Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Dennis Rodman’s The Minis 🌭

In cinema, there is a thin line between “inspirational tale” and “grotesque mockery of everything we hold sacred” and if you don’t know what I mean, go back and watch American Beauty. In 1999, millions of upper-class white dudes gazed tearfully at Kevin Spacey and whispered, “When I look at that man, I see myself.” Though I guess they weren’t wrong.

What I’m trying to say is that maybe we shouldn’t be relying on Hollywood to teach us inspirational lessons at all. Your favorite powerful movie monologue was probably written by someone who had to stop half way through to google, “troubleshooting adult pet tiger after cocaine injected into penis.” But, uplifting stories sell tickets, so every filmmaker is required to have in their mind some vague shape of what a meaningful story looks like. After that, they’re kind of relying on the actors’ charisma and a stirring score to hide the fact that their movie has no idea what it’s saying.

In a blockbuster, the result is usually merely vapid (“Your heart is free,” says Braveheart’s dad, “have the courage to follow it“) but sometimes you end up with a straight-to-video underdog sports movie about NBA great and legendary weirdo Dennis Rodman training a team of basketball dwarfs. This is not a photoshop:

I mean, it is, but it’s for a real movie. The Minis, which was at some point re-released as Little Hoop Dreams, is a 2007 film in which Rodman, who in real life became extremely wealthy due to a combination of remarkable rebounding ability and marketable personality disorders, plays himself. He is recruited to help the aforementioned men with dwarfism win a basketball tournament and by all rights this should have been the last underdog sports movie ever made before the genre was banned via some kind of international treaty. The film has been out for thirteen years and has no Wikipedia page.

Just to be clear, what’s hilarious about this movie isn’t that it features dwarfs doing things. The way these actors have traditionally been treated by Hollywood is some bullshit. They’re forced to pick their projects based entirely on which whimsical fantasy creature they want to play next and if you think I’m joking, take a gander at the IMDB of one of the most prolific actors with dwarfism, Warwick Davis: In his career he has played characters named Sniff, Wicket, Lickspittle, Weazel, Flitwick, Weeteef, Nikabrik, Bopkin, Grildrig, Glimfeather, as well as the occasional unnamed “Elf” and “Leprechaun.” He’s not in this movie, but you get my point — every member of The Minis cast was probably thrilled to have a part that didn’t require six hours in a makeup chair before filming a scene in which they cackle while stealing a baby.

The opening credits of The Minis plays over a hip-hop(?) song that you quickly realize actually seems to be about dwarfs playing basketball? Sample lyrics:

I really wanna be a big player

Mini get it on the court, come closer

You wanna be a giant like me?

Take the ball and prove you can be




Little man when you’re dribblin’ low

Then bustin’ it back to front

Come on do what you came to do

We’re gonna play b-ball together

Yeah, it turns out that every song on this film’s soundtrack was composed specifically for the film and every fucking one is absolutely about basketball-loving dwarfs. Each was written by Valerio Zanoli, who also wrote, produced and directed this film. There is an excellent chance that The Minis started as a concept album about dwarf basketball and the movie was merely supplementary material.

We then cut to Roger and Chevy, a pair of middle-aged men with dwarfism playing basketball on a city court in L.A. A group of evil, also-middle-aged anti-dwarf bullies come along and taunt the protagonists. Why bother playing basketball, they sneer, when you are so short? You’ve seen underdog sports movies before and so had Mr. Zanoli — this is the part where we reveal the ignorant prejudice that our heroes must overcome. It is also cruelly true to life: in twenty-first Century America, success does in fact require winning the support of guys who look exactly like this:

Chevy replies to the bullies that Roger is a great shooter, regardless of height, and that he’ll prove it. Then Roger shoots and 
 misses so badly that the ball is wedged behind the hoop. 

So this story, ostensibly about how prejudice unfairly holds back certain groups, goes out of its way to point out that prejudice is in no way the obstacle in this particular case. The protagonists are simply not very good at basketball, despite unfettered access to all of the necessary equipment and facilities. The existing system, this film says in its opening minutes, is a meritocracy that is functioning perfectly. Or, at least, it was.

Roger then goes to a different court to watch his normal-height teenage son play a basketball game of his own. His son also sucks and, after an embarrassing turnover, a (different) bully taunts him with, “Like father, like son.” So in the universe of this film, Roger the dwarf is so bad at basketball that 1) he is infamous around the Venice Beach basketball scene and 2) has shamed his entire family. 

His son runs home crying, disowning his father (calling him “Roger” instead of “Dad”) and telling him that he was just rejected for a basketball scholarship, presumably because his father has done such a shitty job of imparting to him any kind of basketball-friendly genes or skills. Roger then sullenly sits on the sofa and gazes at a framed photo of his son being sad about basketball:

Roger soon stumbles across a flier for the First Annual Venice Beach Basketball Tournament, seemingly taking place on the same famous courts featured in White Men Can’t Jump (side note: if you stumbled across The Minis on cable, you’d assume you were watching a White Men Can’t Jump porn parody in which all of the fucking is merely implied yet also unspeakably graphic). The first prize is $50,000 and Roger notes that this would be enough to pay his son’s college tuition. End of Act 1. 

Roger needs a team of five for the tournament and recruits two other middle-aged friends who also have dwarfism, reminding them that all they need to do is believe in themselves. The pair note that they have not played basketball since they were children but agree to join because, as one of them says, they have nothing else to do. This will remain those characters’ only motivation for the rest of the film.

