Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, Part 2🌭

Last week I wrote about CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, the epic tale of triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler, a community theater puppetmaster who solved the Fermi Paradox with racist puppets, In Part 1, I focused solely on the art of Robert J. Gold, a maniac spending his retirement years on this CGI porn asset cinematic universe. It’s sort of like a horny Skibidi Toilet for boomers, if that helps.

“Huge tittied woman has a lot of real problematic puppets” has not historically been a dealbreaker in my personal life, but this idea had its time and place, and that time was 1993, and that place was the clearance bin in a KB Toys. Any reasonable person would discard this premise as the misfiring of dying neurons, and decide to stop huffing paint. But these puppets ate Robert J. Gold’s brain until all that remained was lust and puppet scat. He wrote a 70 page graphic novel, a 136 screenplay, and a 70,000 word novel of the exact same story. Just the Hand Puppet Commando origin story over and over again, and it all looks like this:

Absolute visual poison. Glossolalia for the eyeballs. A lens flare siphonophore held together by a network of beams, bolts, and rays. It somehow reads exactly like it looks:

That’s enough to medically diagnose a hyperactive child. It’s what a Decepticon tells his dementia nurse before transforming into a rhombus. I can tell you with authority that reading this is what it feels like to get hit on by Ernest Cline. Robert J. Gold has spent years of his life writing a faithful transcription of a car wash. But, remember, horny.

This is a comic book, screenplay, graphic novel and animated trailer that could’ve been a math doodle. It’s somehow both not enough and way too much effort. Robert J. Gold has been working on this for, let me check-

Twenty years. Two decades of bothering his wife and co-workers with puppet accents he swears are ironic. A quarter of a lifetime spent tweaking the computerized feet of a virtual model meant to be plowed by Sonic the Hedgehog. I’d say this is a man in love with the first and only idea he ever had, but nothing could be further from the truth. Robert J. Gold is literally an idea man.

That’s exactly the Photoshop I would’ve made as a punchline for the obsessive puppet guy’s life. But that’s a real book. Not only that, Simon & Schuster published it. They’re one of the Big Five, the largest and most prestigious traditional publishers in the world. That doesn’t mean it’s legitimate, just that Robert J. Gold got paid actual money for it. It’s important to remember “inventor” has always been a polite term for grifter. If somebody told you they were an inventor in the 1990s, that meant they were going to sell you a headscratcher for $40 and skip town. Not so with Robert J. Gold, he spun that one book into an empire, culminating in the most prestigious of 1990s publications: the interactive CD-ROM.

Suddenly, the design sensibilities of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos make total sense. It does have “1995 Educational CD-ROM learning to fuck” vibes. The weird thing is, when you drill down into Robert J. Gold’s actual inventions, they get very boring. A 1990s grifter usually claimed to have invented a working hoverboard or a cancer preventing straw. Robert J. Gold claims to have invented a flat panel display controller and a new kind of energy bank. Boring shit. Legitimate sounding shit. But then there’s this-

That’s the grifter we want! Scam inventors love to say they worked for the military, and it’s not always a lie. DARPA owns a lot of hilarious patents because some charismatic weirdo came in with a slick PowerPoint presentation about a Battle Whistle. Let me guess, Robert J. Gold tried to sell DARPA some kind of beam-based weaponry.

Wait! Laser puppet.

Wait! Racist laser puppet.

Once again, that sounds worryingly legitimate. There’s no way the horny CGI puppet guy actually invented a real flashbang grenade in use by SWAT teams and militaries. Let’s track down that patent.

No mention of lasers, beads, or magnets – the holy trinity of ‘90s grifter inventions. This might be real. There’s one way to check how legitimate a patent is, and that’s to see who’s cited it. Check who might be using elements of the invention outside of the owner. If it’s a patent for some stupid scam device, the only thing in the citation section is the original inventor wearing a fake mustache, trying to run the scam again under a different name. Here’s the citations of Robert J. Gold’s flashbang grenade.

That’s too many for a scam. Let’s pull out just one:

So he really did invent an influential form of the modern flashbang grenade back in 1992, it truly was used by military and police forces around the world, and it’s still relevant decades later. Normally when I go looking into sexual puppet maniacs all I find are crusty felt holes and unhappy churches. The occasional cannibal. I have never found a real life weapons designer. But it makes sense. It’s all there in the work: Each and every racist puppet has a bright beam, a stun ray, or a novelty grenade. Like all the best authors, Robert J. Gold is subconsciously writing his past trauma into his current fiction.

Hold on, “trauma” is a spoiler.

