Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

1,003 Great Things About Being A Woman šŸŒ­

Let’s talk women, ladies, and all the things that make women “Great!” Shoes! Underpants! Shoes! Shoes! Can you name 999 more? Stop, don’t bother! In 2005, “authors” Lisa Birnbach, Ann Hodgman, and Patricia Marx already did it! Their shitlike but feminine minds wrote the definitive guide to dingbat stream-of-consciousness, 1,003 Great Things About Being a Woman.

Lisa, Ann, and Patricia never tell the reader who wrote which ones, but there are three distinct styles in the book. One of the lady authors thought it was her job to just list tired gender stereotypes without context or comedy. I think her goal was to create a collection of lady driver references so joyless it could be sent back in time to undo Steve Harvey. Speaking of tired gender stereotypes, one of the ladies is the kind you find in any group of women two or larger: horny as fuck. She is single-minded in her interest, and it’s cock, yummy and now. And finally, one of the ladies is 107 years old and her brain is misfiring as it accesses ancient pop culture references and debunked social theories.

In what might be a stupid-fucking-tidbit-book record, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia exhaust their premise 2% into the writing of their book. It’s page 11 and their idea of “great things” has turned into trying to think of the female sidekicks from cartoons and nursery rhymes. And it doesn’t even make sense. “Without Olive Oil, Popeye wouldn’t have eaten his spinach?” She doesn’t have anything to do with his spinach. That’s just an unrelated element of the show. It’s like saying “Without Wonder Woman, Superman couldn’t Aquaman and Garfield!” It’s like Olive Oil having sex with a gorilla after a murder rampage and saying, “I did something!”

Thank your local women for “for annoying child actors” and “hell.” And again, fantastic job on the book, ladies. Terrific stuff. Pointless, but not “funny” pointless. Technically words, but not “meaningful.” Congratulations, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia. Most doctors would never be brave enough to put their patients’ dementia on display like this.

This one is a good look inside Lisa, Ann, and Patricia’s creative process. Because if you’re idiots listing female side characters from TV and history to frantically fill a book called 1,003 Great Things About Being a Woman, Eve is going to occur to you. And then it’s time to brainstorm what makes Eve great. “She’s made out of a rib? Two of the numbers from my childhood address followed by a sharp pain in my arm? I say we go with the rib one.” Many fools will live their entire lives and never say anything this useless or dumb. This is nothing. This is not the start of an idea; this is not helpful or cute to any person real or imaginary. Fuck this world for allowing anyone to be this bad at anything without breaking any international laws.

Sure! Who knows? Lisa, Ann, and Patricia don’t! They’re not sure why they brought it up! Or kept it in the book! Or which 4 o’clock it is right now! Or if their nurses are robots like Greta Garbo told them in a dream!

These women barely have a handle on one language and now they’re bragging about how easy it would be for them to learn a second one. Like Ann Hodgman is going to take Aramaic night classes after her nephew comes over to show her again how to add the little flower in a Wordstar document.

Yes, we heard. Truly, the wonders of the female mind are limitless.

Wait. S-so your husband doesn’t? Either these women are randomly hitting typewriter shapes to see what happens or Ann just confessed her child is the product of adultery.

It could be argued women get the better deal in polygamy? Followed by no argument? Hold on, do these three women share a husband? And they’re hoping someone, maybe outside this circle of sister wives, could make a good case for polygamy? “Look, it’d take someone smarter than me to explain why it’s great, but I’m one of the top six servant holes in a pretty exclusive sex cult.”

This is a really positive spin to put on your bitch ass high-jump, Ann.

Jesus Christ, we are 24 pages in and they’re already so out of ideas they’re listing their physical defects. Well, not the defects themselves, but their ability to detect asymmetry? They have droopy eyes? At least one of them has a-a… some kind of long foot? The minds of these three ladies are fucking done with 292 pages to go. This is like signing up for a marathon and shitting out all your blood on the way to your car.

Oh, this is the catty side I was hoping to see out of you ladies! You are bad. This will teach Shelly, that insecure bitch, why she should have confided in you about her low self-esteem!

Well, except Shelly. Fuck you, Shelly! You ruined everything again!

And Shelly knows while she’s up there getting married you goddamn bitches are back there whispering about how she’s definitely pregnant. “I’m so fucking fat,” she thinks on the happiest day of her life.

I know we’re only screwing around here, but I think it’s important to take a step back and remember: this is a book listing reasons women are great and Lisa, Ann, and Patricia chose to include “sometimes we have a hunch babies are boys.” Let me be clear: if the universe allows anything less related to female empowerment than that to appear in a book called “1,003 Great Things About Being a Woman,” it will prove, definitively, we are ruled by nothing but chaos.

“There is no God and we have proven it.”