We then cut to a montage of all of the men practicing and failing so hilariously that it appears they’ve never even heard of the sport of basketball, let alone played it. They chuck one-handed shots that sail over the backboard. A simple pass hits Roger right in the cock.

I should note here that easily 60% of this 75-minute movie is montages and each montage is set to a different track about dwarfs playing basketball. It’s basically a rock opera. Sample lyrics from this sequence:

Here we go (garbled) this Roger guy

He used to play b-ball in Junior High

But now they don’t have style, they don’t have grace

Trippin’ and bumpin’ all over the place

People say, they can’t play just because they look that way

So he’s small, they’re not tall

They’ll bounce, dunk and dribble to show them all

You lying motherfucker. No one is saying they can’t play ball because, “They look that way.” People are saying they can’t play because they’d be lying if they said anything else. These men haven’t developed even the limited physical gifts they possess.

It’s after this disastrous practice that the four decide that their chances in the tournament would be improved if their fifth player was both very tall and also an all-time basketball great. As luck would have it, Dennis Rodman just happens to be in the neighborhood. They ask for his assistance and eventually Rodman and these four horrendous basketball players wind up in the office of Rodman’s agent. 

That’s what they had in the script, anyway. For reasons that may or may not involve Rodman forgetting he was in the movie, this scene about the three involved parties talking around a conference table is actually cobbled together out of shots of the agent, Rodman and the dwarf team that were clearly filmed in three different locations on three different days. All of the shots of Rodman are generic facial reactions that I think were filmed without his knowledge:

The agent dubs the team “The Minis” and it’s time for another montage, this one involving Dennis watching the men do calisthenics on the beach. To this day I am 100% sure that Rodman believes all of this was just one of his less disturbing hallucinations.

The original track that plays here is either about dwarf basketball or a school shooting (They made fun of us in high school / they stepped on us, we were the fools / but now we’re gonna make ’em pay / the Minis are gonna have their way). It is revealed here that the Minis, in addition to being bad at basketball, are also in very poor physical condition and struggle with basic exercise. The tournament is two months away. 

At this point, I suspect that something like twenty minutes of film was lost in a suspicious fire. Just five minutes after the above scene, we get another montage about how the Minis, over the course of a couple of weeks, have become wealthy international superstar athletes. As far as we the audience know, the five have not played a single game of basketball against anyone, or even practiced as a team. Yet, we get a song about how great it is to be a famous basketball-playing dwarf (“You got the fame, you got it all / You got the life, now play b-ball / You made it big though you’re tiny / I wanna be like a Mini”) over a montage of The Minis appearing on magazine covers all around the world:

Then a character in the movie notes, out loud, that Minis merchandise can be purchased at the-minis.com, a domain that absolutely was the movie’s online store at the time but today  just redirects to their YouTube page (935 subscribers!). 

The film quickly rushes through a series of subplots. Chevy wants to date a tall woman, shunning the attention of a woman with dwarfism. Roger’s son says he hates basketball and wants to go to clown school in Paris. Roger responds that they can send him to any college he wants, because now they have more than enough money even without a scholarship, thanks to their Minis-related windfall- 

Wait. Back the fuck up. 

This character’s entire motivation was winning the basketball tournament to earn the $50,000 to send his kid to college. And here, a mere forty minutes in, he’s done it. They just mention this in passing, like everyone involved kind of just forgot the film’s inciting incident. No time to dwell on it — there is another training montage (minus Rodman, who again apparently failed to show up to the set) showing that the Minis are now good at passing and making shots, as long as there are no defenders on the court. 

The screenwriter knew that around here is where the heroes are supposed to hit some kind of speed bump in their progress, so he awkwardly inserts a dispute triggered by the agent suggesting the Minis do a series of endorsements to cash in on their fame. Most of the men refuse, because they don’t want to sell out. But 
 wait 
 they weren’t doing endorsements before now? Then how did they make all of their money? From the merchandise? I mean, it’s Dennis Rodman and four dwarfs, what else could they 
 oh god. Oh god, no.

No time to dwell on this, either, as the Minis reconcile literally four minutes after their breakup. It’s tournament day!

Courtside, the announcer notes that despite the tournament being open to anyone, only eight teams have qualified and the Minis are among them. Let me remind you that in fifty-two minutes of movie, these five players have still never taken the court together, not even for a scrimmage. Maybe the idea is that Rodman’s fame was enough to get them in? Eh, I’m sure whatever group of inner city street ball players they displaced couldn’t have used the $50K.

We learn via montage that the Minis win their first game because Dennis Rodman utterly dominates the amateur competition. It’s around here that you realize the true underdogs of the story are the other players who’ve spent their entire lives honing their craft, only to find themselves humiliated by a millionaire and a team of novices who showed up because one of them walked past a flier. Meanwhile, here’s what the soundtrack says as we watch Rodman dunking over those sad fuckers:

You can’t keep the little man down

’bout to do this like I’m a terminator now

Small but fly, you can’t pace us

Stakes are high, you can’t erase us

Gonna dribble you out, then play stainless

Side note: The single best experience you can have with a movie is watching The Minis and imagining the soundtrack is sarcastic. Advancing to the tournament’s final four, the Minis immediately play the next game and, again, win easily, this time the dwarfs hitting open shots because the other team’s defense collapses on Rodman. A new song plays:

You know we really don’t care what people say

We know we’re gonna b-ball anyway

Don’t think we’re scared, I’m gonna tell you why

We’re gonna make the big boys cry

What? No one tried to stop you from entering this tournament, even though they absolutely should have! The only people in this whole movie who told you not to play basketball were the bullies at the beginning and they’re not even here. If anyone is being treated unfairly, it’s the opponents who paid their dues on the courts but never got magazine covers out of it, then had to watch as Dennis Rodman, no shit, scores the winning shot by picking up Chevy and throwing him at the hoop:

With that, the Minis have advanced to the final game, which we’re told will be played the following day. Everyone goes home and the editor, realizing they didn’t film anything close to enough movie, slaps together yet another training montage from unused footage. It’s seriously just a bunch of clips of the actors fucking around in their driveway. Then we get a shot of Chevy driving around in his massive new Hummer SUV, which is another scene intended to emphasize that their lucrative-but-unspeakable side hustle has rendered the tournament and its prize money utterly irrelevant to everyone involved.

