Category: PUNCHING DAY

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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Dick Jones’ Robo-Crap 🌭

If you took a sentient bag of mescaline to Cirque Du Soleil, its Yelp review would be the Robocop screenplay. A film willed into existence by Paul Verhoeven, a gasoline-blooded sex wizard masquerading as a movie director, Robocop grabbed Reagan-era policies by the throat and chokeslammed it into nitrous dust. It then spat that dust into our eyes like Rick Flair with a handful of cheat powder, and the result blinded us with such radical bodacity that 30 years later an alarming number of people still take the movie at face value.

Don’t get me wrong – Robocop is objectively awesome. I endorse all movies that combine disparate nouns with the word “cop,” be it your Kindergarten Cops or your Wolfcops or your Beverly Hills Cops, or even your One Good Cops. And of all those films, Robocop is the Robocop-est. But Robocop is, very pointedly, a dystopian nightmare satirizing the privatization of social services, taking the recklessly excessive policies of Reagan’s 80s to their most extreme conclusions. Remember when they remade Robocop in the early 2010s as a glossily chaste action figure commercial with some light commentary about the pitfalls of drone warfare? If they’d just waited a few more years until 2021, when America has reached the point where the media is unironically suggesting that Amazon and Facebook should be allowed to join the United Nations, a reboot would’ve practically written itself. That sentence I just typed is indistinguishable from any of Robocop’s goofily dystopic in-universe commercials trying to sell us performance health care on a pre-approved line of credit. The fact that it was dressed up as a story about a metal man dispensing “justice” the only way he knows how – with psychotic violence – was the spoonful of sugar to help us choke that medicine down.

Anyway, I bring all of that up because today I want to talk about Robocop. I always want to talk about Robocop. I cry out his name in my sleep, so insatiable is my need to keep his mechanical spirit alive in the hearts and minds of all Robogod’s children. But today, on this blessed Punching Day, I specifically want to talk about Dick Jones, the testicle-crushing president of Omni Consumer Products. 

That’s not even a completely accurate description of Dick Jones. Dick Jones doesn’t crush his rivals’ testicles so much as flatten their testicles like a prom corsage in a textbook about the advantages of beating children that he stole from a prison library and display the book in a glass casket as a warning to future disrespectful scrotums.

Dick Jones is the villain of Robocop, a perfect distillation of 1980s corporate culture right down to his smart wingtips. He’s Marvel Comics’ the Kingpin on a juice diet. He’s the last boss of Final Fight sprung to glorious life. Dick Jones would drown Gordon Gekko in a bathtub. He would feed Patrick Bateman’s thumbs to an ATM machine. Dick Jones would show up three hours late to a dinner with Tony Montana and then order off-menu for the whole table, and Tony wouldn’t say shit.

Perpetually sporting tailored suits and a veneered sneer, Dick Jones doesn’t give one piston-legged fuck about anything but collecting all of the money in the universe. He spearheaded OCP’s acquisition of Detroit’s police force, primarily to use as a staging ground for his Tyrannosaurus mandroid ED-209. ED-209 is a tank with feet, the kind of thing a kid doodles in the back of a police car. It’s an avatar of violent whimsy. It has the vibes of a murderer working on his standup routine. It’s like a Teddy Ruxpin with bloodshot eyes. If Hasbro built a razor-beaked Furby that only spoke German, Dick Jones would’ve deputized it as a school resource officer, and it would be ED-209’s partner. What I’m getting at is that ED-209 is the absolute last thing you’d ever want to put into contact with the general public, and Dick Jones wants it to be a policeman. It’s the public safety equivalent of giving every elementary school student a flesh-bound book and a ceremonial dagger. The population of the city is about to be dramatically reduced, and in an historic fashion.

We’re introduced to Dick Jones when he brings ED-209 to work like a therapy dog and it kills someone in front of his boss. Just absolutely obliterates a junior executive in the middle of a quarterly strategy meeting. Slams that fucker into meat confetti with bullets the size of Pringles cans. And this is the robot Dick Jones built to ticket unruly motorists and guide children through crosswalks. Everyone in the meeting reacts as if the robot malfunctioned, but if you ask me, nothing could be further from the truth. Based on everything we come to learn about Dick Jones, that robot was functioning as designed. Dick Jones didn’t accidentally build ED-209 to massacre people for littering or breaking curfew; he built that shit on purpose because that’s what he thinks about everyone who isn’t Dick Jones. He’s every auto executive who griped about having to do a product recall simply because a few lousy jagoffs got decapitated by the automatic seatbelts.

Dick Jones is such a nail-shitting bastard that balding reptilian crime boss Clarence Boddicker screams his name into Robocop’s face to avoid getting policed to death. Clarence Boddicker, a man who graphically executes his fellow human beings like a Ghostbuster but for people, invokes the name of Dick Jones in his moment of greatest terror. That’s the kind of letter of recommendation I wish my guidance counselor had written for me.

But what really seals the deal for me is the scene in which Dick Jones plans a man’s murder while finishing a shit. Just muscling out the tail of a monster dooker while paging Clarence Boddicker a coworker’s home address.

You see, after ED-209 turned an employee into bone paste during a budget meeting, OCP defunded Dick Jones’ murder bot project and turned to Bob Morton, an up-and-coming executive with a dream of fusing mangled dead flesh with remorseless metal and circuitry to create The Future of Law Enforcement™. Morton swoops in to pitch his Robocop program and becomes the new star of OCP, stealing Dick Jones’ thunder. If anything I’ve written up to this point has been coherent, I apologize, but what should’ve been clear is the fact that stealing Dick Jones’ thunder is the last thing you should ever do. That’s like calling an Uber Pool to take you to Hell. Both the journey and the destination are an eternity of suffering.