– Lisa Birnbach, Ann Hodgman, Patricia Marx

Look, I know this is an embarrassing level of horny, but when Senator Joe Biden fucks you in your dreams, you write it down and publish it in a list of feminine achievements. “I haven’t had a chance to read the latest pages yet, but I’ll get back to you after the weekend,” said this book’s editor before dying on a boat trip.

I’m not well educated in gender studies, so I don’t know what’s happening here. Is this like a story? Did one of them have a straw hat with… I swear I’m reading this wrong, w-with fake hair attached to it? And then they lit one of their heads on fire to lure single men from the nearby firehouse? Am I interpreting this correctly? And if not, what the fuck are these ladies talking about? You horny idiots, can you not think straight near the word “fireman?” And, of course, there are socks with false teeth in them. Firemen bring both balls to the bathtub. Oh great, now I’m doing it.

I honestly don’t know enough about panty girdles to know if these facts are great or irrelevant. My gut tells me one of these authors had to pee while she was trying to remember which talkies had girls in them and she put that inspiration into her writing.

This one is kind of fun. Men get cancer in their ass and have to watch each other pee. “Not us ladies,” say Lisa, Ann, and Patricia!

When I consider all the things that set women apart from men, “eligible to fight in the U.S. military” might make my top 4.008, but definitely not my top 1,003. Honestly, if I had to write this book the whole thing would be Susan B. Anthony jokes. Just offensive nonsense about how she’s some lady on the shittiest dollar and nothing else.

Oh my god, yes! Precisely this! This was my exact terrible idea, Lisa, Ann, and Patricia!

I know this one, Patricia. “You point a gun at his panda!”

PATRICIA: Gals, I think we should do an entry about Sex and the City.

ANN: I never watched it, but I heard it was a very popular show.

PATRICIA: Oh my god, Ann. Ann, say that again.

ANN: What?

PATRICIA: Say that. The fuck. Again.

ANN: That, um, it was a very popular show?

PATRICIA: That’s it! That’s the entry right there! “Sex and the City was a very popular show.” Ann, you magnificent slut!

Picture yourself as a teacher teaching any grade in any country with any level of advanced placement or special needs. You ask your class “What are some things that make women great?”

A kid raises their hand and goes, “WHY DO THEY LIKE TRUCKS SO MUCH?” 

The kid asking that, without question, would be the dumbest piece of shit to ever disrupt your classroom, right? You would instantly know that child was going to die from an aerosol overdose. You would quote “WHY DO THEY LIKE TRUCKS SO MUCH” while trading drunk stories with other teachers about their dumb pieces of shit. And yet here, in this written book by three professional adult authors, nobody thought it seemed out of place.

It’s the battle of the sexes and the stakes could not be higher! Men are in the lead after liking trucks so much for some reason, but women answer back with how their houses aren’t really clean! Then the ladies follow up with how they, if reminded, will send postcards to their nieces and nephews at camp! Women win again!

Okay, I am choosing this word very carefully here, ladies: lol

Look at the balls on these women. They have all the intellectual curiosity of elephant seal cows waiting their turn to get impregnated and they’re quoting Charlotte Bronte like she was talking about them. They led into this quote about the gender-spanning power of the written word with the words “You finally found the perfect red T-shirt!” It’s beyond the scope of irony. This is like John Travolta telling you to always be yourself while your dick disappears into his face’s elaborate disguise.

Dear Ms. Birnbach, Ms. Hodgman, and Patricia,

We have had a chance to go over your writing packet and while it shows promise, there are no current openings on our staff. However, we can offer market rate of $29 for your joke about women’s magazines and Jell-O.

– The Office of Bill Maher

Lesser authors of a “Great Things About Women” book would have simply written random facts like “panty girdles proved control and comfort!” or “we don’t get prostate diseases!” But Lisa, Ann, and Patricia? They put in the work. They scoured lady medical journals for weeks to see if there were any health complications related to smoking, and since they’re the best– they found one.

This book was published in 2005 when any of the three women or an editor could have used Google to verify a claim like this. I promise I didn’t go into this book thinking I was going to debunk the idea of women being great, but:

The danger of this kind of error is that now I have to reconsider everything these women have taught me. Is this red T-shirt I found not perfect? Were some of those firemen I fucked married? Is the real question why they DON’T like trucks so much!?

Living through an era of chastity belts might explain why Ann can’t go three entries without mentioning rough hands and wet penises (I think I’m starting to figure out which lady is which!).

“We’re too ugly to be eaten! The side effects of menopause are good, actually! Ladies, I don’t feel so good? Good is a weird word, group cycles, where am I, Jane Austen! Jane Austen!”

Okay, no more jokes. I think Lisa had a stroke.

Oh no. Patricia, hang on! Someone help them! Don’t let them keep typing through these brain seizures! This is the most humiliating way anyone has ever died!