The final game arrives, against the “Venice Vipers.” The poor bastards playing the Vipers do their damnedest to sell the idea that they could plausibly lose one-on-one matchups to players with zero athleticism or skills who are literally three feet shorter than they are. The editor rapidly cuts around shots of the action as not to linger on moments like the one below, in which three flat-footed defenders kind of stand back and let Roger shoot, condescendingly going through the motions like a parent playing with a toddler. “Yay! You made it!”

Mr. Zanoli knows that in the sports movie template, the underdogs need to suffer some kind of crushing blow right at the finish line that they must overcome with heart and teamwork. Thus, the scoreboard says the Minis are down by four when Dennis Rodman suffers a knee injury. The minis will have to learn how to play without him! The movie almost makes sense!

Wait, no. Roger’s son — the one who sucks at basketball and hates it, who wants to go to clown school, inexplicably shows up dressed in a clown outfit with a Minis uniform over it. He’s going to step in and help the team win. Oh, he hasn’t suddenly become good at basketball or anything — the actor actually does that thing where he has to look down while he dribbles so he doesn’t bounce it off his foot 
 


 but he makes the tying shot because the other team kind of just lets him? There’s no sports movie Chekhov’s gun that was foreshadowed earlier, no equivalent of the Karate Kid’s crane kick or Pedro Cerrano learning to hit the curve. The worse basketball players come back against the better basketball players for no reason whatsoever. The game is now tied and they call timeout to draw up the potential game-winning play. Whatever you think is about to happen next, I’m telling you that you’re fucking wrong.

Without any discussion or any previous indication that the following is possible, the Minis start glowing with golden dwarf magic and climb on each other’s shoulders to dunk the ball.

It takes them a full minute of screentime to assemble themselves this way and if you’re wondering how they had time to do that, it’s because one of the Minis drilled an opposing player in the scrotum with his elbow and the other four members of the Venice Vipers were busy quadruple-teaming Roger’s son, perhaps mistaking him for Dennis Rodman. 

The referees then take the court and wave off the basket, since that play did in fact violate several rules of basketball and at least two city ordinances. Rather than award the ball to the other team, the ref just declares the Vipers the winner(?). Then Dennis Rodman shows up again and says that it doesn’t matter that they lost, because they have gained something far more important: Popularity with the crowd, which is now chanting their name. A child in the audience turns to his father and says, “When I grow up, I want to be a dwarf!” Credits roll as that line ricochets around your skull.

So, there are two possibilities here and they are equally tragic:

A) The entire message of this movie is a sarcastic “fuck you” to the entire concept of “believing in yourself” mattering at all;

B) Our screenwriter made it to the climax of the story and himself realized that there was no plausible way to have these guys achieve their goal, even within the incredibly forgiving rules of a genre in which you can tell the audience “angels helped them” and nobody will blink. 

Now, as some of you know, I write novels for a living and have a novel coming out this year called Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, about a team of con artists with PSYOPS training navigating a future full of superpowered lunatics. But my goal with these books is to make enough money that I can retire and do an oral history of The Minis. I expect the project to take decades and it will require me to learn Italian in order to do the research. 

Here’s a taste: The trivia section on Amazon says, “In Italy, the film teamed up with the number one sports newspaper, radio station and theme park. It had promotions with companies such as Yahoo! and McDonald’s.” It also notes that the Italian dubbing was done by various famous soccer stars. On YouTube, you can watch the trailer for the video game tie-in that apparently actually existed in some form:

What I’m saying is that there is an alternate universe in which this movie became the next Space Jam and I won’t quit until I can build a machine that will let me go live in it. 




Jason “David Wong” Pargin is a New York Times bestselling author and the former executive editor of Cracked.com. You can follow him on Twitter or browse his selection of alarming yet shockingly well-reviewed novels.

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UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: How to Get Along With Black People 🌭

A lot of hyperbole gets thrown around on the Internet. You may have heard, even from me, how a movie is the worst ever or a video game is an actual AIDS golem built by Hitler’s colon polyps. So I understand if you don’t believe me when I tell you this is the most problematic book I own. You aren’t ready for it. It’s “Upsetting Day” on a comedy website built by two men who grew up in an era where a stand-up special was just Denis Leary coughing into a crippled person’s mouth for 40 minutes and calling it Learn to Walk, Wheelie: The World Fuck You Tour, and there’s still no way you’re ready for it. Okay, unprepared readers, let’s look at How to Get Along with Black People.