Before we find out what that trauma is, we have to start at the beginning. Flashbang grenades existed for a very long time, but they did not work very well, and they weren’t used often. What you think of, when you think of a flashbang today – that all started with Bill Nixon, who invented a more stable version in 1988. He filed his patent and began widespread distribution in 1990. Flashbang grenade usage skyrocketed around the world, but especially in the US. And Robert J. Gold rode this wave right behind Nixon, with his own patent just a couple years later in 1992.

Flashbangs aren’t fun and harmless like in video games. They’re a modern plague. They were only meant to be used sparingly, in very specific scenarios. If you have to incapacitate a hostage-taker and only probably but not definitely kill the hostages, you use a flashbang grenade. That’s pretty much it. There just aren’t many times where throwing an explosive at somebody is the safe option. Flashbang grenades are still bombs.

After people like Bill Nixon and Robert J. Gold made them mainstream in the ‘90s, military and police started tossing flashbangs around like party favors. This resulted in at least 50 deaths, but probably more like hundreds.

Considering that statistic only goes back to the year 2000, it may be thousands. What was once used solely by elite military forces in hostage scenarios, was now being used by yokel cops to detonate the local Boy Scout troop. Did you think that was a fun joke example? That’s not a fun joke example.

Oh, good. He only exploded himself, and not the troop of Boy Scouts. Because those were the two options he left himself in that scenario. Real quick: Why do Boy Scouts need to know how to deploy a flash grenade? Do they work on bobcats? Troop 187 may not have learned the proper way to stun and disorient a chipmunk, but they did learn a little something about the militarization of the American police force that day.

This motherfucker was so desperate for 12 year-old nerd respect that he gave himself stun grenade leprosy. Somehow that was the last straw for inventor Bill Nixon. Ten years after his invention started exploding minorities, he helped turn a cop into a flashbang zombie and that was his Oppenheimer moment. He got out of the game.

If teaching Boy Scouts what the Rapture will look like weighed heavily on Bill Nixon’s conscience, the time a cop threw a flashbang into a baby’s crib must have ruined him.

This kind of guilt destroys a man’s soul. Bill Nixon must have built a Silent Hill in his mind because of that shit. He probably spends every dreaming moment sneaking past Boy Scouts with beams for eyes, trying to collect shredded baby clothes.

Look, I know this is darker than you want to go in a comedy article. I’m sorry. The line isn’t always clear, but for future reference it helps that we found it. It’s right here, between a cop blowing himself up in front of a Boy Scout troop, and exploding a baby. Both things made possible by the modern flashbang grenade. They’re truly an atrocity. The State Supreme Court of North Carolina recently classified them as “weapons of mass death and destruction.”

Which should theoretically make their use on civilians a war crime, but that’s American Exceptionalism at work.

We’ve lost track of Robert J. Gold’s whimsical puppets a little bit.

We needed all this groundwork to establish that flashbang grenades are a disaster, that their reckless use should probably be a war crime, and is for anyone but American police officers. But flashbang grenades are still a tool, and misuse of a tool comes down to training. Who’s training these cops?

The manufacturers, of course. Usually for a lucrative government contract fee. Ideally, that training would teach police to use flashbangs only in situations where it’s absolutely necessary, and not to huck them at protestors or air-drop them from helicopters.

Which I only mention because they’re two specific citations of intended use in Robert J. Gold’s patent application.

We all know the best people to teach how and when to use a potentially lethal product are the ones who make money every time it’s used. If it’s good enough for the pharmaceutical industry, it’s good enough for handgrenades. Robert J. Gold not only invented and sold grenades to the police force, he was responsible for some of that training everyone agrees was reprehensible. Some men are consumed by guilt. Some men stick in guilt’s throat. Bill Nixon is over here in Flashbang Hill fistfighting Pup Tent Head, meanwhile Robert J. Gold has this on his LinkedIn profile.

Accuracy Systems, Inc. of Phoenix, Arizona is where Robert J. Gold taught, and presumably learned flashbang safety himself before going on to start his own facility, First American Counter-Terrorist Systems. Let’s look into his alma mater:

Ooh, you don’t love to see headlines about explosive decapitation in your handgrenade certification school. This happened at Accuracy Systems, Inc. in 1989, just before Robert J. Gold filed his patent in 1990. Gold doesn’t list a date of employment, but the timeline implies our beloved puppet maniac was working, training, and possibly building his own future curriculum under Accuracy Systems owner, Chuck Byers, before Byers’ incompetence exploded a man’s head off. That’s me being generous, because the alternative is after.

