here? An uncooked sausage hidden in a box of diaper wipes. Why are you looking at it? Because there is something terrible going on in the Ukraine but we don’t share enough common metaphors to explain it visually. There are several minutes dedicated to hiding cold sausages in packets of wipes, which sure sounds like a disgusting euphemism, but it’s somehow not. I wasn’t racist against Ukranians in this specific way before, but I guess I am now.

Here we’re trying to smuggle beef jerky and loose Kraft singles inside a file folder like a sad communist Spy Kids. I am terrified at the reality of the situation that necessitated this video, but I can only guess at its nature. Was there some sort of UNICEF mixup that replaced all food donations with craft supplies? I know you’re a resilient and proud people, Ukraine, but your kids don’t have to die licking spare calories out of glue sticks. Just send a polite email with a copy of the invoice and attach a photo of your schoolchildren holding forks and frowning at 6,000 staplers.

There’s another whole subgenre within this inexplicable channel that is somehow entirely out of line with the rest of the videos even though there’s no coherency to any of them, and it is the hardest thing in the world to skim madness from madness. I’m talking, of course, about the unicorn wars:

If I had to guess, they seem to be predicated on the understanding that fursuited unicorns are a huge demographic in Ukraine, and they will only use certain products and eat certain foods that are carefully ruined in a playful way. Also there are actually two types of unicorns, and they are locked in a brutal racial conflict. This is a war that is never explained — that you are simply born into and forced to join, even though you will never understand it, much less meaningfully affect it. That is a stunning metaphor hidden inside this fourth grade Trapper Keeper nightmare, Troom Troom.

While the world’s fundamentally broken aid system clearly cannot save your shattered country, rest assured that we will one day make a meaningful Netflix documentary about the savage dichotomy between your art and your message.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme,Matt Reiley: Our only patron at any level with no criminal food fetishes.

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LEARNING DAY

How to Protect Yourself on a Cruise Vacation 🌭

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real Case: “I made peace with God.”

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

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

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

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

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LEARNING DAY

How to Make Trippy Music 🌭

If there’s one group you never want to make an instructional video for, it’s the cool kids. I know all you want to do is teach 4th Graders what a nollie is, or help Somebody’s Aunt learn to rap about her joint pain, but the cool kids will find you. They’ll tear you apart. They’ll start a whole hot dog themed website about you. You’ll be ridiculed into a legacy of shame, and at best you’ll live out the rest of your days as an ironic folk hero. If living as Tommy Wiseau is your best case scenario, is that really living? Ask Tommy Wiseau. He’ll tell you about his Suicide Hotline Rewards Card. 

So really, this video about making “trippy music” for the kids was doomed even before this internet harbinger showed up:

The eHow logo is like the Nintendo Seal of Quality — 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.

Coincidentally, this is also the first frame in eHow’s popular How To Spot A Narc video. If somebody walks up to your smoke spot and does this, I promise you they are either wearing a wire or else they’re caught in a Freaky Friday body swap. That is your call to make. It might actually be worth it to smoke them out if you’re banking on a mystical body exchange —  sure you might get busted if you’re wrong, but you also might get to make out with somebody’s mom and score points with their daughter after they learn a lesson about how hard each other’s lives really are and switch back. That’s called the Two Birds With One Stoner Maneuver, and it is as rewarding as it is difficult to execute.

Of course her name is Kendall. She’s wearing that shirt; they only sell those to Kendalls. She talks like the Mickey Mouse Club rejected her for being too disingenuous and she says the word “trippy” like it’s an obscure sexual slur. 

Her very first piece of advice is “let’s just improv!” When a person who looks like this says “let’s just improv!” every muscle in your body seizes in anticipated terror. It’s like PTSD from an event you haven’t experienced yet. It’s Deja Trauma. “Let’s just improv!” has never ended in a worthwhile piece of art, it only ends in a lady named some shit like Kendall ‘accidentally’ saying something homophobic, or a guy named some shit like Ashley ‘accidentally’ taking it too far with his one and only character: Captain Boobgrab.

Sure enough Kendall’s improvised tune is just every vowel she knows in order, moaned into her own throat. 

It’s a whalesong from the loneliest whale who is that way for a very good reason. Kendall will break into song with no warning even though it is legally required in every state but North Carolina. Nobody gets through a short chat with Kendall without her going into a Christina Aguilera-style hand scale.