The Robocop program is a big success, and Bob Morton becomes the talk of the town. OCP promotes him to executive vice president, which puts him in prime position to come gunning for Dick Jones’ job, and if you aren’t screaming “Bob Morton, no!” at your screen by this point then I have failed at my duty of spreading the gospel of Dick Jones.

Like Icarus before him, Bob Morton flies too close to the sun, and the sun in this case is the OCP executive lounge. Dick Jones is busily baking a considerable tube loaf loaded with the bones of previous Bob Mortons when Bob Morton comes whirling through the door in a cloud of hubris. 

Chatting with a fellow executive, tragically unaware of the extremely occupied stall behind them, Bob Morton brushes off his friend’s advice to watch his ass for Dick Jones and breezily calls Dick Jones a pussy. I’ve sat through approximately 127 viewings of Robocop, and I gasp every single time.

Does Dick Jones come harrumphing out of the bathroom stall, crabbily tugging up his trousers with a face full of bluster to confront Bob Morton? Absolutely not. Come on. This is Dick Jones we’re talking about. Dick Jones patiently lets Bob Morton continue to hang himself while quietly finishing his shit.

The rest of the executives in the lounge correctly panic and flee as soon as the disparaging wind of Bob Morton’s words pass through his lips, so extreme is their fear. It’s unclear whether they saw Dick Jones enter the stall or if they simply recognized the scent of his turds, which we can only assume must be rhinocerotic in both size and odor. He’s painted the room with the scent of his butt-shouts, is what I’m getting at, so Bob Morton is making his casual declaration of war against Dick Jones while breathing the warm air from Dick Jones’ asshole. He’s unwittingly signing his own warrant while smelling the farts of his destructor.

When Dick Jones finally emerges from the stall, revealing himself to Bob Morton and his friend, the friend pisses all over the front of his pants and rushes out of the executive lounge. This is both a result of his frantic hurry to escape, and a cunning display of fealty. Indeed, had Bob Morton also peed on himself, he might have avoided Dick Jones’ wrath. With the patience of geologic time, Dick Jones corners Bob Morton in his executive fart chamber and informs him that he has just fucked up big time. I don’t want to belabor the robopoint, but it truly cannot be overstated that Dick Jones delivers the prophecy of Bob Morton’s doom five feet away from a magnificent pile of his own shit. That’s like serving your partner divorce papers at Disney World. It’s a flex of pure cruelty, like the Ultimate Warrior in inquisitor’s robes.

Bob Morton struggles to recover and stand his ground, but it’s far too late. Dick Jones holds grudges like a mummy curse. In a final display of ultimate power, Dick Jones grabs Bob Morton by the skull and yanks his head back, to maximize his intake of the shitty breeze wafting through the executive lounge. “Suck my farts,” Dick Jones all but hisses. “Breathe in the rich scent of stained oak and dead horses that is your demise. My ass belches beckon you to the abyss.”

The very next day, Bob Morton is trying to forget the terror of that assy encounter by throwing himself a cocaine party with some attractive young models in his den, which has five (5) TVs. But Dick Jones is not a man who rests on his laurels. He sends Clarence Boddicker to murder Bob Morton with a lethal combination of gunfire, hand grenades, and a sassy DVD message. Clarence Boddicker chases the models out by uttering, “Bitches leave,” but with the subtle understanding that he is also speaking to Bob Morton’s immortal soul; a moment immortalized in the official Spanish lobby cards:

He then blasts Bob Morton’s legs into a divergent timeline wherein Biff Tannen becomes president and pops the DVD into Bob Morton’s admittedly impressive entertainment center. Dick Jones appears on all five televisions to erase what little remains of Bob Morton’s dignity with one savage final windmill dunk, the gist of which is, “Yesterday, you smelled my shit. Today, you’re gonna eat it.” 

Clarence Boddicker then leaves a grenade on Bob Morton’s coffee table next to the cocaine and walks out, gently closing the front door behind him, which is possibly my favorite detail in the entire film.

Bob Morton claws feebly at the grenade as Dick Jones’ prerecorded roast continues to play, but only succeeds in knocking the bomb out of reach before it finally explodes. Bob Morton’s final thought before being catapulted out of this world is, “I’m about to be murdered by a guy who forced me to smell the colossal dump he took at work yesterday.”

That’s what happens when you call Dick Jones a pussy, Bob.

Tom Reimann runs the Gamefully Unemployed podcast and streaming network with David Bell. He also writes for Some More News, and is allegedly a Senior Editor at Collider.

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Josh S, who teaches a killer business seminar on how to take a Dick Jones Power Crap.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: MacGyver Fights Ants 🌭

I know it’s not Reflecting Day here at 1900🌭, but like to talk about something very emotional anyway. It’s an important event from 1985 that changed everything we knew about telev– nay, art. You might be thinking, “This is a fun bit where he’s leading to something that WASN’T an earth-shattering super-event.” And now you might be thinking, “I was wrong! I was so fucking wrong! The setup was sincere! This is real!” Because I’m talking about the spectacular Season 1, Episode 6 of MacGyver… “Trumbo’s World!” The one where he fights ants!

The episode opens with MacGyver sneaking into a Spanish paramilitary camp to rescue a geologist. He creates a disguise by climbing a tree and improvising a fishing pole to steal one of their towels. The show is remembered for the amazing gadgets created from trash, but MacGyver solved a lot of problems by just taking off his clothes and hoping for the best. It’s a childhood lesson I still use to this day, yum.