Please! Please!! Whatever your motivation, there has to be a more ethical way to collect data on dying brains than this! Surely some of Hitler’s scientists kept notes you could use!

I’m sorry I made fun of you Lisa, Ann, and Patricia! No one deserves to go out like this… confused and alone, punching every stray thought into a typewriter. I’m so sorry!

Ha ha this one is pretty good. She burned to death.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Benjamin Sairanen: Who can actually tell you the single greatest thing about being a woman, though the forbidden knowledge has driven him quite mad.

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PODCASTING DAY UPSETTING DAY

Podcasting Day: The Duets of Movies with Jason Pargin šŸŒ­

Happy Upsetting Day! Hopefully youā€™re not upset that youā€™re getting a podcast instead. Today we discuss the important and oft-overlooked movie genre: Over the Top. 

Now, I know what youā€™re saying: ā€œThatā€™s not a genre, thatā€™s a movie! A great movie! You are not the men to bring it low!ā€

And youā€™re right. So we contacted Jason ā€œDavid Wongā€ Pargin for backup. Heā€™s known as the ā€œalternate thumb positionā€ of podcasting, and today we finally find out why. Weā€™re not here just to make fun of Sylvester Stalloneā€™s wild misunderstanding about the importance of armwrestling in modern society, weā€™re here to make fun of its entire legacy: from The Wizard to Road House, from Twister to the Huey Lewis/Gwyneth Paltrow classicā€¦ Duets? Yes, Duets! We make fun of Duets! We dare.

Haha, thatā€™s the poster for Over the Top?!

Haha, thatā€™s the poster for The Wizard?!

Haha thatā€™s the poster for Duets?!

Haha thatā€™s the poster for Road House?!

Twister is beyond reproach.

I also once again defend my title as ā€œMost Losingest Competitorā€ in Seanbabyā€™s Book Game! Guess how it goes! Hey, fuck you. Maybe it goes well this time.

Itā€¦ it doesnā€™t.

And remember, Jasonā€™s here promoting his new book: Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick. I have read this book. All the way to the end. Yes, I know youā€™re proud of me and I appreciate that, but I mention it because I know the book is fantastic. Itā€™s funny, thrilling, stupidly hilarious, and also subtly, cuttingly relevant. I donā€™t know how he pulled all that off, but he really did. Itā€™s sort of Idiocracy for the Elon Musk generation. Itā€™s sort of cyberpunk for the TikTok generation. Itā€™s funny and itā€™s deep and itā€™s compelling and itā€™s satire and itā€™s a book! You read those!

While youā€™re here, please remember weā€™re still just starting this podcast. It really helps if you like and subscribe to The Dogg Zzone 9000, and it helps immensely if you review it. Try to mention how big our dicks sound!

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UPSETTING DAY

Dear Nintendo My Life is a Goddamn Mess Part II

Welcome back, 1-900-HOTDOG readers! We now rejoin my responses to Nintendo Power’s reader mail responses already in progress.

Oh, here’s a fun letter sent to Nintendo Power from a Wisconsin boy named Joe Harrison who lost his home to a stove fire!

When your job is working in a Nintendo building with Nintendo employees on a Nintendo magazine reading letters sent to you from Nintendo fans, I imagine it’s hard to maintain perspective on the importance of Nintendo. But when you get a letter from a little boy who refers to a burnt Super NES as the “death of a family member,” you shouldn’t think, “Yes, of course an affordable piece of consumer electronics is exactly this important; praise Father Mario, The Tanooki-Suited.”

If you sent this letter to the child who assembled that Super NES, whose fingers would have been removed and mailed COD to their parents if they misaligned a Game Pak contact, they would have said, “Kid, take it easy. It’s just a Nintendo.” 

Joe praises and thanks God for not forsaking two of his games, and “Hala Luya” for He was listening when Actraiser called His name from the flames. I’m not super religious, so maybe it’s normal to thank the thing you worship for destroying only your copy of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball and your home. But at the end of the letter, Joe asks the game enthusiast magazine, “do you think that my Super Nintendo and games went to heaven? I hope so.” This is sadder and dumber than a human should be capable of being. This is what you would get if you asked a brilliant writer to work backwards from the prompt, “The one question that would make Jesus Himself tell you to fuck off.”

The editorial staff at Nintendo Power would sometimes try to bend the Player’s Pulse section to its will by asking for specific types of letters. Here they asked readers to send in wacky humiliations they would endure to get a Super NES, and oh boy did they disappoint! Jamie Overstreet from Mobile said he would, get this, dress up like a chicken and sing a royalty free song!? Ha ha ha, can you imagine!? I get there’s no reason for anyone to expect this part of the magazine to be good, but try to think of any single way this could be less entertaining. I wouldn’t give you a wet sack of used Billy Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball ashes for this idea, Jamie. I mean, someone had to have told Nintendo Power, “I’d kidnap children from the park until I found one whose parents had $199. Then I’d suck off the dad for 67 of those dollars and repeat the process two more times. Pilotwings looks fresh!”