You may already be worried this book was written by two whites who have spent enough time around African Americans that they think they have permission to say it. About that, I can set your mind at ease. It was written by two intelligent, sometimes silly black women who graduated from Ivy League law schools. But it was published 49 years ago, and we don’t even have adjectives left in circulation to describe how different racism was in 1971. In 1971, you could still get a near-mint Whites Only trampoline. In 1971, the government could still ship black neighborhoods to Vietnam. And in 1971, people still asked Bill Cosby to do the foreword for their book. This is going to sound like I’m making a weird joke, but he starts by helping you feel more comfortable with racial slurs, then encourages you to try them out when firing black subordinates. I personally wouldn’t listen to him, but I’ll let you decide for yourself:

When you’re writing a book about race relations in 1971, you need to approach it with tact and understanding. This one opens with a rapist using the n-word, so if fixing racism has any kind of a fail condition, these women are charging pretty hard toward it. There is no way to safely test this theory, but I don’t think you would get along better with any black people by telling them, “You might think I don’t understand your struggle, but as Bill Cosby once said, gulp, THE N-WORD WITH AN R, you’re fired!”

The least a white can do is try to be self-aware of all the racism built into us and work to undo it. You should be constantly annoyed at the racism you find in dusty corners of your neural map. For instance, when I go to Habesha restaurants, I always order kitfo, a traditional Ethiopian dish that makes all American dishes look like stupid pussies. It’s a pile of raw meat served on a pancake with a side of cheese. I would eat it every meal. But still, after all these years of overeating kitfo, when I hear “Ethiopian food” the first thing my brain conjures is not the hundreds of delicious raw meat pancake tacos I’ve stuffed into myself– it’s Michael Jackson and Kenny Rogers singing together so crates of grain make it to desert baby hobo camps.

I’m pretty sure when I first heard the words “Ethiopian” and “restaurant” together I pictured a kitchen filled with starving toddlers heating up UN rice in disarmed landmines. My point is, this racism was branded onto the inside of our skulls as children and we have to always be watching for it. And it is with this vigilance I stopped reading How to Get Along with Black People every few paragraphs to think, “I am fundamentally more racist after reading these things.” My daughter said her first words to me during this book and they were, “Honkie, this advice is going to backfire.”

For the first 25 or so pages, How to Get Along with Black People is a light-hearted comedy routine about stereotypes which I recognized as a trap. Giving white people permission to laugh at racial stereotypes is how we got Zach Braff. Plus, this book’s authors are lawyers, not pioneering voices in comedy. They can’t navigate the complexities of these issues like someone who has, say, seen Dolemite 2: The Human Tornado 68 times. And as that someone, I have a note. Don’t call one of the chapters in your book on racial harmony ‘EENY-MEENY-MINY-MO (WHAT TO CALL “THEM”).’ I typed those words one sentence ago and I’m already getting targeted ads for Jordan Peterson videos and something called “Lawn Cross brand lighter fluid.”

The most unbelievable part of the book, and I haven’t forgotten about the Cosby hard R n-word incident, is “The Integration Index.” It’s a list of all the types of blacks, how “white” they are, and how you can spot them. They’re each categorized by a silly name like a READY RICHARD, who is a middle-aged man “found with whites when he can manage.” The READY RICHARD, and please understand the rest of this sentence is a direct quote, “prefers ‘Negro’ but will answer to ‘colored.’ He tends to be lighter-skinned.” This reads like a handbook for a Kentucky militia to help distinguish between enemy hostiles and the good ones, but it was published by educated women of color in an effort to undo intolerance. Which is very much like writing a book called Safe Woodworking Projects and only including knock knock jokes about sawing your dick off.

The other “portraits” in the Integration Index are HUSTLIN’ SAM, a dark-skinned huckster who can trick the whites into thinking he’s one of them. There’s also KWAME JONES who adopts African traits but can be found in all-white corporations. GHETTO JIM is a servant or a day laborer– “the black whom whites know best– and least.” I could feel every syllable of it making me a worse person; plus, I have no idea where I’d apply this knowledge. Are these conversation starters? If I meet a black stranger am I supposed to say, “I’m an Aquarius, so I get along best with a GRANDMA CHURCH-HAT or a THUNDERCOCK JENKINS. Which are you on the Integration Index? Or, oh! Oh!! Can I guess!?” It’s becoming more and more clear I don’t understand any of this, but I remain confident you shouldn’t open a book intended to make white people more inclusive with a funny 4 Blacks You Meet At Every Cookout list.

As the book goes on, there is a pretty serious tone change. It starts to complain about the cliche things caucasians do and say to them and absolutely stops even trying to be cute. Discussing and researching the subject matter seems to have exhausted the authors’ patience for our white bullshit. And fair enough. There is a tiny Zach Braff inside each of us, desperate to get included in a complicated handshake or given permission to wear blackface for a Scrubs cutaway. So I get we suck, but look at what that contempt for us did to this book. It turned an artifact of pure insanity into an academic study of the harsh truths of our hypocrisies:

In the end, this book promising you an exciting life of diverse friends turns into lecture on all the ways you’ve hurt people with your ignorance. It makes a strong case for how the well-meaning white is nature’s most obnoxious animal. Even assuming every white person was trying to not be racist, and history has shown this to be closer to the opposite, there were about 178 white Americans for every 22 black Americans when this was published. Which means in 1971, every African American had to be someone’s first black friend eight different times. They had to field the same stupid questions and hear about the same stupid Scrubs gag eight different times– at least. Meeting nice caucasians seems like running into a different crazy ex at every party you go to, and not being able to talk to anyone else until you’ve fixed them. Maybe? The one thing I definitely learned from How to Get Along with Black People is no one likes it when white people offer observations like this. Anyway, happy Upsetting Day to people of all colors from the obnoxious well-meaning whites of 1-900-HOTDOG!