The other thing worth remembering about MacGyver is that it was a full hour show and they had a lot of time to fill between diet soda grenades and power washer jetpacks. So he wanders through the enemy camp, eats some of their soup, and while a slow synthesizer remix of the show’s theme song plays, he complains it’s not as good as his mother’s Basque stew, as she experimented with many international soups. Not a word of that is an exaggeration. One of the producers said, “Get me ten minutes of shirtless MacGyver! I don’t care what you have to do! Well, I mean, don’t do something like a voiceover where he tells a childhood soup story or anyt– hello? Are you still? He hung up. Ahh, he probably heard most of that.”

Anyway, the geologist doesn’t even know why she was kidnapped, but MacGyver suggests maybe this Spanish militia thought she was a physicist and she could build them an atom bomb? No more thought is given to this extended excuse for shirtless MacGyver. He gives two completely contradictory and insane answers to questions no one asked to explain something no one needed a reason for. No one seeing shirtless MacGyver having a raft chase with a group of Basque secessionists would ever say, “Hold on, a second. I need a WHOLE LOT OF SHAKY BACKSTORY TO EXPLAIN THIS.” For instance, during the raft chase MacGyver stops, pulls out a roll of barbed wire, strings it across the river, and America recently celebrated 36 straight years of no one caring where MacGyver got that shit.

MacGyver and the geologist escaped by heating up the camp’s shower and running away while everyone laughed at the scalded guy. And it didn’t work. Everyone saw them run away. MacGyver had to wait while a panicked woman rappelled down a cliff for the first time and men a few yards behind shot at him with rifles. They missed at him for minutes. Then he rappelled through the bullets himself and covered his exit by lighting their rope on fire, which oh yeah, I should mention the geologist was being kept in a prison cell with a can of gasoline and a rope. And this amazing sequence of lucky events only bought them another two seconds because each of the bad guys had their own rope.

Please note MacGyver was sent here. He wasn’t part of this woman’s “geology mission” and forced to throw together some desperate escape. This was a plan. Some private security firm said, “This is a delicate rescue op in Spain, so we’ll have to send one man, nude. Preferably experienced in soup. Barbed wire and gasoline must be procured on-site.” He should have been dead hundreds of times over. If you wanted to remarket this as a comedy about a guy who can’t die, you would not have to change a single thing. And I worried this cold open might have used up all of MacGyver’s luck because the rest of this episode is him fucking everything up and watching his friends get eaten by ants.

MacGyver is called to the Amazon by his friend Charlie who says he has “a very strange problem.” That’s all MacGyver needs to hear.

The problem that was too sensitive to explain over the phone or letter is this: a dozen species of birds have been seen in flight. “Desperate flight,” in fact. Charlie thinks they’re running from something in the heart of the rainforest. That’s the whole thing. No one has gone into the jungle and never come back. There were no legends or unexplained noises. You know everything.

But instead of saying, “Motherfucker, I’ve been on a plane for 23 hours, a boat for 72, and I paid two hundred bucks for a night in a half star hotel and you’re telling me this is because you want to see what scared, you think, several birds,” MacGyver thinks for a moment and goes, “Here be tigers and unknown beasts.“

Charlie’s response is only, “Exactly.” Our expedition is underway!

This is only the sixth episode of MacGyver ever and already the writers seem to be specifically saying “FUCK YOU” to anyone who cares how MacGyver gets into all these hijinx. It’s like someone told them they weren’t allowed to just start the episode with MacGyver in a giant anthill with a handful of thumbtacks and writing this scene was their temper tantrum.

They don’t mention how MacGyver and Charlie know each other, but it doesn’t seem to be from adventuring. Charlie is useless. He’s a fussy scientist with no leash on his childlike sense of wonder and no sense of danger. Even before you find out the thing that scared the birds was a big colony of ants, you’d look at Charlie and say, “This whiny flight-of-fancy guy is going to get eaten by ants before the end of Act 2.”

The two best friends get a boat, but can’t find an “Indian guide.” Apparently you can send MacGyver after a group of heavily-armed terrorists with his nipples and nothing else, but he can’t figure out how to walk the opposite direction of birds in the woods. They get a lead on a villainous chocolate plantation owner who is notorious for attempted murder and also does not offer a native guide service. They call him Trumbo, and MacGyver is like, “Trumbo sounds like a guy who can help.” They boat there and they are immediately fired upon with guns and arrows.

Sure enough, Trumbo, the evil slave owner holding them at gunpoint, who does not run a jungle tour company, can’t supply them with a guide. MacGyver offers to fix his irrigation pump as a trade, Trumbo says no, but MacGyver fixes it anyway. It almost feels like the script said, “EXT or INT. SOME TIME OF DAY. Random, unrelated things and conversations TBD happen between the engineering bits and fist fights.”

MacGyver is so good at fixing the pump that Trumbo offers him a job, but he turns him down. MacGyver tries to explain how slavery is bad, and Trumbo explains that’s not what is happening. He brags about how good he is at the noble act of cutting down the rainforest and turning it into cocoa plantation. It’s weird. If you wanted to remarket this as a comedy about an action show being meddled with by sinister corporate sponsors, you wouldn’t have to change a thing. Trumbo might as well have turned to camera and said, “MacGyver, you and I are like the heroes at Nestle, makers of the new Mochablast Jiggle Chillers, fighting courageously for freedom. Every day, that great company brings us closer to a world with fully deregulated clearcutting and a return to ownable humans.”

Anyway, the cocoa baron who shot at MacGyver for rowboating near his plantation is the good guy. And the only reason he isn’t offering them a guide is because he won’t risk any of his men on a spooky mystery. So he’ll go himself.