You better believe we’re going off on a Chuck Byers tangent. If karate movies taught me anything, it’s that you can kill a guy by slapping him in the nose. If I learned two things, it’s that the student is only as good as his teacher. Robert J. Gold learned his Flashbang Style from Handgrenade Sensei Chuck.

First day, straight to grenades! Most places don’t let you work the cash register. If 1/7th of a Wendy’s Grill Skills program doesn’t sound like enough training to assemble sensitive explosives, you’ve got more foresight than Chuck Byers.

Somehow, this is not the decapitation story. This is what most places call criminal negligence, but in the grenade world is known as dramatic foreshadowing. By “grenade world” I mean “Arizona.” Not only did Chuck Byers not learn to change his ways from this, he told the recently exploded man to walk it off.

Put some dirt in those stumps and get back to work, pussy. In my day, we exploded ourselves to work at the grenade factory, where we exploded all day and then blew ourselves back home to our terrible wives, who were just a collection of handgrenades stuffed into a dress.

Why didn’t it stop there? Why would anyone watch a fellow employee explode themselves over the treeline, and still clock back in after lunch? Cult! The answer is cult.

Holy shit, I think there was some actual karate in there. This story truly has everything. We started at harmless horny puppet maniac and somehow wound up here, in an Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult. A marketing team’s favorite thing to ask new clients is “describe your brand in one sentence.” 1900HOTDOG does not have a marketing team, but we do have our answer.

The one good thing about a 1980s Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult is that they mostly just blow themselves up. Maybe some ninjas. Not the case with Chuck Byers and Accuracy Systems, Inc. They became a national threat.

Throughout the late 1980s, UPS was shipping boxes full of live handgrenades without so much as a FRAGILE sticker. That’s a Naked Gun gag. It feels like we’re veering off into slapstick.

Imagine slipping on a banana peel while carrying a box of live grenades and filing a workman’s comp claim for a tweaked back. The clerk would think they’re on a prank show. They’d start looking for hidden cameras and BAM! That’s when you explode. In the comedy world that’s called an Arizona Misdirect.

Eventually the government would catch up to Handgrenade Sensei Chuck…

And slap him with a fine slightly less than the cost of a well-loved jetski.

If you know anything about right wing maniacs, you know that “a minor fine laughably inadequate for their crimes” is enough to drive them completely insane. Here’s a letter Chuck Byers later wrote to congress about the worst military aviation crash in history, the Gander Air Disaster. It killed 248 American soldiers. In the letter, Chuck Byers spins up a conspiracy about a nuclear backpack bomb and a secret Iraqi sabotage mission-

All pretty standard right-wing nutjob stuff, down to the obligatory Oliver North. So what did Chuck Byers want out of this? The bad kind of attention? Backpay for the top-secret backpack bomb he developed? To cut a novelty rap single with Oliver North where they rhyme “and I’d like to say” with “handgrenade?” Nope, all Chuck wants is credit…

For killing the American soldiers.

Byers claims that an LAPD Bomb Squad officer recognized the explosive that blew up the Gander flight, and that Accuracy Systems, Inc. manufactured it. Byers wants congress to know he totally did that. He built the bomb that exploded the plane and killed those troops. It’s just that he thought it was for the CIA. Now, you might be asking yourself: What kind of lunatic wants this? What kind of absolute face-chewer wants false credit for 248 murders? What could he possibly get out of this?

He’s trying to get out of the accidental death charge at his explosives factory! Chuck Byers, Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult Maniac, thinks the best way to prove his innocence in a single accidental death charge is to implicate himself in a CIA conspiracy that killed 248 US soldiers and also, just for fun, the attempted assassination of the President of the Philippines. It’s like trying to clear yourself of a trespassing charge by saying you’re a 9/11 hijacker who jumped out right before the plane hit.

Because this has all the hallmarks of a political thriller, you’re probably picturing a fancy bomb at the heart of this scandal. Something with tubes full of blue liquid and multi-colored wires. No. Chuck Byers wants credit for putting napalm in a Coke can.

Okay, that’s enough about Chuck Byers. I only mention him to prove- I’m sorry. I’m being informed that’s not enough about Chuck Byers. He would eventually be convicted of a kickback scheme with the military unit who killed Osama Bin Laden.

Okay, now that’s enough about Chuck Byers, I only bring him up to talk about-

Hold on. Sorry, again. I just learned Byers sold his Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult compound without removing the grenades, and it’s still exploding people decades later.

We got off track again!

The important part is that Robert J. Gold, the horny racist puppet guy, probably got his grenade training from Chuck Byers, and definitely worked at his explosive decapitation factory. Gold used that knowledge to start his own flashbang grenade training facility, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that flashbang grenades are a disaster that cost many American lives due to the dogshit training methods around them.