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UPSETTING DAY

The Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible 🌭

I was born a heathen and I’ll die a heathen, probably in some kind of heathening accident. I don’t know anything about the Bible. If I wanted a story about unlikeable characters doing shitty magic and learning self-evident lessons I’d watch The Magicians. And I did watch The Magicians until they softened up Penny and he became unfuckable, so what do I want with the Bible? But one thing I do understand is cartoons, and there are more cartoons about the Bible than there are about talking animals and friendship put together. Now, they might be old news to you, but being raised entirely outside of its influence, I’m learning about famous Bible tales for the first time and they are very upsetting. Especially the way they’re portrayed in The Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible — an animated, kid-centric series about the gnarliest parts of The Old Testament. It’s brought to you by Charlton Heston and lax Chinese labor laws, though I think one of those things is a lie. Let’s see if you can guess which one by the end!

Why not start with the episode on Sodom and Gomorrah? I love Sodomy, and Gomorrah is my second favorite Guardian of the Galaxy. But apparently to get to that story, we have to start with Abraham:

Abraham looks like Steve Perry with a wicked Synthwave aesthetic, and you know I love that, but there’s only so long I can watch him wander the Farmer’s Market and attend lackluster raves:

I know that was probably a fuckin’ rager back in Ye Olden Times, but party technology has advanced so far — a fully clothed woman waving wheat in the air barely gets me hard anymore. 

If this show is accurate to the Bible, then the good book really needs some pacing feedback. We spend fully half of the run-time of this episode just following Abraham around while he knocks things off his chore list. He starts looking into real estate, and God just hovers over his shoulder for twenty straight minutes telling him which neighborhoods have good parking. These days we lament the questionable absence of God in our lives, but He was a hell of a micromanager back in the day. I suppose it’s a bit like playing an RTS game: In the early stages God has like eight guys and he’s invested in every one. Clicking them out into the Fog of War one tile at a time all worried there’s an orc in those woods. Cut to a few thousand years later and he’s got the whole map churning out support units and there’s just no way he has the mental space to give a shit about each and every one.

Hey look at that: five hundred words in and we’re already having a crisis of faith and that’s before I’ve even told you this is a musical. One with rock riffs so tired they were written by a Phil Collins Ambien-daymare, crudely rapped over by a child who had to look up “rhyming” in a soiled dictionary only to find half the definition was illegible, all while we cut to stock landscape footage of out of an Uzbek karaoke video.

When Abraham built an altar I figured it was about to get interesting, since that’s the turn in every horror movie. But no, they just laid an extremely cute lamb on it:

And skipped the ‘prep’ section of the recipe:

If I were writing it, this would be the point in the story where it turns out they got the altar address wrong and didn’t appease their own god, but did accidentally anger the Ram God. Yep, this was all a surprise prequel to The Silence of the Lambs called The Roaring of the Goats. The rest of my soundtrack would just be more bleating and screaming and meatslapping than the last half of Baskin, but in Abraham’s world, burning a cute animal doesn’t do much more than explain why you should never leave Steve Perry impersonators around unattended pets.

Let’s just jump to several decades later, because nothing much of import happens: God promises Abraham a son because his wife is barren, but there’s no mystical birth – he just meant Abe should start banging the maid. Turns out Abraham’s wife hates this for some reason, and takes it out on the girl. The maid flees, only to be told to return to her dangerous situation by Ricky-Joe the Domestic Abuse Angel. Everybody lives in a tent for seventy years and it is only through God’s grace that they aren’t riddled with scabies by the time “the Lord and his angels appear in the guise of three ordinary men.”

Which is to say that three dudes wandered into camp and, when asked if they were gods and “would like their feet anointed,” answered “sure thing, buddy.” That’s just Drifter Code right there: Never turn down a footjob, no matter who offers. While Abe initiates some toeplay with what is clearly an opportunistic hobo, the two angels wander off to massacre a town for ill-explained reasons, as is, again, the Drifter Code.

Well that seems like a perfect segue into a jaunty song break!

Despite this episode being titled Sodom and Gomorrah, that’s all we see of either. They get forty seconds of airtime, then explode and are completely forgotten, just like Tricky in The Fifth Element.

Let’s check in with Abraham and his 90 year old wife, who is now giving birth:

That sounds like a scene they’d cut from a Cronenberg script, but this religious cartoon for children is totally cool with exploring geriatric genital genocide. Because this is a miracle birth ordained by God, the child, Isaac, lives to be just old enough to understand dark irony before God appears again, all drunk and needy. 

“I must know if you love me, Abraham,” he slurs, “if I am first in your heart.”

I’ve played the game long enough to recognize that kind of addled desperation. This here is a booty projection, isn’t it, God?

To prove his devotion, God asks Abraham to kill Isaac, and hey — did you guess that the grim walk to burn your son on the whim of an insecure madman was a rad spot for another song break? 

It is pretty impressive that the show manages to set a chill guitar riff to immolating a child — that’s a rare skill set only featured here and on Danzig’s solo acoustic album: Danzig With Myself.

Abe builds the altar and places Isaac upon it, and something in the Chinese sweatshop children animating this must have really resonated with the idea of a father sacrificing his kid due to forces beyond his control, because they drew the hell out of Abe’s grief. Nothing says “the unexplainable sadness of burning my boy” like this face, which I call “halibut getting a colon exam.”