So now the main bad guy has joined our heroes and they finally set off to solve The Mystery Of Some Maybe Scared Birds. But they soon find out it’s more serious than that when they come across a new piece of the puzzle. Charlie says, “WHAT? What could possibly cause panic in both birds and small ground animals!?” Here’s what he was looking at:

This is not a wild animal stampede. This is a fuzzy buddy messaround. This is a Friendship Falls Gumdrop Festival’s 80th Annual Gerbil Race. And look, I don’t know what the logistics were for setting up a hamster stampede for a union TV production in 1985, but I do know this is adorable and hilarious.

The dream team of bird, and now small ground animal, investigators make a plan to hike three kilometers to a native village Trumbo knows about. But MacGyver stops them. He’s noticed one more subtle clue– a terrible screeching coming from nearby. He walks toward it and sees a canyon filled with the show’s secret real main villain: ants. “An eating machine. Two miles wide and ten miles long,” he says. Then the show, for the first of many times, cuts to random ant footage from at least three different ancient nature documentaries. Which only makes their choice to film seven furry best friends having a little race even stranger. The producers don’t care about the shots matching, so they could have cut to stock footage of an actual stampede!

Anyway, they now hear human screams over the sound of the ant screams so they head over to the village. It’s more like ten feet away than three kilometers, but MacGyver writers would like to remind me to fucking get over myself and realize we’re not here to make goddamn maps.

At the village, a group of native caricatures are just getting their asses kicked by ants. They are a pre-pants civilization absolutely at the mercy of insect swarm attacks. And while they bash an ocean of ants with sticks and writhe on the ground in itchiness, they leave one of their women for dead under a canoe.

Like her people, Charlie abandons the canoe woman and starts taking pictures of ants. He can’t believe it. Ants! Real ants! He takes dozens of extreme closeups of ant faces to really communicate the size of their colony, never believing it for a second. Amazing! Ants! It was ants all along! The colony swarms him, mindlessly unaware of their luck in finding meat too excited about ants to move away from ants.

MacGyver and Trumbo try to rescue the woman from the canoe, but two men and half a woman are no match for a canoe. Three men might be, but Charlie is too busy having never fucking seen anything like these ants. MacGyver finally gets his attention, and instead of helping, he hands a stick to MacGyver and runs back for more antwatching. This woman has never laid eyes on an American before, but after watching a slave owner, a hunk, and a fucking idiot make themselves at home in her ancestral lands and let her die from an easily preventable death, she’s already an expert.

Let’s check in with Charlie.

He’s not doing great. Charlie is what ant soldiers call “an easy day at work.”

MacGyver’s homemade canoe winch works, and they pull the woman to safety as Charlie is off somewhere shrieking for help. And here’s where we seriously almost lost Richard Dean Anderson. He’s an athletic actor who does a lot of his own stunt work, but if the stunt coordinator told him what was going to happen when a goddamn bamboo spear uncoils with the force of a full canoe, Richard forgot about it after the cameras started rolling. Look at that! They were one inch away from having to replace most of their lead actor’s head! Why did this stick prop come to a deadly point at all? And why was the pointy end on the, surprise, much longer half? Did the ants do this!?

Speaking of, the ants are tearing this village up and MacGyver has no ideas. He saw these primitive tribesmen rolling around and clubbing the ground and thought, “Well, I can’t improve on this.”

Let’s check in on Charlie again.

He’s fucking dead. Devoured to the hat by ordinary ants right in front of his best friend and world’s greatest rescue hero, MacGyver. You can’t screw up harder than that. This is like opening a book on cat safety and getting mauled to death by a kitten while sharing an elevator with celebrity bad boy of cat training, Jackson Galaxy. So MacGyver has let the quest giver die, teamed up with the villainous baron, and the village he tried to rescue has been wiped off the map by insects. It’s over. There’s nothing left to save. In only his sixth episode, MacGyver has suffered the greatest loss in syndicated television history. The end.

No. There are thirty fucking minutes of show left.

They go back to Trumbo’s lawless chocolate mine for a last stand against this unstoppable force of nature. Not to rescue anyone, because all the slaves are leaving. By the way, Trumbo responds to this by opening fire on them and would have murdered them all if MacGyver hadn’t pulled him off his horse and kicked his ass. In any piece of media other than this very specific episode of MacGyver, Trumbo would be a nefarious scoundrel who must be stopped at any cost. Here, MacGyver agrees to stick around and help him defeat the ants and save his plantation! Why, you ask? Goddamn it, it’s like you haven’t been listening at all. The writers don’t care! Before Nestle’s PR guy came in with notes, the first draft of this episode opened with MacGyver getting sentenced to execution by combat arena by the Snake Council of The Moon.

Trumbo and MacGyver hatch an unlikely plan to create tiny rivers around the plantation. Unfortunately, these rivers need to be held open by a wheel located directly in the path of the ants. This job was given to the only worker to stay behind, some guy named Luis. If MacGyver could have rigged something to hold the wheel in place that wasn’t made out of delicious human ant food, he didn’t bother. And more bad news for the abandoned slave fields: the ants accidentally invent boats.

The little rivers get smaller and smaller while MacGyver and Trumbo wonder why that darn Luis isn’t keeping the water flowing. See if you can guess what happened!

You were wrong! Luis was, get this, eaten by the ants!

Trumbo and the writers seem to think Luis died a hero, but he died for nothing and from not walking to a location without hungry bugs. MacGyver has now watched 66% of the named characters in this episode get swallowed by ants, so he moves onto Plan B: homemade flamethrower! This lasts about two seconds and doesn’t work, so it’s onto Last Resort: blowing up the dam and destroying the entire plantation he (for whatever reason (fuck you)) has sworn to protect.