She describes her own vocals as “breathy and really chilled out,” and again there is so much constrained resentment in her voice. From Kendall, even the simple word “fun” sounds like a vile curse. Like so many people have left because of what happens after she says “fun” that she missed a step between cause and effect and now blames the word itself for her cat family.

About halfway through the video, Kendall suggests that all trippy music could use a little Middle Eastern or Indian slant. 

And now we need to pause for a moment.

There’s a unique facial expression that you will only find on bored suburbanites when they’re about to say something racist. It’s a complicated mix of glee and self-hatred; an eagerness tempered by questionable rage from no clear source. They’re going to say it, you can’t stop them from saying it, and they kind of want you to call them out on it — they’ll coast on the adrenaline rush from that argument for weeks. It’s the only thing that will keep them from secretly crushing the class gerbil on Parent-Teacher Night. That expression looks like this:

Kendall, god damn it. Don’t do it. You haven’t earned enough goodwill to make a controversial statement about the Middle East or India, you-

Oh shit! 

You might’ve been expecting Kendall to throw a curveball eventually, so she threw a fucking dart. She literally changed the game on you. She region-locked your expectations by throwing the Middle East out there first, then nailed you with the Native American racism. And look how fast she’s out of there — two seconds of slashing arteries and she’s moved on before you can even register the damage. That is minimalist, brutally executed, pro-caliber racism. Kendall is the John Wick of Applebee’s bigotry.

When pressed to describe the kind of psychedelic image she imagines as she’s playing, Kendall says “maybe a bird flying in the air or something weird.” That’s so far from weird that I worry I’m mocking a head trauma patient, like she got into a motorcycle accident and left her imagination smeared across the 405. I am sorry that Reading Rainbow taunts you now, Kendall, but trying to defunk an entire generation of budding musicians is a disproportionate revenge. Just tell them to wear a helmet and never fall in love with a man named Chain. You could help instead of harm!

I have this theory that the most annoying people use their neck more than the average human, and Kendall is the only proof I ever need of that:

Those tendons are the strongest material known to man, and they’ve only ever been used to put zany emphasis on words like “stanky.” She can bite rebar in half thanks to the exercise she gets by wildly overpronouncing every other phoneme. Because she says the word “Chinese” with such venom, now no ballgag can hold her.

Take us out, Kendall:

“Enjoy making trippy music! I’ve taught you two classical techniques on a violin and why you don’t like people who describe themselves as ‘on a journey,’ goodbye!”

…

Brought to you thanks to a tip from Br At. 

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LEARNING DAY

The Practical Guide to Ear Candling

Ear candling is precisely, exactly what it sounds like without any caveats. It’s an activity a three-year-old would invent if you asked them to draw “ear candling.” I still feel like I have to say it, though: it’s the ancient science of sticking a candle in someone’s ear. How can you do it yourself? I just fucking told you: stick a candle in someone’s ear. But for those who want to make it a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit more complicated, let’s look at The Practical Guide to Ear Candling (6th Edition(!)).

The “””science“”” behind ear candling is this: hot smoke goes into your skull through your ear hole and it heals you, physically and spiritually. The author of this book doesn’t quite know how it works, and in fact seems terrified of saying anything specific enough to make him liable for injuries. Every page praises the benefits of this historical ear magic invented by nerd Indians and then immediately adds something like, “But, you know, remember: this has only been tested on mummies and you should check with a doctor before you scorch half your face off with authentic Wally’s brand ear products.”

Oh yeah, I should mention the author sells ear candles and a wide array of snake oils you can rub on your ear before and after you put a lit candle in there. This is essentially a 64 page advertisement and liability waiver with a touch of dingbat witchcraft, and I think I accidentally just described every metaphysical book ever written. In your face, wizards.

As the introduction says, The Ears May Hold More Mysteries Than We Imagine… but we aren’t saying they do and you can’t prove in court we specifically told you to put something called an “ear candle” into your ear and light it. This activity is for “relaxing, soothing, and entertaining” only, and won’t cure any of these ailments these legends claim they cure. Weirdly, the author keeps downplaying the magical power of ear candles while growing more and more certain in the mystic protection of his legal disclaimers. He is one step ahead of any potential lawsuit. In fact, if you surrounded a lawyer with pages from Practical Guide to Ear Candling, they would be trapped in an endless dance until a scorch-faced virgin broke the circle.