Just knowing he was responsible for burning the shape of an exploding cop into the retinas of a Boy Scout troop was enough to do in Bill Nixon’s conscience. Robert J. Gold followed in Nixon’s footsteps back in 1992, and his products were likewise responsible for the surge of flashbang deaths in the ‘90s and beyond. He’s apparently cool with it. He’s still got it on his LinkedIn profile. He proudly lists his certification in Booms at Sensei Chuck’s Huckin’ Hut to this day. He worked for and studied under a guy who wants you to believe he blew up 248 American soldiers with Napalm Coke. Somewhere in there was an exploding baby.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, this kind of thing fucks you up. The inventor of dynamite started the Nobel Prize to try to make up for it. Oppenheimer resigned out of guilt. Bill Nixon is on GameFAQs right now looking up how to beat the gunpowder zombies in his mind. Robert J. Gold used his American war crime money to obsessively recreate the same story over and over again. A story full of stun rays and novelty grenades. A story where the tiny, vulnerable creatures are actually strong warriors who would never be blown apart in a crib. A story about puppets, and beams, and bright lights, and beams, and explosions, and more beams, and regret. And titties.

Fetishes are birthed from trauma.

I’m not saying I can prove Robert J. Gold’s weird puppet gigantism kink comes from a repressed brain trying to absolve itself of explosion guilt. I’m just saying puppet research always goes like this.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jared Clack, who only has enough room in his heart for one Amateur Handgrenade Karate Cult.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Plasma Intelligence

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Miss Castaway 🌭

One of the inadequate ways we describe our hot dog site is “we create joy by excavating the debris of a broken world.” That’s not what we’re doing today. This isn’t one of those times where I find a wonderful catastrophe, where an artist’s ambitions and talents disagree hilariously. This is heartache translated into madness. Today I excavated only tragedy. Let’s talk about 2004’s Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls.

The movie is a spoof of seventy things across all genres, and I doubt I need to explain any further. It is random references to whatever with an almost cruel lack of jokes. It has the plot of every fourth grader’s first movie and the tone of that movie screened at their memorial service. The actors in it had no prayer of knowing which words from the script were meant to be the funny ones, so they deliver every line with a mix of boredom and wild guess. And it doesn’t help that their co-stars are untrained bikini girls and the future site of Pakistan’s most affordable CGI monsters. It’s worse than you could ever imagine, and some of that is failure, but a lot of it is foundational. If you were born after 1970, your sense of humor is simply too sophisticated to accept God from the Bible meeting the Incredible Hulk and R2D2 as a complete joke.

Let me see if I get my point across faster.

The auteur behind it, Bryan Michael Stoller, has directed four films starring Eric Roberts. One of them is about a Christmas dog, and another one is about a president dog. If you met someone who directed four Eric Roberts movies (two non-dog, two other) and also someone who married their 12-year-old niece, you’d remember it as the day you met two perfectly equal pieces of shit. But I bet there’s something on those movie posters you have questions about. Computer, enhance quadrant sector Michael Jackson.

What the fuck is Michael Jackson doing in this. There is no point in Michael Jackson’s career where you could approach him with a half-finished bikini script and say, “We still need to add a few Chewbaccas, somehow find $14,000, and come up with a name for our dinosaur pig, but this is a part you were born to pl– oh my god, JURASSIC PORK. Looks like shooting can start tomorrow! I assume you’re available, Michael Jackson?”

In the movie, Michael Jackson plays “Agent MJ” who is also the regular Michael Jackson and is… probably a spoof of his role in Men in Black II where he very briefly appeared as an alien named Agent M. It doesn’t matter. Michael wouldn’t know, and Bryan Michael Stoller wouldn’t know how or try to make it funny if it was. Maybe I should just show you; here’s 80% of Michael Jackson’s appearance in the film:

As I said, Agent MJ is also Michael Jackson, so when he appears in the sky, everyone’s reaction is “Hey, there’s Michael Jackson.” One of the bikini girls spurts, “Can you teach me how to moonwalk!?” Michael reads his lines like someone bought a Mark McGrath Cameo to tell you your grandfather got moved to hospice. And if it looks like Michael recorded it from an armchair in his den it’s because he did. But even still, how? Why!? Michael Jackson had been the most famous person on the planet for over 30 years. He may have acted like a squeaky little innocence sprite, but he was also a hard-working sex criminal who never met anyone who didn’t want something from him. You couldn’t trick him into this kind of gig, and he surely turned down things much better than this a million times. Why finally say yes to this unspeakable no-budget fart comedy written and directed by a man who argues with Eric Roberts’ manager about dog karate scenes?