Of course an angel descends to stay Abraham’s hand, but only once they’re absolutely sure he was really going to do it. Like this was all a mean-spirited prank whose punchline is ‘watching parental love die in your child’s eyes.’ God just jumps out from behind a cloud, busting a gut like “hahaha, holy shit! You were really gonna do it! I can’t believe you were actually going to do it. You shoulda — pffthahah — you shoulda seen your face! Y-you were hgghkkhahaha — you were all:”




This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Dean Costello: The Meanie of Weanie, the First Chair Cello of Hot Dog Jello.

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UPSETTING DAY

HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT YOUR GAY SON

If you don’t understand or accept your gay son, you’re probably not used to good news, but I have some: there’s a book called HOW TO UNDERSTAND AND ACCEPT YOUR GAY SON (Even if you’re not sure you can). It’s the perfect guide for someone absolutely repulsed by basic human decency, but also willing to read a book on it.

HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc) spends most of its 155 pages answering tough questions a proudly ignorant person might ask a gay expert. It’s a best-case scenario debate between the world’s most patient person and the bronze medal winner in the Gay Son Hating Olympics. These hypothetical interactions were mashed together into a vaguely book-like structure by a gay couple in… holy shit, 2015!? This wasn’t written from an Arkansas AIDS pandemic in the ’80s? It seems impossible that while we were watching the Night’s Watch and the Wildlings form an uneasy alliance, there were people driving to the suburbs and telling the Barnes and Noble clerk, “Maybe y’all can help me out. I found a penis in the boy’s mouth and, well, before I put him down I was lookin’ for the latest instruction manual on gay.”

Here are, word for word, some of the obvious questions answered by HTUAAYGS(Eiynsyc):

You probably guessed the answer to most of these questions is something close to “no,” but much closer to “no, you goddamn psychopath.” The book tries to take irrational hate and fear and respond to it rationally, which is kind of satisfying and seems like it should work, but you can obviously look around and see how it doesn’t. For instance, if you believe a 680-year-old man named Noah built history’s largest zoo on a cruise ship using year 🩮7đŸ‘â˜„ technology, you don’t change your mind when you enter second grade and find out everything about it is fucking stupid. And if “the God” told you your gay son was an unnatural pedophile, you don’t tell that God to fuck off because a book goes, “Actually, in several functional ways that’s not technically accurate.”

My point is, I’m not sure how effective this book will be at fixing bigot dads. Not only because of the nature of the problem, but because these authors might not be experts on gay culture. For one thing, they say in their book there is “strictly speaking” no such thing, but also look at the gay son on the cover. Are you telling me a gay teen showed up to picture day with no product in his hair? And look at how it’s been cut. That’s worse than cheap– this kid stuck his bangs in a carnival ride and told them to let it rip. The gayest thing this kid has ever done was ask his mom if he could buy the WWE 2K Randy Orton DLC. Which means the publisher did not set up a cover shoot with an out-and-proud teen model– these assholes scrolled through stock photos until they found a kid who looked kind of gay. It’s probably as tone-deaf as asking your son if he’s a bottom, and gave me more than enough bread crumbs to find their source.

The cover comes from an Adobe stock photo called “Mother and Son Smiling in an Outdoor Setting” which was also used, and this is true, by a military school for troubled teens and a software company specializing in apps that prevent truck drivers from looking at their phone. And like with all stock photo shoots, the models moved around doing weird shit for a few more pictures. Which means the rest of the article is just this:

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Watch: ASMR Roleplay 🌭

You know what ASMR is: softcore porn for audiophile Quakers. “It’s not sexual,” every ASMR fan tells you, even as they moan at your lip smacking and shirt crinkles. I don’t blame you for trying to pull this con, ear-freaks — I once tried to convince my boss that anime was about more than just panties, but he still wouldn’t let me watch it at work. Maybe that’s why ASMR has given up on playing coy, and its major YouTube channels are now one errant camera pan away from switching to PornHub. They’re all about “ASMR roleplay” these days, and yes, it is definitely sexual
 albeit in a deeply lame, deeply upsetting way.

Here’s how your typical ASMR video starts:

And right off, there’s a problem. If this isn’t pornography, why are all of the big stars either cute young girls or terrifying middle-aged men doing everything they can to secure a spot beside the cute young girls? 

She’s doing ‘finger flutters’ by way of hello — wiggling her fingers in front of her microphones so you can hear the sound that flesh makes. We are zero seconds in and this is where I would quit watching if you weren’t paying me to. I hate it instantly. It sounds like gelatin corduroy. It sounds like parasitic moths trying to wiggle their way past your protective earmuffs. It sounds like lotion feels in your belly button. 

ASMR Girl goes right from those saucy little finger-scrapes into a whispered ad for NordVPN. Hope you’ve always wanted to watch an average girl talk quietly about server capacity and — actually, most of you do want nothing more than that. Well, enjoy the next three straight minutes:

No joke: Three minutes of amplified whisper commercials for secure porn browsing. Is this foreplay for a creature I can never understand? Peter Thiel isn’t this hard for capitalism and privacy, and his only goal in life is to start an island society where they don’t prosecute sex crimes.

Only once you’ve explored every orifice of NordVPN’s excellent deals do you get to your low-stimulation pornography: 

Yes, it’s alien play. Softcore quiet alien play. Like the third naughtiest fantasy of an extremely sheltered librarian. 

The saddest part of these ASMR videos is how ubiquitous nitrile gloves are. Like it would just spoil the average viewer’s suspension of disbelief if it looked like a woman was willing to touch them with her bare hands. They’re so far gone from actual human contact that it can’t even be a part of their fantasies anymore. ASMR fans go soft the moment they see cuticles. Right now some poor noble nurse is catching COVID-19 because MRS. ASMR outbid the hospital on the last box of Kleenguards. 