As you can see from the other response, many readers had the same knee jerk idea of “silly costume + patriotic song” because we’ve apparently always known in our hearts that being American was one of the more embarrassing things a person can be. Nintendo Power probably received 7000 variations of these exact responses, but I like how revealing Jason Destroismaison from Tynsboro’s answer was. When he thought about what he’d do for a SNES, the first thing that popped into his head was “Wear my sister’s clothes WEAR MY SISTER’S CLOTHES AND LET FISH FUCK ME IN THE EARS! USA! USA! U!S!A!!!” I hope you got that Super Nintendo, Jason.

Let’s change things up from letters about things that might happen to letters about things that fucking absolutely didn’t happen:

So let me understand this situation, David Landers from Richmond. It was 2am and you were about to ritually drive over Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy with your 18 wheeler. And “this guy” runs up to you, at 2am, who recognizes exactly what you’re doing. And this guy spying on people in a truck stop parking lot had all the maps and secrets of Final Fantasy Legend for the Game Boy either memorized or with him. And then he sat there waiting, at 2am, for you to load up your save game and implement his strategies? David. Come on, David. Maybe your wife and Nintendo Power believe this excuse for why a strange man got into the cab of your truck at 2am, stayed there for half an hour, and then left a hero, but come on, David.

The less fun among you might be saying, “How do you know this is a lie? How do you know he has a wife?” Because duh and I found his obituary. He died 25 years after he told Nintendo Power this unlikely story and if his wife ever figured out what he really meant when he said he was “Heading out for some Final Fantasy Legend with the boys,” it was not brought up alongside his surviving family and final resting place.

I’ve mentioned this before, Nintendo Power, but you can just not print some of these letters. This idiot kid invented the idea of going door-to-door and asking for free money. In a state where people spend their days digging meat out of crabs and, maybe partly because of that, murdering. And Nintendo Power didn’t say, “Stop this, Nick. You idiot fuck.” They were like, “Giggle, you’re quite the card!” He might have done this. There’s a decent chance Nintendo Power killed Nick Fulton of Maryland. That may sound like a crazy thing for me to say; however, look at it like this: I am strongly against murder, but ask me again if there’s a knock on my door and it’s some asshole asking me to buy him a Nintendo game. He’ll probably be okay, but I walk away from that less against murder.

Okay, this entire concept has jumped the shark. Masando Jenson from Port Orchard wrote to Nintendo Power to tell them their envelopes taste like carrot juice, nothing else, and they printed it without a response. The Nintendo Power letters section just opens these windows into worlds where a lunatic might be somewhere in Washington sucking off envelopes like a Final Fantasy Legend expert in a truck stop men’s room. Who benefits from knowing this? What need, what fetish does it fulfill? If you lived in Sarasota, screamed “Bayou Billy” into a jar, and told Nintendo Power it had no effect on the mayonnaise would it have any less meaning? Could it help you understand what’s wrong with Masando, this monster searching for the tastiest glue? I don’t know if my mind can take another letter like this, so the rest of the article will be reviews of cakes sent in by readers.

Jason of Corfu, this looks like the last act of someone who died from being terrible at making cakes. “Happy Birthday, kid. It’s a lopsided Mario, but I didn’t have time to draw it all so you have to imagine that’s not a skeleton hand waving a dildo.”

Jason of Corfu, your friend’s mom decorates cakes so badly her ex husband brings it up during family court. And speaking of the law, if you asked a grocery store for a Mario cake and they made you this, they would legally have to sell it to you as dog food.

Happy 41st birthday, Phillip! Are you the cake being held by this 60-year-old sexual solicitation suspect?

You’ve lost control of your life, Phillip J. Vanover from Mesa, Arizona!

I hope you were ready for MORE BAKERY A C T I O N ! Joshua Blalack, named after me trying to explain which Joshua I’m talking about when the other one is white, celebrated in action with this soggy tangle of shapes. Hey, Joshua’s mom, when you’re making a novelty cake, how do you fuck up the rectangle part?

Happy birthday, Jose from Lufkin. Nice Street Fighter II cake you got. Fucking piece of shit looks like a courtroom sketch of Chun Li on trial for trafficking counterfeit cakes. This is a Fightin’ Spirit or World Heroes cake at best, two expertly selected references you can’t even look up because your cake was so dull you fell asleep swallowing it and choked to death.

Hey, Matt Smith of Dayton, did your mom bake this on the engine of a moving tractor? This looks like you’d cut it open and find old pets that went missing. It looks like something the President would use to call an airstrike in a Ghanaian action movie. Anyone who gets a cake like this should be proud their mother was able to overcome so many security measures meant to keep her out of her psychiatric hospital’s kitchen.