I promise I’ll explain, but first, take a look at this fucking movie’s finale:

It’s frantic, inept shapes. A vomit of submediocre impulses. Michael Jackson could do anything he wanted, and he proved that by dying nowhere near any prison, so it is insane he chose to be a part of this. Did he get threatened? Blackmailed? No, Bryan Michael Stoller lured Michael Jackson into this trap by honeypotting him with his main weakness– childhood trauma. And I know this because Bryan accidentally confessed to it in the DVD extras. We’re done talking about the movie, by the way. Absolutely fuck that movie. We’re going to look at the dark manipulations that spawned it.

In the DVD extras, Michael Jackson and Bryan Michael Stoller share the same chemistry as Michael Jackson and someone who chased him into an airport bathroom. And that’s fine, there’s no way around that. If I was hanging out with Michael Jackson for the fiftieth time, I would say “Holy shit, you’re Michael Jackson; what’s it like being Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson!?” This is a real story: When I was a freshman in college I got second place in a fraternity beauty contest and my talent was Michael Jackson impersonation. I have been Michael Jackson at 19 costume parties. I took my wife and 18 less historically important women home dressed as Michael Jackson. I loved him so much, and the world will fall into the sun before we get another Michael Jackson, but my point is this: it is brutally obvious Michael wasn’t doing this movie as a favor for a close friend. He’s four thousand plastic surgery procedures being held on with aviator glasses, so it’s hard to read any of his expressions, but he does not seem to know or like this Bryan Michael Stoller guy.

Bryan tries to explain the complicated special effects they used to make it look like the Michael Jackson in the movie was not a frustrated, poorly lit man in his own library. It is a fascinating look behind the scenes at Hollywood magic. A real eye-opening treat for movie fans. Then they play all three of the lines Michael lazily recorded a few times. Not different takes, just the exact shots viewers saw in the movie, over and over. Bryan Michael Stoller took this seven seconds of footage and turned it into twenty minutes of DVD featurette and one third of the movie poster. Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls is a tiny morsel of Michael Jackson pulled tightly around the shattered bones of an idea, which is confusing because that’s also how you would describe Michael Jackson’s face in 2004. Again, I loved him.

This making-of featurette also lets us see a little of Bryan and Michael’s creative process. For instance, Michael sees his lines for the first time and Bryan goes, “I was thinking here, where you’re saying ‘she’s out of your life’ you could sing it, like in your hit song ‘She’s Out of My Life’?” Then Michael rehearses it, and because he’s a cute pixie baby with no clue how people behave, he fakes a little giggle. It’s brutal. It’s the same pity laugh you would give if a child’s last words were a knock knock joke. If you, as a writer, gave Michael Jackson a joke and he let out this condescending snicker, you would not only throw that joke away, you would vow to never write again. And yet Bryan Michael Stoller used this exact take, this rough footage of a cold script read-through that ended in his devastating humiliation, in the final film.

I don’t want to explain how hard the joke doesn’t land in the finished scene or how much a sudden Michael Jackson quip undoes the movie’s logic. It all sucks. Every time Michael Jackson appears it’s like they stopped the movie to play a slideshow of the director’s awkward trip to Neverland Ranch. But here in the extras, after they replay each second from that trip many times, from the same angle, we finally get an answer as to what the shit Bryan was doing in the King of Pop’s house. There’s no gentle way to put this, so here we go. Bryan says he wrote a screenplay based on They Cage the Animals at Night, an autobiography of a traumatized orphan, optioned by Mel Gibson to be co-directed by Michael Jackson. If I spelled everything right there, you should now feel the touch of Many’KinToo, Dark Lord of Bad Ideas.

So Bryan brought the author of the book, Jennings Michael Burch, out for a meeting with him and Michael. And surprise: it was so goddamn weird.

Jennings’ only friend as a child was a stuffed dog named Doggie, who he still had and brought with him to this business meeting. He introduced the filthy old thing to Michael Jackson who, to his credit, had no idea what to do with it. Jennings really thought Michael would be excited to meet it, but sentimental value doesn’t translate even to a magical love imp like Michael Jackson. He looked at it like it was somebody else’s birthday card and their name was Hitler Williams. If he still had lips we might have been able to read them, but his body language seemed to be saying, “Did you need one of my guys to throw this away for you, or…?”