I’m not even through one video and I already feel bad about making fun of the people who watch these. 

Every one ends with the woman begrudgingly admitting that she likes you — not loves you, not wants you, just tolerates. That’s the lowest bar for a fetish this side of Limboner play, which is exactly what it sounds like, but somehow lower.

Here’s the same girl demonstrating that she’s willing to get hit by every obstacle in the nerd’s fetish gauntlet.

Yes, it’s ASMR Shrek Roleplay, in case you were looking for the exact sequence of words to say out loud to get your parents to stop loving you. It’s like a phonetic hack, Snow Crash-style, designed to kill the human brain’s capacity for respect. She does twenty minutes of “non-erotic” whispering in a terrible accent that veers between Scottish, Russian, and drunk Jamaican. It is more than enough time to prove that improv is not her strong suit. 

We dive off into several long tangents about the real estate agent that sold her the swamp-shack, and how you might want to invest in swamp property yourself, and who the fictional real estate agent is married to, and all the while her audience is just waiting for her to whisper “moist” so they can close this incognito tab.

Please notice, even here, the gloves. ASMR fans will tell you it’s nothing dirty — it’s just to augment the noises the fingers make, and then they’ll run a wet tongue over their dry lips and start rubbing the dirty swatch of burlap in their pocket.

There you go: if what you need to finish is a disinterested 22 year-old wearing green makeup and a vest made out of towels whispering you off to lyrics by Smash Mouth, please clean yourself up before you go back on stage at the Douglas County Fair, Smash Mouth.

“Cranial nerve exam porn” sounds like something so hardcore you can only film it in the most Russian parts of Russia. But no, this shit is like the schoolgirl fantasy of ASMR Roleplay: So commonplace it’s barely considered deviant. These videos are as omnipresent as they are perplexing…

It’s always the same — an attractive female doctor gently inquiring if you have something wrong with your brain. It is the single most attainable fantasy for ASMR fans, who could make this a reality by taking two steps: Making a doctor’s appointment, and admitting to why they made that doctor’s appointment.

Here’s a ‘gang-nerve exam,’ which is something I thought I made up for my Shadowrun fan fiction.

Never tell me this isn’t pornography. Look at those usernames: Maybe ‘Seafoam’ can pass for a crystal hippy, but ‘Matty Tingles’ is a man for whom the San Fernando Valley is a way of life. 

You all need to be more careful about what gets you off. What if you head out to ick on some poor doctor and they actually find something wrong? Now you’ve tied a fetish to a diagnosis. Ask any James Spader movie why that’s a bad idea. 

Here’s Lice Inspection ASMR Roleplay:

Finally, a sexual fantasy for the Deep Nerds that involves precisely zero stretches of the imagination.

And these are the ones that pretend at respectability! They’re the Showtime of the ASMR world. Here’s the Cinemax: 

Yes, this is an ASMR video. Yes, it is a Misery-style porn roleplay about lumberjacks. No, don’t look it up even if you think you’d be into that kind of thing. Making an ASMR video doesn’t guarantee you’ve got a good voice, or any acting ability whatsoever. This one is like listening to your dentist do low-confidence bondage.

What if you’re as into furplay as you are out of dignity? Have some ‘Werewolf has you tied up ASMR Roleplay.’

Listen to six minutes of a guy doing a subpar Skyrim NPC impression about erotic maulings. Try not to laugh as he tells you his werewolf name is “Maurice.” Fail when he fucks up the syntax and accidentally rhymes during his climax line, “I think it is high time to embrace you in the night with just one bite.”

Or hey, if you’ve found that the slow dissolution of the civilized world has made you unspeakably horny:

No teasing here. Rest assured, suicidal whisper perverts, you will quietly fingerbang the coronavirus before this is done.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Fuck Will.i.am’s Entertainment Tonight Theme Song Remix

Art is subjective and fluid. It’s transformed by intent, viewer, and hindsight. So when someone says, “That’s the worst art ever made,” even if they’re right, it won’t be true for you or when put into any other context. Until 2012. In 2012 a vast, well-funded undertaking produced the worst piece of art ever under any circumstances and for all time.

I’m of course speaking about the time Entertainment Tonight commissioned Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas to remix their theme song.

At the time, Will.i.am was a touring, Grammy-winning pop performer and by the show’s estimation “the biggest star in music,” so he was certainly paid well for this project. The show put the full might of its publicity engine behind it teasing it over and over and over with behind-the-scenes segments. Yet with all these motivating factors, when they asked him about his vision for remixing the song, this is all he had prepared:

He was fine with that take and didn’t suggest a second one. They aired it on TV. I don’t think anyone should put their full heart into a behind-the-scenes look at their Entertainment Tonight theme song remix, but this fucker didn’t even think about what he might say during the town car ride to the studio. If he gave a single thought to a single talking point in the make-up chair before the shoot it would have been more professional and coherent than this. He was given hundreds of thousands of dollars, weeks of lead time, and all he had to offer when asked about his remix was “REMIX,” and “WASHED OFF. BUBBLE BATH.” If a birthday clown left with one of your sons and drove into a river, you would say, “There goes a man better at his job than Black Eyed Peas frontman, Will.i.am.”