You really came close to making frantically smeared infant shit look like a Game Boy screen, Matt’s mom. Fun fact: this 2.0 score is out of a possible 150.5. This is an autopsy photo of a Game Boy corpse found in a swamp, Matt’s mom!

I was making fun of that kid earlier for asking if his fire-damaged Super Nintendo went to Heaven, but seeing Bread Boy makes me think there should be an afterlife where vengeful gods can punish game consoles for crimes against humanity. Giorgio and Daniele, your terrible baking has spawned a thing not bread nor boy, but an abomination violating the laws of both.

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UPSETTING DAY

Love Beyond Circuits, Love Beyond Flesh

Making fun of fan fiction is tricky. On the one hand, it absolutely deserves to be mocked. On the other hand, youā€™re absolutely an asshole for mocking it. For starters, a professional writer making fun of an amateur writer is generally considered punching down, and people frown on that, despite it clearly being the best direction to punch from. You get extra momentum from gravity! 

Thereā€™s also a level of protective irony inherent to the genre: Half of fan fiction is written to make fun of fan fiction, and the other half just uses that as an excuse if you happen to make fun of theirs. Itā€™s called ā€˜troll ficā€™ — purposely writing bad fanfiction to get the internet to make fun of you for, I assume, sexual reasons. I am aware of these pitfalls, and I have figured out an ethical way to get around them: I donā€™t give a shit.

Weā€™re going to talk about Love Beyond Circuits, Love Beyond Flesh. 

Egatro and Potimus sound like bit parts in Hamlet, and Iā€™ll never call the good guys from Transformers anything but the Autoboys from now on. This is so bad that I immediately worry itā€™s on purpose, but hereā€™s the thing — even if this is supposed to be terrible, we still need to talk about it. We need to talk about the important work itā€™s doing in Transformers lore. Specifically in detailing the sexual anatomy of a robot that turns into a truck. 

But before you fully explore an asshole, you must first care about that asshole. Thatā€™s what separates erotica from proctology, and why my proctology erotica can never seem to find a good audience. 

The setup for Love Beyond Circuits, Love Beyond Flesh is thus: 

That is some lean storytelling. We are a total of perhaps 200 words into this story, and weā€™ve already successfully merged the Transformers and Star Wars universes. Some fan fictions burn hundreds of thousands of words just trying to get their two properties to play nicely, and this motherfucker pulled it off in the span of like six fortune cookies. 

I mean, yes, all they did was say ā€œfuck you, theyā€™re the same universe, fuck you againā€ — but the simplicity of genius looks a lot like idiocy from a distance. Sometimes it looks like that up close, too. Like when Jabba announces that his pleasure barge is actually a fuck-barge, which never needed any clarification. When Steve Bannon drags a cringing young woman onto his mega-yacht, he never needs to specify ā€œthis is the boat where I give you diseases in terrible places.ā€ Itā€™s assumed.

Optimus Prime apologizes profusely for the horrible atrocities his robot cock is about to commit, which is the gentlemanly thing to do when one finds oneself to be an outsized robot on a fuck-barge, but thereā€™s no need. Leia just soldiers the fuck up:

Here. This is what Iā€™m talking about: The Transformers dick-building is both casual and astonishing. Of course Prime would have a crotch gate! The author is not just making that up out of thin air, thereā€™s a precedent: On the original Optimus Prime toy, he kept his entire head in a flippable platform inside the cab. It was a silly but elegant solution — of course it would work the same way for both heads. This is how you do worldbuilding: The author actually takes the existing functionality of the toy design into account before extrapolating the location and functionality of his cyberdong. And let us not ignore the metaphor here: Optimus Primeā€™s dick is both lead and gold — the least and most valuable metals. Thus symbolizing the way Optimus Prime both treasures and is ashamed of his sex. This is literature!

And of course, graphite for lube. If you ever have to fuck or get fucked by a robot — and the way 2020 is going, you absolutely will be doing both before Christmas — youā€™ll remember this storyā€™s advice and you will thank it with every fiber of your laser-targeted orifices.

I say again: Yes. The worldbuilding! The anal cavity of a sexually conservative robot like Optimus Prime would absolutely be neglected, even rusting. But heā€™s still a caring friend who knows people love to crawl up his asshole, so itā€™s also full of special lighting and even a little visitorā€™s center. Maybe a gift shop, to remember your special time inside his cavernous metal anus. 

Holy shit! True to his name, Optimus opted for every Prime add-on when kitting out his butthole. Heā€™s got the Luxury Package, the Entertainment Package — motherfucker even sprung for the Comfort Package. Writing is about the words you donā€™t write. You donā€™t need to specify it: I know this robotā€™s ass comes with zoned climate control and a moonroof. 