The two men sat down to talk sadness, and Jennings gave Michael a second chance to give a fuck about his old stuffed dog. “Seriously, no thank you,” repeated the then-living legend. And this is where the fun ends. For all his talents, Michael Jackson did not know how to run a meeting, or have human conversations. The next words out of his mouth were, “I have a question. Um, with all the pain. And the stress, and the pressure. That you had to cope with.. did you ever? In your childhood… think about… it’s not worth it. Did you ever try and…”

Jennings finally understands what Michael Jackson is getting at in this casual meet-and-greet. He blurts out, “Suicide.”

Michael Jackson shrugs. “Suicide, yeah.”

Jennings says, “Definitely. Definitely.”

Michael Jackson patiently waits for his conversational skills to kick in. And after they don’t, he goes, “Yeah.”

And that’s the end of this fun behind-the-scenes look at the making of Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls, because Jennings has an emotional breakdown. Not about his attempts at taking his own life, but about the 1972 song about Michael Jackson’s pet rat, “Ben.”

“You brought me Ben. You brought me Ben,” he cries into the stuffed dog that failed to impress the King of Pop. And I’m not making fun of Jennings. Take away the toy and pick a better song, and this is identical to how most people probably talked to Michael Jackson. I simply want to remind you that every vanishingly precious Michael Jackson moment from this Eric Roberts sex “comedy” was shot right after this and from the same chair.

There are no right words to say to a man blubbering into a stuffed animal about the Jackson Five at work, so Michael hugs him and tells him, “That’s beautiful. That is so beautiful.”

With the hug complete, Michael tries to leave, but Jennings clings to him and whimpers, “Will we always be friends? Will we always be friends? Will we?” This is one question into their first fucking sit-down, and they have already Timecop-touched into a sadness blob. No production meeting has ever gone worse, and I was there when I asked Bas Rutten if he thought we should kiss. It is too much emotional trauma for a DVD extra on a straight-to-video titty romp by the writer/director of The Amazing Wizard of Paws. And I don’t know if this makes the story more or less tragic, but they never got around to making the film. Michael got groped by a hysterical man and coerced into the worst movie of all time for nothing. It would arguably be the saddest Michael Jackson story if Corey Feldman hadn’t written a chapter about their friendship in his book, Coreyography.

What is this story? Corey Feldman could have lied! We’ve seen pictures of him and Michael Jackson together! Corey could have said, “Yeah, we hung out a lot, I taught MJ how to navigate difficult conversations.” Or even, “We spoke on the phone, on a number I knew and did not have to guess by process of elimination.” He didn’t need to spend two pages detailing the process of going through every number, one by one, to find the one that reached Michael Jackson. Corey Feldman was friends with Michael Jackson the same way I was friends with exciting insurance rebates in 1998. This is a story about how one clever mathematician stopped The Cold Call Strangler, not a story of two best pals on the phone. Oh no, it’s not done.

If I’m understanding this, there’s a really good chance Corey Feldman has never spoken with Michael Jackson on the phone. By his own admission, Corey tried every number and most of them were not Michael Jackson, but if he did get lucky and someone picked up, he only knew it was Michael Jackson after 15 minutes of silence. And if the person who picked up started smashing the phone? That was Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee. Unless it was Michael Jackson himself, which Corey Feldman did not appreciate. It would arguably be the saddest Michael Jackson’s chimpanzee story if La Toya Jackson hadn’t visited Bubbles in 2010 to tell it Michael had died. Oh damn it, I carefully transcribed the whole thing.

In her 1089th desperate grab for Michael-adjacent attention, La Toya Jackson filmed herself shrieking for his chimpanzee to remember her, and it refused. It’s every kind of sadness at once, but its tragedy is eclipsed by the segment title Entertainment Tonight chose. “The Queen of Pop Visits Bubbles,” they called it. This is like saying “The Queen of Pop Pays Her Respect” to describe Michael’s nose glue lady dialing random numbers to find out where they’re holding the funeral.

After threatening to spit on her and then pointedly ignoring her, the ape has run out of ways to tell La Toya Jackson to fuck off. “Bubbles! Bubbles, bubbles!” she screams. “Bubbles!”

As panic sets in, La Toya tries screaming her own name at the chimp. It doesn’t work, and some long forgotten feeling, something close to self-awareness triggers inside her. “People can see you,” it tells her. “Make an excuse for this,” it pleads. “He– when Michael called my name he would– h-he… LA TOYA!” she stammers.

After screaming her own name doesn’t work, and her excuse for doing it trails off into gibberish, La Toya tries one more cope. She claims the chimpanzee, like many humans it is so like, is too shy to remember La Toya Jackson. It is not going at all how she pictured it. She is La Toya Fucking Jackson and was expecting the full ape enclosure celebrity treatment. These chimps and their bizarre game of pretending not to be familiar with La Toya Jackson disarmed her so much she completely forgot to tell her brother’s chimp he died.