AAAAAIIIEEEEEE! SHIT! FUCK! IT DOES NOT GO WELL!

In his panic, MacGyver throws off his makeshift bee suit and blows the dam up while he’s still right in front of it. He is only barely not killed while stock footage of a flood washes away everything the noble Trumbo built on the backs of local natives displaced by his deforestation. Every good guy is dead! The only survivor was the main bad guy whose sadness farm MacGyver tried to save and failed! The end!

There’s nothing else! MacGyver blew it, the end!

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: American Police Jiu-Jitsu 🌭

The art of turning a man’s brain off with your hands was perfected in 1930 by Seattle patrolman Svend Jens “Jorgy” Jorgensen. If you’re crime, you already know him as your greatest enemy, the author of AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU.

Looking at the drawing on the cover, you might think, “That sad cop won a medium amount of medals.” You idiot fool. “Jorgy” was so decorated he had to tailor a sleeping bag to hold them all, and I don’t think I’m kidding. When you open the book, there’s a photo of him dressed as what can only be described as a cranky award tube. Just a meat-faced caterpillar of recognition. And this is also unusual: right after his name he lists his address in case you’re looking to get fucked up.

Google tells me that today, 515 3rd Ave in Seattle is the address of a housing non-profit. It probably wasn’t in 1930, but try to imagine my delight when I picked up a cop karate book, saw the author was dressed like a class ring catalog, realized it was about insane karate chops for defeating guns, and then found out it was published from a homeless shelter. That’s not a series of happy coincidences– that’s a coded message from my future self telling me we will one day have a vintage printing press, a time machine, and best of all, nothing very important to do.

Before we begin learning AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU, we need to take some safety precautions.

“Jorgy” says our human experiments may suffer permanent injuries if we don’t follow his instructions to the letter, which seems reasonable until you find out every move is described with three photos and half a page of vague text. He doesn’t exactly give you a list of detailed tactics and safety precautions when he takes you from “certain death” to “holding a human heart” in three pictures. Luckily, by the end of the book I think I’ll have made a case for how there’s no safer place to be in the world than on the receiving end of AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU.

Oh, one more thing to consider before we begin:

It’s a little bit safer if you take the bullets out of your gun before your human experiment points it at you. Or better yet, find one of your old guns that probably doesn’t shoot anymore. Of course, this will make you a little less safe if you and your partner are attacked during jiu-jitsu practice, so to compromise let’s use your fourth or fifth best gun with some bullets. Okay, we’re ready to do this:

Svend starts with a classic stabbing defense. First, the easy part: you get stabbed. Second, karate chop the inside wrist of their stabbing arm.  This will help defl– wait, immediately paralyze that hand!? Ha ha okay, Svend. Maybe! Just in case, use your other hand to slap their chin which should create spa– whoa, knock Mr. Knife Man completely out!? How? Is this like a polio thing? Were human nervous systems different in 1930? If this was how you defeated them, shouldn’t our grandparents have died during their first mistimed handshake? How did their delicate skeletons survive the invention of horse?

Let’s lower the stakes a little bit. Say, for instance, a good friend is choking you:

Getting out of a choke hold is simple once you know how. First, you break out of the choke hold. Then you kick that fucker in the ass. I have no notes on this one; I think it’s great.

Let’s build on what we know to get out of a situation a bit more complicated: GUN TO YOUR HEAD.

Officer Jorgensen says, “Oh, is there a pistol to my head? Two slaps. One to the gun, the other to the face. And good luck shooting me with one arm, no gun, and half a face.”

Assuming skulls and wrists work the way “Jorgy” thinks, this could work, and there’s something to be said for not overcomplicating things, but let’s be clear: there’s no conceivable advice less helpful. If you were raising a baby chimpanzee with nurturing love and stuck a gun in its face, it would pioneer this exact move. So, sure, give it a shot. But on the very, very slim chance your enemy has reflexes, wrists that don’t get paralyzed when you touch them, or a skull protecting their brain, you’re going to die. If the gunman is left-handed, reverse instructions.

Let’s assume you’re battling a man without a knife or gun. First, square up to them with your arms crossed and wait for a punch. That punch? Their first mistake. Having a skull made out of cream cheese? Their last mistake.

At first glance this fighting technique seems simple. Chop until dead. But let “Jorgy” walk you through the subtleties of these chops.

Since your lack of hip rotation will be generating tremendous power, the first chop should be enough. But Officer Jorgensen doesn’t take chances, and he didn’t earn nine furlongs of police medals by “being enough.” So you’re going to want to follow up with at least one more knockout neck blow. Keen-eyed police fighters may have noticed “Jorgy” putting his non-chopping hand in the way of the other man’s punch in picture 17. Why would he do that? Well, it’s complicated:

I was sort of making fun of Officer Svend earlier, but he’s right about this one. For certain rare punches, it’s better to block with your hand rather than your face. However, not every fight is going to be this gentlemanly out there on the 1930 Seattle streets. Some criminals are going to fight like savages:

You know when an assailant is running his head into you while also… shit, how do I describe this? When he at the same time is grabbing with both hands behind your knees, intending to push you over backwards? I guess I’m back to making fun of “Jorgy” because he’s a combat specialist standing in the country where they invented American football and somehow never learned the word “tackle.” Anyway, whatever this forward-movey tumblegrab is called, let’s learn how to stop it.

As humans know from 4000 years of wrestling, you stop a takedown by standing up straight and putting a hand on your attacker’s shoulder. Without getting too technical with the momentum science, it’s similar to how you stop runaway roller skates by waving your handkerchief at the most handsome boy. It’s basic physics and it leaves your other hand free to chop your enemy’s kidney, their other kidney, and their brain-off button.