Great art changes your view of the subject forever. Look at Optimus Prime again without picturing the special thrust elevator installed inside his butt. Hear his soothing, fatherly voice without recalling the special neon rainbow lightshow he gives visitors who tickle his ā€œsoft pinky pillows of pure petuniaā€™s cotton.ā€

I defy you: Watch R2D2ā€™s antics throughout the Star Wars films and don’t think ā€œthere he goes — the freak of the robot school.ā€ 

Look, George Lucas, if you didnā€™t want R2D2 — the lovable inhuman jester of Star Wars — to one day be used for anal play by a bigger robot, then why did you shape him like that? This was inevitable. R2D2 has always been Chekhovā€™s Buttplug.

Sadly, after this section, Love Beyond Circuits falls apart. Things get stupid fast. Jabba grafts Jar Jar Binksā€™ penis to the tip of Optimus Primeā€™s shaft, then:

Optimus just makes a space long-distance call to the brother of the woman heā€™s currently fucking with somebody elseā€™s dick, and thatā€™s it. See, Jabba was too busy micro-managing the Dick Transplant Lab to install basic communication jammers, and the only reason Optimus Prime didnā€™t call for help before now was because he didnā€™t know a good number for it. Well, that and heā€™s getting double-teamed by what are, to him, basically just super horny lilā€™ elves. 

Fuckinā€™ Jar Jar lets us all down one last time:

In the end, Leia reveals that the entire Star Wars love triangle – already complicated by one of the participants turning out to be her secret brother roughly 40 years before our culture decided we were actually pretty into that — was bullshit and she was just playing both men, because once you fuck truck, youā€™re straight out of luck.

But listen, none of that is important. Remember: I didnā€™t bring you here to mock the character development, or the plot, or even the grammar — I came here to do one thing and one thing only: Introduce you to the complicated worldbuilding of Optimus Primeā€™s fully-loaded butthole and, in the process, forever ruin both Transformers and Star Wars for you.

Oh man, not for one hot second did I think you were actually George Lucas trying to set the record straight anonymously. But itā€™s so weird that you felt you had to specify you werenā€™t that I completely do think that now. 

Thanks for the expanded (butthole) universe, George!

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UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: The Prison Alphabet šŸŒ­

Here in America, we’ve designed an easily corrupted, very racist justice system. Then we incentivized everyone involved in that system to be the maximum amount of lazy and evil. After that, we declared it a virtue for you to put all your trust into it. It has not gone well. This Upsetting Day, we’re talking about THE PRISON ALPHABET.

A fun way to determine if your country is fucked is if there are 2.7 million potential customers for your educational coloring book specifically for children of incarcerated parents. This is obviously a cursed abomination created by people with good intentions. And to their credit, they seem to know what they’ve done. It’s the only coloring book I’ve ever seen that opens with two pages of small-font apologies and explanations. There is maybe some perfect tone appropriate for a kid’s coloring book on this dark subject matter, but Bahiyyah and Muntaquim Muhammad did not find it. This shit is crazy.

Maybe it’s for adults who didn’t know that in prison “D stands for Dentist?” Maybe it’s for prisoners who love to color? Maybe it’s for kids to frame and display on their bedroom wall? They honestly have no idea which direction they should take this very, very bad idea. This is like building a whoopie cushion that blows out the words, “Inoperable cancer means you have to say goodbye forever!” instead of farts. It’s like hiring a magician to play the cello at a miscarriage party. No, I’m serious: THE PRISON ALPHABET is legally the same category of thing as a laser tag pet funeral.

This is fun, right? ARREST– The thing that certainly went well for your parent! There has to be an A-word that maintains this high level of education without reminding the prisoner or their child about the terrible moment already burned into their brains. Why not “ASS– Your mommy better watch hers if she’s going to run her fucking mouth.” Or maybe “AMENDMENT– The 13th one created a loophole that let us keep slavery!” I don’t know, I’m probably the worst person for writing coloring books. Well, okay, obviously not the worst.

It’s a common misconception that prisoners sustain themselves with a large communal salt lick or by constructing hamburgers out of snitch hair. Let me educate you: they are given a thing called “FOOD” to eat. “FOOD” is served for each meal, and we are approaching the limits of man’s understanding of “FOOD.” The only way you can get your own “FOOD” is to poison a boyfriend like your mommy.

I’m sure the children of the incarcerated can appreciate this nice pro-authority spin on handcuffs. They’re to keep your dad from killing himself, kid. You see, the system that took his dignity and freedom is only here to help. There are a lot of perspectives you can have about the penal system, but this HANDCUFFS entry seems to accidentally reveal the one held by the authors. This could have been Hh for HOOCH or HANGDOG HANDJOB, but they chose the H-word where your parents get chained up and then the coloring book takes the side of the prison. That’s fucked up. And a few handcuff-eyed Amazon reviewers picked up on this too.

Alan Mills, a top contributor for Fantasy Books, looks like he has every reason to side with the status quo and even he knows you shouldn’t try to get children of the incarcerated to root for the handcuffs.