The book can’t even get through the first page of THE BASICS OF EAR CANDLING without debunking the basics of ear candling. These dorks have been melting candles on each other for generations and it’s only recently they considered all this wax they kept finding came from the candles and not a vacuum spell they were somehow casting on ears? This feels like opening up a puppet show by telling the audience how recent science has proven all your talking puppy dogs are mainly socks on your hands. How dumb is your hobby’s community that this was worth saying out loud, and why would you shatter such a necessary fiction for it to function? No offense to your ancestors, but if thousands of years of their ancient healing art can get dismissed by knowing what candles are, maybe they were all stupid and wrong?

The traditional way to ear candle, the one the author admits does nothing and you should never try, involves laying your victim on their side and using a pie tray to keep most of the ash and wax from falling into their head. But since none of this matters, you can go ahead and sit upright. You could even stay home without putting shit in your ears. This book cannot stress this enough– only a few guys in cave paintings have any idea what this does or why it exists. It’s entirely possible australopithecus drew cartoons where people fucked each other in the ear and this entire practice is a wildly misinterpreted take on them.

So after ten pages of explaining this “home remedy” only adds wax to your ear, it says slowly burning two to three candles into a sitting persons’ skull is “just as effective.” Effective at goddamn what? This is indentical to telling a husband having sex with a rotisserie chicken it will help his marriage just as well if he fucks it wearing a 1-900-HOTDOG headband. Neither one are going to clean out his ears, and they both make for less embarrassing photographs than ear candling. People getting their picture taken during ear candling look like they’re getting their brain basted at Sport Clips.

I swear to God this inspirational quote about learning to fly came right after the author again explained how dangerous and pointless this hobby is along with a plug for Wally’s brand “ear oil.” It’s philosophically as far from flying as any activity has ever been. If you were a raccoon delicately eating around the semen on a discarded rotisserie chicken, it would make more sense for someone to recite quotes to you about soaring beyond the confines of your fear.

I mentioned this is a 64 page book, but there is less than a page worth of actual material. They keep rewording the candling process, which I swear I’m not simplifying, and then lowering your expectations, which I swear can always get lower. Repetition can be a helpful learning tool, but this is like watching a sick goldfish discover diarrhea 128 different times.

The “Anecdotes” chapter is a sad, whimpering collection of evidence no one is expected to believe. Make-believe individuals make vague, third-hand claims about the benefits of ear candling after a disclaimer saying they’re all probably lying. This author is way too sheepish to be a grifter. They’re like a breezy heiress who never really wanted to be stuck with her dead dad’s penis enlargement business.

This ear candler is not an expert on anything including this, their useless and ineffective life’s work. The one thing they should be good at is killing time while they wait for candles to burn down to their client’s head, but the chapter “During Candling” is two pages long and only includes a single activity idea: face massage. So if you pursue a life of professional ear candling and small talk isn’t working out and you’ve already exhausted all 7 seconds of the full history of this ancient practice, simply rub your client’s face for the remaining three to four hours. Or hell, why not open plastic bags of cabbage burps or hand them drawings of local cat buttholes? Nobody is ever going to say, “This wax guru held a spirit candle to my ear for most of the day, and then things got weird.”

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LEARNING DAY

The UFO Strangers Coloring Book

The 1970s were worried about a lot of things: smog, the fragile afro integrity of the average white man, that this cocaine high might not last forever no matter how true it sounds when you scream it — but mostly it was aliens. Back in the ‘70s, aliens weren’t a fun concept to explore in fiction: They were very real magical sky rapists who would probe you at the slightest provocation. It was like living under Zeus’s rule. So parents needed a way to warn their spawn about the extraterrestrial menace, and nothing teaches you to deal with a threat like doing art about it, which is why every single one of Steven Seagal’s movies are about male impotence, except for On Deadly Ground, which is about the crippling fear that eskimos might discover your male impotence. 

That’s why we have UFO SPACE STRANGERS: A COLORING BOOK — a manual that teaches children to both fear the unknown and stay within the lines. If it also featured a dangerous gay character, this one book would be absolutely everything the 1950s wished they could tell the 1970s, but never knew how to say.

I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be a Mustang 2. I’m absolutely certain that couple is going to find out whether or not they secretly enjoy probing, because there is zero chance they’re outrunning an alien menace in a Mustang 2. You can’t even outrun the regret of buying a Mustang 2 in a Mustang 2.