Bubbles needs to hear this terrible news from a friend, so La Toya decides she can’t leave without doing what’s important. She goes back to the cage alone, and…

… grovels for Bubbles to remember her. Bubbles, you remember her. You remember her. You do, Bubbles. You do. Tell her, Bubbles. Bubbles? Are you not listening to me either, Bubbles? Bubbles? Bubbles. Bubbles.

Bubbles, don’t do this, Bubbles.

Bubbles.

Bubbles.

No one knows what La Toya was looking for that day. Maybe she expected the chimpanzee to turn to her and say, “La Toya, of course. I remember you from several head shapes and nine faces ago.” But it never happened. She begged, cried, and demanded, but the ape refused to remember her. She worried there was something she was forgetting to do, something having to do with this fucking dick monkey, but whatever it was couldn’t be that important. You remember her, right, Bubbles? It’s La Toya, Bubbles. La Toya!!! You remember her, Bubbles. Bubbles? Alright, forget it, Bubbles. Bye, Bubbles. You remember her, Bubbles. Bubbles. Anyway, that’s my review of Miss Cast Away and the Island Girls! ★ ⯨

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, who legally cannot discuss their time on the Miss Castaway island.

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Dr. Cooper and His Friends🌭

Remember Today’s Special, the Canadian TV series that instilled the deep desire to spend a night in a department store in an entire generation? That show featured the expressive puppets of Noreen Young, and as a result we once got to see an adorable mouse learn about the horrors of alcoholism firsthand from a ginned-up photographer.

But Today’s Special wasn’t Noreen’s first gig. And it might surprise you to learn it wasn’t even her first use of puppets as a vehicle for an anti-drug message. Slither aside, Curt Hiss, because a member of the goddamn Order of Canada is about to make you look like the fucking garbage you are.

That’s right, these are professionally made, government-awarded doobie-smoking puppets. Let’s meet Dr. Cooper and His Friends.

You aren’t going to find much about Dr. Cooper online. It seems to have been a series of videos created by Noreen Young for the Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario in the early ’80s to be shown in schools. There were six in all: “Butt it Out”, “Never Listen to A Bottle”, “Alcohol, The Inside Story”, “Pas de Pot Mon Pote”, “Keep Off The Grass”, and “Nothing To Sniff At.” Of these, only the last two are available online. Oh, and “Pas de Pot Mon Pote” is a French saying meaning “no luck, my friend,” but also might be a weed pun? Like most Canadians outside of Quebec, I speak only grade school French and the talking pineapple that taught me didn’t explain drug slang.

But that’s another story. Let’s get back to Dr. Cooper.

We open on Dr. Cooper’s lab and oh, shit, right off the bat we’ve got a song. It’s about making choices and getting the facts. Great! I’m sure these puppets will provide us with the undiluted truth on cannabis consumption.

There’s one weird line here, though, where the unseen singer says “All you know is getting high makes you feel small / ’cause the higher you go the harder you fall.” I’m not sure that’s how it works? For less experienced drug users, weed doesn’t really have a comedown in the same way that, say, MDMA or cocaine do. But this was the ’80s, so there was still a lot we didn’t know about drugs. Dr. Cooper was on the forefront of that research.

Check this out: he built a machine that just blasts cigs. That’s its whole job, to rip darts twenty-four seven. Melvin, Dr. Cooper’s dog assistant, is puzzled. “I thought we already did tobacco,” he says. “Let me stick my face directly into these chemical fumes,” Martha the mouse says.

I can’t lie, it’s surreal to see a Noreen Young mouse puppet that looks kind of like sweet, innocent Muffy from Today’s Special breathing in an entire 1985 Burger King smoking section’s worth of secondhand smoke. But hold on, that’s not tobacco!

It’s marijuana! Do not touch — in the ’80s, pot had the same contact-fatality effects on puppets that fentanyl has on police officers today. Martha has a puppet conniption, screaming deliriously about how she smoked dope before careening across the room in the full throes of reefer madness and immediately passing out.

Imagine this: you’re a researcher studying drugs. You come into your lab one day to find your assistant collapsed on a table. What’s your first thought? Do you check to see if she’s ok? Dial 911? Start a fire to cover up your crimes and move to Manitoba before the RCMP gets wise?