This anonymous Amazon Customer bought this coloring book to learn and it only took them 8 letters before they realized, “This is either a joke or total bullshit.”

Debra M. finished the entire alphabet and her takeaway was not “I know a lot about prisons now.” It was, “I hope the author consults with reputable psychotherapists next time publishing a book to purportedly help children.” I don’t need to tell you Debra is, ugh, the worst, but she’s probably right. Do you have any idea how shitty you have to be at making coloring books if you’re a professor of criminology named Muntaquim Muhammad and some random Debbie has a better take on the prison industrial complex than you? This is like Lena Dunham getting body acceptance explained to her by a guy named Footslut Jake.

Pp is also for PRIVACY which your parents won’t have! Plus, Pp is for PROFIT because unchecked capitalism has turned even your mommy’s love for you into a revenue stream!

Jesus, Ss is for SADNESS. I’ve had a lot of criticism about the artistic decisions made in this coloring book, but good luck representing the soul-crushing monotony of losing your freedom better than this page, all future art.

As a parent, I’ve been exposed to a lot of alphabet-themed media, so I’m used to xylophones and x-rays being brought up in wildly unrelated premises. But what the fuck is this? “X-rays are taken by prison doctors who check inmates for broken bones?” If you have to make up crazy shit, just skip the letter, Muntaquim. The only way American prisoners get access to a radiologist is if the guards can’t remember which inmate they left their baton inside.

They really did it! Zz is for fucking ZOO! Color the stated metaphor for how your daddy is an animal, kid. And look, I know THE PRISON ALPHABET is nothing more than a series of regrettable mistakes and it’d be best to ignore it and never think about it again. Still, for not being able to draw tigers for shit, this artist is saying a lot with this zoo picture. These animals are living in harmony inside one giant enclosure. Giraffes share a pasture with tigers along with a baby elephant who gets to grow up surrounded by the love of its family. Coloring children, these caged animals have it better than your parents. Let’s skip to the About Page to see what in the hell is going on with the publishers of this book.

Oh my god, there’s an entire THE PRISON ALPHABET universe with child superheroes? Which, wait, means they have fantastic powers but believe their criminal parents were justly imprisoned and should be left there? I need to see what in the goddamn fuck is going on with these Project Iron Kids. It says for more information on them and upcoming books, visit www.projectironkids.com and… oh, there’s nothing there. Maybe their parents paid their debt to society and they lost their powers? T-that can’t be right. Let me see if I can find out more.

In the About The Authors section, a normal thing for a coloring book to have, it says Mr. and Mrs. Muhammad’s next book “100 Questions Children of Incarcerated Parents Ask” will be published Spring 2014. So I’ll just search for that and… okay, it doesn’t exist. Which means, and I don’t know if this is a happy ending or not, THE PRISON ALPHABET was so terrible it undid the life’s work of its authors. To put it another way, if you lived in a universe where children of the incarcerated had adequate educational material, this exact coloring book is what you would send back to erase your timeline from existence. And that’s a banana you can suck on, kemosabe!

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UPSETTING DAY

Gary Busey Pet Judge šŸŒ­

Things are getting dire in the streaming era. Nearly everyone has their own streaming service. I do. Itā€™s called Brok and so far I only have the rights to rebroadcast a Slovakian public access documentary about tainted wells and every single episode of Joey. Iā€™ve made eighteen dollars this month from ads assuring my viewers that discount tire companies are here for you during These Uncertain Times. There are too many baskets and not enough dicks, I guess is what Iā€™m saying here. Thereā€™s just not enough quality programming out there to fill all the services started by the shitty sons of sketchy Russian millionaires. Even Amazon Prime is having troubles, which I assume from watching their new series, Gary Busey: Pet Judge.

Gary Busey moderates funny pet-related disputes in a mock Reality TV parody of The Peopleā€™s Court, and if you recognize every part of that description as wildly outdated, well then Iā€™m sorry you didnā€™t get that job as head of programming for Amazon Prime Video. If you made this show fifteen years ago people would have said ā€œreally? A Peopleā€™s Court reference? That is so fifteen years ago. Now please get out of the way — I have to ride my pocket bike to a Franz Ferdinand concert and Iā€™m already late because of that flash mob pillow fight. Poker will never not be cooooool!ā€

Letā€™s watch it anyway. Thereā€™s a plague. The fuck else are you doing?

Gary Busey is, as always, a Greyhound station at 2AM:

And every case is an excuse for aging improv actors to demonstrate why they failed that MADtv audition.