If you’re meek or kind-hearted, you may find yourself being legsnatch-tummybonked(?) by someone you don’t want to kill. When this happens, direct your third chop four inches from the base of their brain. It will still completely fuck them up, but it’s safer than swatting them directly on the brain.

The point is, don’t worry about where you hit them. Any impact on any point of the body should paralyze or kill them. I’m making fun of him again, but Svend Jorgensen might actually be suffering from some kind of untreated trauma. The simplest explanation for AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU is that the author dropped a baby and he now he sees that tiny, f-fragile body everywhere he looks.

There will be occasions when you’re being stabbed and you don’t want your opponent dead or unconscious. Maybe you need to get information about his stab supplier, maybe he’s your wife, maybe both. In those cases, you want to carefully, almost comically, poke the points of your fingers into his belly. Surely this –this– won’t shut off his entire nervous system.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

You might be starting to think AMERICAN POLICE JIU-JITSU is only useful for getting out of easy situations. Well, think again, cop. You’re being robbed! You have a gun pointed at you and your hands are up! You’re helpless! Okay, now chop the gunman in the neck.

The human neck is home to “the nerve centers,” so the fight is already over. Still, you don’t rob a policeman in Jorgy’s town and walk away with your genitals right-side out. Fuck that guy’s crotch. The bad way.

You need to do this at flashing jiu-jitsu speed, so practice this simultaneous neck-chop/crotch-knee as many times as possible with your most durable friend or lover. Use a moose if you have one. You know what? Leave the moose alone. Let’s see if I can find a gun escape with fewer steps.

There we go. If you’re being held up, take their gun, and this next part is important so listen carefully: kick them in the dick.

If your work shoes haven’t been treated for crotch fluids, you can also use your knee. It’s crazy to think that before 1930, crime victims had no idea you could just grab your murderer’s gun and shatter their penis.

Sometimes when you’re on patrol, grateful citizens will sneak up behind you and express their love with a sudden gentleman’s hug. You have a lot of personal discretion here, but policy suggests remaining in the embrace for 30 seconds before putting your finger in their asshole and carrying them to the nearest bowling alley. We’re all in this together, citizens!

As every good cop knows, if a citizen is hugging you from behind over your arms, this is a sign of disrespect. Blast them off you completely with a reverse pelvic thrust and then hit them with a short elbow to the gut. And if you’re ever taken a light impact to the torso, you know what that means:

IT IS A COMPLETE KNOCKOUT. You’re ready! Go get ’em jiu-jitsu cops!

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Haraka: who has just been knocked out by this dedication.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Golden Age Comics: Lash Larue 🌭

In 1949, Hollywood star Lash Larue, King of the Bullwhip, got his own comic book. And for twelve years, he and his whip tamed the frontier! Do you think you would have had what it takes to do that? Now you can find out! I selected over 700 hair-raising, cliff-hanging moments from some of Lash’s greatest adventures. See if you would have handled things the same way!

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: Who has personally taken 863 medically significant conks and can still work a spoon!

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Self-Improvement, Self-Defense, Self-Help, Self-Care for Girls and Women 🌭

Are you a man who wants to explain to women how to improve themselves but can’t get them to stop running away from you on the street for some reason? Why not try putting all of your super-cool ideas into one self-published self-help book with a title that covers pretty much anything a girl or woman could ever need help with? Self-Improvement, Self-Defense, Self-Help, Self-Immolation, Selfie Stick, How To Remove From Eyeball, etc…

I can’t say for sure that Khelen Nicole is a pen name being used by a man to distribute this book, but I have pretty good reasons to believe it is, which we’ll get to later. For now, you have to trust me. I know, that might be difficult for you after all of the terrifying things I’ve introduced you to on this website, but I promise: there’s a reason. 

The synopsis for this book is a journey. It sums up over fifty percent of the book in two sentences and then gives us the banger statement that, “Women are physically weaker than men, hence, numerous laws have been enacted for their welfare, protection, and happiness.” Which makes it sound like all laws are for women. If women didn’t exist, society would just be a lawless stab fest with an occasional break for naps and nachos. I feel like men enjoy not being attacked most of the time too, but sure. Let’s move on. Here’s the book’s extremely long description: 

The second suspicious thing I noticed was how “Khelen” uses old-timey phrases like “pocket money” in a post-pocket society. We now live in a world where it’s so rare for women’s clothes to come with pockets, we’re morally obligated to mention them whenever someone compliments our outfit. And “Khelen’s” book was published in 2019– a full two decades after female fashion designers hunted the last pocket to extinction. 

It’s also not written from any particular perspective. Usually, self-help books and self-defense books draw heavily from the life of the author. They need to tell you why they’re an expert in this field so you know why you should take their advice. If I wrote a book called How To Fix Cars, Probably, IDK: My Best Guess About What Is Going On In Cars, you wouldn’t buy it, as I’ve not proven myself to be an authority on the subject matter. If I wrote one called Pocket? The Fuck is a Pocket!?: A Female Perspective on Carryin’ Shit, you’d be sure of my expertise.

The only time a direct reference to the writer of the book appears is in the second-to-last sentence when they say, “Need to really work on myself,” but I think that snuck in there by accident. It’s also the truest statement in the book; I would very much agree that the person who wrote it does need to really work on themselves! 

This confusion of tense and writing style continues inside the book. It starts with a slight rewrite of the book’s description and then pretty much immediately launches into a voice that is so different from all of that, whatever it is… Need to really work on myself. It becomes an entirely different book!