All videos associated with this monstrosity, especially the finished song, are scrubbed from the Internet as quickly as anyone might link to them. If you’ve never watched it, it’s a grim humiliation. Entertainment Tonight spent so much time and money to make a functional utility jarringly unlikeable. They would have been better off developing a food delivery app that adds “Go back to Mexico” as a special request whenever you order from a Brazilian restaurant. So instead of embedding a video that will be gone before you read this, I’ll be telling the story of the Entertainment Tonight Will.i.am remix through trading cards.

Seriously. What the goddamn shit was Will.i.am talking about with the FRESH manifesto? It’s like an evil gamesmaster put a camera on him and cackled, “Mr. i.am., the bomb you are sitting on is set to go off if you ever stop saying words you loosely associate with FRESH. And your powers are already waning! ‘BUBBLE BATH? FRESH GETTIN’ READY TO GO!?‘ Nonsense! Imbecilic nonsense! Your time is almost u– wha!? The rest of the breakthrough sensations The Black Eyed Peas!? Fergie! Taboo! apl.de.ap!? H-how!? I saw your Best Friends Mystery Van fall into the crocodile chamber!”

To make matters worse, this corny fuck delivers every word with a fruity sass that seems carefully designed to conform to the least generous expectations of an Entertainment Tonight viewer. He drags out each vowel with a head revolution like Whoopi Goldberg reading for the part of “Impatient Airline Passenger.” Is that what he thinks Nebraska grandmas find fresh and def? Because it’s hard to believe Will.i.am walks around all day doing a mean-spirited JackĂ©e impersonation.

Entertainment Tonight knew the final video was him with his hands in his pockets looking like a dumb shit while he listens to the now worse Entertainment Tonight theme song through headphones. And they thought you wanted to see how they made that! Well, guess what, flyover states: they stuck him in front of a retractable green screen while he looked like a dumb shit. Hollywood magic revealed.

Normally when a show gets a new intro song viewers think, “Hey, is this a ne– oh, what’s this any other thing much more interesting?” Entertainment Tonight doesn’t have that same healthy perspective. Entertainment Tonight will bring on three guest hosts for a panel about Dean Cain building a snowman and what it means for the rumors of Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s new Malibu bicycle. They do not have a handle on what’s interesting or important. Obviously, since they thought “Asshole adds drumbeat to theme song” was worthy of weeks of content.

But no one has ever misjudged potential value quite like this. If you left Hooters thinking your waitress wanted to both marry you and invest in your Brazilian food delivery app, you would be better at gauging other people’s interest than Entertainment Tonight‘s producers. These sneak peeks into each and every moment of Will.i.am’s creative process revealed a man attacking a project with all the passion of a Chuck E. Cheese chef assembling a full pizza from unfinished ones. Dogs watch their own gallbladder surgery with more enthusiasm.

“How can I take a piece of American culture and… translate it ’cause you know, that-that theme song… represents families sittin’.” – Will.i.am 

The relentless interviews with this bored man each revealed less than the last. There was almost a courage to it, like watching an old man fight his way out of an iron lung to excavate the empty mine that gave him emphysema just 713 more times. But it was also cruel, like holding a gun to a baby’s head and demanding it write a three act play about its filthy diaper. No one should know with such certainty that Will.i.am is an empty-souled idiot, yet Entertainment Tonight spent outrageous amounts of resources to demonstrate only that.

Every few segments, Will would turn to camera and talk directly to the viewers to try to help them wrap their heads around exactly what he was doing. You see, he was taking a theme song, which is a fancy term for a piece of music specifically for a TV show, and making small changes t– you know, I should let him explain. Here’s how he put it (weird pauses are his):

“Nah’m… the re-mixer. Producer. Reeee… flipper? … Spicer-bringer.

For this great.

…

E.

T.

American. Anthem.” – Will.i.am

It’s important to remember these events were not suddenly thrust upon Will.i.am. He knew this entire procedure would be under scrutiny. He knew he would be expected to speak on the topic of his musical and remixing abilities. But the man is incapable of expressing a single coherent thought about what should be his main area of expertise. He is so bad at this. If Will.i.am and a gorilla speaking sign language were up for the same music teaching job, not only would the gorilla get it, every administrator who came into contact with Will would forget why they ever loved music in the first place. Over the course of these 13,000 behind-the-scenes interviews the only thing I learned about Will.I.am’s artistic inspiration is that it’s functionally the same as flatlining on a toilet. When you are hungover and waiting for a Pop Tart to come out of the toaster thinking, “Almost Pop Tart, headache, butt itches…” you are operating at a higher level than 22 Will.i.ams.

After the editing vultures had picked dry the skeleton of Will.i.am’s stupid fucking sound bites, Entertainment Tonight moved on to the scrapbook slideshows. These were literally severals of photos of people taking pictures of Will.i.am in the same tiny studio as all the interviews. So like a more stationary version of what they’d already shown you, but without any sound. It’s the very limit of what a human mind might call “something.” And to anyone unironically interested in the photos taken during the talking about the making of the 28th revision of an entertainment news program’s theme song: how do you function? Is everything your manatee mind looks upon a fascinating wonder? When you see a triangle do you stop for hours to wonder what it is and how many men it would take to count all its many sides? Will.i.am fans, I am ashamed of my disgust for your effortless contentment.

All of this, all of it, led to the final reveal: forty seconds of an embarrassed man dancing off-beat to a tune you never considered could be ruined. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours were spent on a journey to get a bored channel surfer to think, “Nothing good is o… wait, was that always the song? It sounded shitty as f- oh, rad: Bloodsport! And the kumite hasn’t started yet!!!”