Gary Busey: Pet Judge owes about half of its comedic stylings to Best In Show, and the other half to Tim and Eric — the two properties responsible for more damage to comedy than Borat. Donā€™t get me wrong: Best in Show and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! were both great, but they taught a generation of aspiring comics that anyone can be funny without telling jokes, and then those comedians spent the next decade inventing new ways to prove that wasnā€™t true. Now everyone thatā€™s not sure where to start with this whole ā€œfunnyā€ thing does this:

Dude looks like heā€™s attending a Halloween party as ā€˜Misremembered Napoleon Dynamite Reference.ā€™ He is here to be incredibly awkward in a way that you are very prepared for, and he doesnā€™t even get real people to sweat on. He only interacts with other gasping improv comics whose every character is ā€˜myself, but more unlikeable.ā€™ 

Luckily there is a crazy beating heart in the chest of this desperate premise. Yes, itā€™s the King of Quirk himself, Gary Busey:

Haha, classic Busey! Always looking like a drunk mop and saying shit that sounds like itā€™s been translated to Chinese and back. Iā€™m sure theyā€™ve written some baseline setups for his weirdness, but you cannot get Gary Busey to follow a script unless you tape it to the ghosts he thinks are attacking him. At the very least, you know all of the strange acronyms and endocrine references are pure unmitigated Busey:

Hey thanks! Thatā€™s really cool. Listen, I do not have a cigarette and Iā€™m starting to think I missed the last bus to Akron. Iā€™m just gonna go to the bathr-

Youā€™re going to follow me to the bathroom, arenā€™t you?

Gary Busey has the mannerisms of a shell-shocked lizard and he talks like he came unstuck from time while having an argument with Bjork. But hey, real quick, do you know why Gary Busey is like that?

If youā€™re of a certain age, you probably remember that. It was a huge deal. But weā€™ve been making fun of Gary Buseyā€™s brain damage for so long that a whole generation of young adults have no idea ā€˜the weird dude from reality showsā€™ actually left every third thing he knew on a California sidewalk back in 1988. Gary Busey is only ā€œquirkyā€ because he was in the most ironic type of motorcycle accident:

And has been suffering from long-term degenerative brain damage ever since. In fact, thatā€™s where those acronyms come from. Heā€™s not joking about those — they mean the world to him, and they literally started the second he scrambled his brain.

If youā€™re under 30, Gary Buseyā€™s just a Hollywood Weirdo best known for being the wild card that derails the Build-A-Bear challenge and gets Team Leader Xzibit sent home. But start at the bottom of his IMDB page and scroll up to watch a man lose his mind in slow motion. If theyā€™d picked any other host, this series would have only been disappointing. But by anchoring the whole thing on Gary Busey and then staffing it with quirky extras doing Eric Andre impressions, they have effectively made a show where everyone is pretending to have mental problems except for the main character, who is genuinely trying to communicate with other humans through a broken interface.

Iā€™m not trying to take the moral high ground here. The savvy among you may have noticed I made several Gary Busey jokes, myself, and if you missed them, hereā€™s another one: Gary Busey is like if Nick Nolte fell into a vat at Ace Chemicals.

I donā€™t even know what the moral high ground is in this situation, because the alternative to paying Gary Busey so you can laugh at his brain damage is not paying him at all. Iā€™m just saying half of this show is written to be ā€œquirkyā€ and ā€œawkwardā€ and the other half of this show is trying to cushion Gary Buseyā€™s forehead as he headbutts holes in the drywall looking for wall gold. 

Please note that those improv comicsā€™ hilarious response to this one was ā€œstunned silence,ā€ followed by ā€œchecking around the set to see if anyone was coming to help.ā€

Amazon have effectively made a show called ā€œguess which one has genuine mental health problemsā€ and it is fucking crazy that premise got greenlit! Itā€™s literally a comedy show designed around trying to ā€˜one-upā€™ a mental patient as his scattered brain draws faulty conclusions from neuronic connections whose other half is coloring a curb in Culver City.

This format does not function in any other permutation! You canā€™t pair a bunch of young actors pretending to be goth with one thatā€™s genuinely suicidal and bill it as a comedy. You probably canā€™t set it on a bus and call it Across the Street or Down the Road. You canā€™t start a dating show by mixing a bunch of reality skanks in with one seeking help for a crippling sex addiction. Maybe her name is Penny, but even so, you certainly canā€™t call it Penny For Your Thots. You canā€™tā€¦ you canā€™t pair a bunch of comedians doing cruel impressions with a guy who actually has Downā€™s Syndrome and then bring on contestants who have to guess which ones are faking. You canā€™t call it Donā€™t Bring Me Downā€™s. You canā€™t do it! You should go to jail for thinking it! You canā€™t hire a bunch of improv dropouts and put them in a room with a mental patient and tell them all ā€œeverything he says is your next promptā€ and call it Gary Busey: Pet Judge. Oh wait, shit, thatā€™s the real one!

This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Kenlel Paisley: The Shogun of Slam, the Daimyo of Damn, the Tenno that’s a straight ten, yo.