It’s like the person writing this was possessed by a ghost who died because of their terrible diet. The first part of the book, labeled “Self-Improvement, Self-Help, Self-Care” immediately starts with diet advice that is clearly out of date and also directed specifically at teenagers. It advises not to have too many snacks at “the drugstore” after school and tells you to ask your mom if you can drink coffee in the morning. The rest of the diet suggests a lot of fruit, cottage cheese, hard boiled eggs, and conssome, which is ’50s-speak for bland soup.

I was surprised it didn’t throw in a classic, “Have a cool and refreshing Lucky Strike once a day to keep your body healthy!” Again, the cover says this book was written in 2019, but there’s a section on how to properly fit a girdle.

Later in the book, a girl mows the lawn, and the lawnmower is so unrecognizable to me as a lawnmower that I thought she had lost control of her Segway. 

There’s a picture of a girl waiting for a date by the telephone and the telephone I only recognized because of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It looks more like a vibrator than a telephone to me. Need to really work on myself.

Now very suspicious, I decided to run some of the text through a plagiarism checker, and I learned that, in a way, I was wrong about this book being written by a man. It was written by famous teen model Betty Cornell in 1960. It’s actually called Betty Cornell’s Teenage Popularity Guide. Some audacious fucker took a 1960s self-help book and added karate to it. 

“Lydia Holmes and the Mystery of What the Hell is a Girdle Again?” was not that difficult to solve! I know plagiarism on self-publishing platforms is a big issue, and scammers are always finding sneaky new ways to make money off of other people’s work, but the combination of this particular 59-year-old book plus karate is especially nuts to me.

On the author’s amazon page, I saw they had written a few other books about self-defense and assumed what I had stumbled across was an instance of book stuffing. Authors on Kindle Unlimited are paid per page read of their books, so some writers will stuff an entire book or two into the back of their book in hopes that a reader will just keep reading through their entire 3,000 page opus and net the author a cool eleven cents. Or, they’ll put a deceptive link in the first chapter that takes the reader to the end of the book, tricking their e-reader into reporting to Amazon they read the whole thing. They’re tricking you into tricking a robot into paying them less than a tenth of what they would have earned mowing lawns with a Segway.

I figured this guy wrote a self-defense-for-women book and wanted to make it longer, so he stole a book from the 1960s and stuck it in front of his self-defense tips. Wild choice, but I get the incentive. However, it turns out the second half of the book is also fully plagiarized! Want to know what gave it away? Check out this image of a guy about to get a stylish, vintage ass whooping. He put on his best bow tie just to hit this lady! Man, those were the days.

My trusty (and free) plagiarism checker informed me that the second half of the book is actually The Science Of Self-Defense For Girls And Women by Professor Henry Seishiro Okazaki, published in 1929. Somehow someone looked at these two books and decided that they could in some way be convincingly woven together to create a guide for teaching modern women in the year of our lord 2019 how to look good and kick a man in the dick. By the way, How To Kick A Man In The Dick And Look Good Doing It is another book I’m highly qualified to write. 

What’s really funny to me is that even though the author could have maximized their potential income from this book by making it as long as possible, they seemed to have gotten bored with copying the self-defense part, possibly because they had to take out all of the mentions of the author and how he came to invent these self-defense moves. The descriptions of what’s going on in the photos are pretty bare, and sometimes confusing.

Getting attacked by a man seems like it used to be way more polite. There’s a whole section on ways to get out of false handshakes, which makes me think that used to be a big problem? Were men constantly luring women into handshakes and then attacking them? “Hello, ma’am. I am Professor Henry Seishiro Okazaki. It’s very nice to… KARATE YOU!”

I’m curious how the author thought this would work? I can’t imagine anyone on earth being gullible enough to get a page into this and not realize it’s super dated. Unless you’re in some sort of Blast From The Past, fresh from an underground bunker situation starring Brendan Fraser, the thing going on here is immediately obvious. So there’s no way this person could possibly be making money off this book, right?

Maybe? Probably? Yet, it seems like this wasn’t a one time project. The same author has several other books on Amazon that are, um, I don’t know, a little suspicious in some way?

This book cover screams written in 2019 to me. It says it right on the bottom! Sure, the title reads like it was purposely designed to trick me into thinking I’m having a stroke, but other than that, it’s definitely a modern book! So is this very informative book by the same author, also for sure written in 2019, about two giants getting knee punched by a tiny guy. 

Some of these books may be old enough to be in the public domain, but even if something is public domain, you can’t add your name and the current year to the cover and call it a whole new book. I mean, I guess no one can stop you? Totally unrelated, I just dropped a new book. It’s called Romeo and Juliet by Lydia Bugg (2021); look for it soon on Amazon! It’s about menstrual belt repair and river boat etiquette!

So I went into this thinking it was a book written by a dude who wanted to tell women how to lose weight by having thinner bones and eating cottage cheese until we die of malnourishment, but it actually turned out to be somehow weirder and scammier than that? Which is honestly impressive.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: A Man. Kicks. A Horse. In the Penis. 🌭

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT KICK A HORSE IN THE ERECT PENIS, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT IS MID-FUCK.

CONTENT WARNING: HORSE GETTING KICKED IN THE PENIS BY A MAN IN BUSINESS ATTIRE.

I want to talk to you about the dream that was the world wide web and an unknown man who inexplicably declared war on a horse boner.