“True accounts of horror from people who have lost touch with reality” is a bold theme for a coloring book. I’ll never forget my favorite children’s activity collection: Ted Kaczynski’s What The Government Does To Your Testicles. The ending of every maze just emptied out right into the start, and all of the word jumbles contained coded messages to something called The Shockers. The last page was just the word “narc” over and over again in decreasingly legible scrawl. This is the keystone to my whole personality — this one bit of information just snaps everything into place. It was in my wedding vows. I’m trusting you not to abuse it even as I realize how hilarious that sounds.

UFO STRANGERS will never have that kind of social impact. But it certainly doesn’t skirt around the concept of lasting psychological damage. Its first story is about a boy wandering alone on a dark rainy night when he meets a faceless stranger in a raincoat, and nobody considers whether or not he’s blocking trauma. They just gasp “aliens!” then ring up the coloring book industry to tell them they got a hot scoop.

Seriously, somebody listen to the words little Raymond isn’t saying.

I’m not skipping over Janine’s thrilling backstory. She makes no prior appearance in this story, then leaps into frame screaming “IT’S ME… JANINE!” and absolutely demolishes this creature that she has never seen before, and wasn’t given a single moment to prepare for. No sooner does she accept the reality of the thing than she is whipping rocks at it. Janine’s boogeyman lives in a shelter for battered monsters. Janine believed in climate change on the same day she firebombed a gas station. Santa Claus came to Janine’s house one time. One time. 

I don’t care how freeballin’ the 1970s were, “color in the trenchcoat monster’s bwang” is a highly illegal request to make of a child.

Again: I did not cut the gritty prologue introducing these crack detectives. This is their first appearance. We jump straight from Janine vs. Predator to Officer Dickcap screaming for Officer Cockhat to shut the fuck up about policework for a second and examine this majestic ponderosa. 

For some reason our coloring book has a host, which is a confusing revelation at any point, but UFO STRANGERS springs it on us halfway through, and then never again. Are you trying to train children to accept the sudden, mysterious presence of carnival workers? Because that’s a good way to have one fewer children and one more pressing unanswered question.

Every adult woman in this coloring book has the same blank 1000-yard stare:

It’s like they’re witnessing the sudden, inexplicable materialization of an unkind god, and his radiance has only just faded enough for them to see that he’s not wearing pants.

Not destroy us like that, Angela, get your mind out of the gutter.

“I’m just fucking garbage at everything I try, Jim. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t know why I do anything at all. I don’t know why I don’t just throw myself in a dumpster and wait to die, Jim.”

Here, children, color the backs of yokels staring at nothing — your imagination is a curse and it must be forcibly atrophied. Hope you have plenty of Rustbelt Brown, and Laid-off Millworker Denim Blue!

Life was fucking crazy before cameras were widespread, you just had no clue how to prove anything to anybody. “These sketches prove it! I saw the mighty sasquatch! I wrestled it into submission! I made beautiful love to it! Examine the sketches — they cannot lie! G-get your hands off me! The sketches! THE SKETC-”

This artist was given an assignment to draw 50 pages of ‘something about aliens’ — anything at all about aliens — and he penned 36 pages of yokels staring into empty fields and dim men transfixed by weather balloons. The children are so disappointed that they’ve gone colorblind out of sheer protest, but god damn if I don’t admire this artist’s unflinching commitment to science.

Only one page has actually been colored in this entire book, and it is the saddest thing I have ever seen. This child had two crayons and a dirty bic. It is no wonder they put prison stripes on the man’s suit; it’s the only clothes they’ve ever owned.

Jesus Christ, look at how utterly splintered little Martin’s world just became. Look how much he loves it. 

“DEATH RAYS WOW WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT.”

Martin is gone. None of these words are registering with him. He is lost to the world of man. He stares at the radio but does not hear the sounds it plays; he only sees transistors that could be repurposed for rays of death. 

I have never seen a face like that before in my life, but I instantly recognize it as the birth of a momentous evil. This is the origin story of the world’s first supervillian. Time travelers from the future keep coming back to this very second with lasers in their hands and murder in their hearts and none of them ever return. This endless stream of dead men from nowhen is why Taco Bell never runs out of meat. Ironically, it is their laser-batteries which fuel the thresher that Future Martin feeds their children into. Fate is an ouroboros, an idiot-worm forever devouring itself, and there is no hero that can sav-