Before YouTube was even a thing, some primitive video-hosting service showed me a clip I’ve never stopped thinking about. It was called “WEDDING INTERRUPTED BY HORSE MACHO” but it has since been uploaded to YouTube under the title, “Horny Horse Ruins Wedding.” It never went truly viral, as far as I know – this copy has only 78,000 views at the time of this writing. The quality is shit, as you’d expect from the era, to the point that it may not even be apparent what exactly is going on unless you pay close attention:

“What’s to get?” says the skeptical reader. “A wedding party in Russia(?) is posing for photographs in a fancy horse-drawn carriage…

…when a nearby stallion starts mounting one of the carriage mares, causing chaos to ensue… 

…and the driver frantically pulls it off. I had the general idea after the first 90 seconds, if this was TikTok, I’d have been fed twelve more videos by now!”

Friends, I wouldn’t have bothered you with the clip if that’s all it was. The real magic begins at 1:34, when a man enters the frame from the right, skidding to a halt like he arrived at the scene of this emergency in a dead sprint. He appears to be a simple passer-by wearing a tie and gray slacks – a businessman, perhaps, on his way to the office.

He flies over to the male horse – which at this point has already been pulled off of the mare – and starts kicking it in the dick. Repeatedly. 

The carriage driver then pulls the horse away from the scene, its erect horse boner flopping wildly …

… at which point the man follows the stallion and, for unknown reasons, continues kicking it in the dong. 

Look to the left, at the other carriage driver and the bystander in the yellow shirt watching this play out. I know it’s grainy, but you’ll see the carriage driver slowly turn to look away and, just as the camera is about to pan away from them, the guy in  yellow is also turning his back to the violence. Neither of them know exactly what they’ve just watched but instinctively know it was not meant for human eyes.

The clip ends shortly after but it never stopped playing in my heart. Who was this  horsecock-punting vigilante? Perhaps an insurance salesman who showed up at the office later with a whopper of a story to tell, his trouser leg reeking of horse fuck? Or, maybe this kind of thing happens in Russia(?) so often that it’s barely worthy of mention around the water cooler. I don’t mean this exactly, maybe just something in the general category: You had to whip a bear on the scrotum because it was eating a guest at your child’s fifth birthday party, you were forced to masturbate a pack of wolves to dissuade them from ravaging your wife’s funeral. I don’t know, I don’t live there.

I know what you’re asking: “Is it possible the stranger is a Horse Guy and this is actually what you’re supposed to do in this situation?”

If so, I can’t find any reference to anyone separating a pair of mating horses in this manner, even in the negative context of a, “You Need to Stop Kicking Your Horny Horses In the Cock” feature from the May 2004 issue of Defucking Your Horses magazine. I can’t find any other videos of a person doing it, or any articles referring to a time when someone has done it, ever, in the history of horses, fucking or feet. Every possible search term gets me the opposite: Horses kicking humans in the dick.

“Maybe you should interview a horse trainer and ask them.” Motherfucker, I’m not interviewing shit. Don’t you understand that the magic is in not knowing?

I choose to believe this guy improvised. I think he arrived at the scene, felt a primal urge to do something and, before he could make a conscious decision, this was the something his body chose to do. Then, once he started, he couldn’t stop. The feel of a horse boner across his ankle felt good, it felt right. I also believe he had no idea he was being filmed, or that tens of thousands of people have since watched him kick that horse in the dong. I believe he will go to the grave not knowing that in those thirty seconds, he brought me more joy than all of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe combined.

AGAIN: PLEASE DO NOT KICK A HORSE IN THE PENIS OR IN ANY OTHER AREA OF ITS BODY. They are beautiful, fragile animals. I am only showing you this video because I am confident that exactly zero people will imitate what they see. I am not approving of this man’s actions. I did not ask him to do it, I merely watched it happen from several thousand miles away, several thousand times.

So why am I even bringing this up? I kicked this off by saying this was about the dream that was the world wide web and I meant it. This clip is probably from, I don’t know, 2005? Earlier? It was right on the cusp of the internet becoming what it will eventually be, which is a medium for watching video of anywhere, from anywhere, at any time. Some of you already know this, but my most recent book is about a future in which virtually everyone live streams their day via a tiny camera pinned to their shirt or whatever, all of these feeds forming a single, all-seeing social media network. It’s a world in which everyone spends every moment knowing that they’re performing for an audience and the story is about, among other things, just how much that fucks with people’s heads.

But back in what historians will call the “WEDDING INTERRUPTED BY HORSE MACHO” era of the web, all I saw was the astonishing potential for humans from all over the world to understand each other. That I could sit in my chair in Illinois and watch this dude in Volgograd or wherever dispense a series of Adam Vinatieri game-winners to a throbbing equine schlong was nothing short of a miracle. I thought that once we all got a look at how other people lived, saw that everyone is trying their best, that the world is full of amazing people doing things that might look strange from the outside…

…that we could start to all accept each other as part of a single human family. It really didn’t play out that way. 

This, you see, is what sci-fi writers like me, and even good ones, miss about the future. Anybody could have predicted that we’d have little screens that send video to each other – Dick Tracy had that in 1964 – but nobody could have predicted QAnon disciples staging COVID mask freak-out videos in grocery stories for social media clout. It turns out that these candid looks into each others’ lives are instantly corrupted the moment we all know we’re on camera. At that point, it becomes about playing a character, presenting whatever version of yourself will get the most engagement which, these days, means whatever version is the most alienating to the other tribes. “I hate you and I’m going to make sure you hate me.”

But in 2005, in an era before ubiquitous smartphones, this man in gray pants had no reason to believe he was performing for an audience. He was simply doing what he, in his role as a passer-by, thought was right. And what he thought was right was to kick the fuck out of that horse dick. Life may never be so pure again.

Jason Pargin’s writings can now be found on his new site hosted at Substack, you can read his columns there or have them emailed to you if that’s too much effort. He is the author of Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick and his new book will be out next year.