If you answered yes, you aren’t cut out for this line of work. Dr. Cooper’s first and only thought on spotting his unconscious lab assistant is: “Sometimes I think Martha gets a little too excited to be a scientist.” Man, she has tiny puppet mouse lungs! Proportionally speaking, she just inhaled an entire Cheech and Chong movie’s worth of the devil’s lettuce! But Dr. Cooper is remorseless and without feeling. He’s detached. Cold. The perfect scientist. Martha could learn from his example.

Today, Dr. Cooper is running a special government project on weed that I guess involves building a drug-smoking robot and hotboxing his lab. It also involves Mike.

You might think Mike seems like a nice fella. He’s a self-described “expert” on pot who’s been smoking dope for years. But Mike is a fool. He is a guinea pig. He is grist for the mill of science, no more deserving of our concern or respect than the drug-smoking machine. He asks Dr. Cooper if it’s alright if he lights up a joint. Go right ahead, Dr. Cooper says. Go right ahead. You’re part of the experiment, Mike. Smoke your accursed hemp and we shall observe its effects on the dried-up husk rattling around in your skull that was once a human brain.

Here is the experiment in its entirety: Mike is going to try and do his job while baked. In this particular instance, his job is installing a coat hook on the wall of the lab. Almost immediately, Mike starts fucking it up.

Which, fine. I get the idea: drugs impair your coordination and abilities. But Mike’s been smoking weed for years while somehow holding down a job as a handyman. So what gives? Well it is the ’80s, so maybe Mike’s used to stems and seeds and Dr. Cooper hooked him up with the high-grade medical stuff. The alternative explanation is that Mike gets like this whenever he’s high, which by his own admission is pretty frequently. This opens up a much darker possibility: that Mike is not among the titular Friends of Dr. Cooper. He is, instead, a pitiable homunculus, a subhuman figure of ridicule and derision whose claim to existence extends only so far as he is able to continue putting various psychoactive substances into his body for the Canadian government.

Hold on, though, Martha says. Isn’t smoking dope against the law?

Smash cut to three grinning, racially diverse officers of the law shouting “stop!” It’s time for the title number. Keep off the grass! Keep off the grass! Don’t play the fool! Who knows where you’ll end up when you break the rules?

I despise these cop puppets. Puppetry by its nature is a whimsical art which can bring a frog or sexually voracious pig to life and touch even the most jaded adult with a sense of childlike wonder. To construct a cop puppet, then, seems like it should run contra to the puppeteer’s code. Especially a cop puppet who sings “Can’t smoke it, grow it, give it away / Buy it, sell it or send it in the mail.” That’s the kind of bastard slant rhyme you can only get away with if you’ve got a tiny puppet badge and gun.

The police officers sing “These are the rules we must obey / so let’s have fun the legal way.” What, like beating up racial minorities and shutting down gay bars? Is the law to be the measure of morality? I pay your salary, you jovial fucks. Don’t make me call the puppet ombudsman.

Get me out of here. I want to see Mike again.

Uh oh! Mike died from weed inhalation.

Just kidding. He took a little nap and now he’s back grappling with the Dark Souls boss that is an incredibly straightforward home improvement project. Witnessing this, Dr. Cooper’s assistants have questions. What happens if you smoke dope over a long time, like Mike?

Well, Dr. Cooper explains, most people who smoke heavily also take a lot of drugs, which complicates things. So maybe Mike’s on PCP and meth too? But there’s more, Dr. Cooper says: dope changes you. “You don’t get along with your friends anymore, your grades fall, you can’t play sports as well, and you forget things.” I’ll be generous and give him three out of four. But not getting along with your friends? The famously ill-mannered and difficult to get along with stoner?

Mike protests: he smokes dope all the time, and look at him! Dr. Cooper smiles smugly, saying that he couldn’t have put it better himself.

Again: if Dr. Cooper believes that smoking pot is turning Mike’s brain into slurry, why not try to get him help? Because, of course, Mike is no friend of Dr. Cooper. But Mike isn’t the only puppet who’s getting zonked out of his gourd in this series. Let’s move on to “Nothing to Sniff At.”

There’s only a short segment of this one available, courtesy of our pals at Retrontario. I don’t know if it would make more sense in context, but the tone here is decidedly more gothic and surreal.

Melvin wakes up in a darkened lab, screaming about how “it isn’t fun” and how “he’s got to stop them.” He tries to run out of the room, straight past versions of Martha and Dr. Cooper that I can only describe as afro clown draculas, while menacing organ music plays.

But woe, hallucinating puppet dog — there is no escape from the fortress of the afro clown draculas.

Melvin then simply pops out of existence, and we see that evil Martha and Dr. Cooper are watching some children huff glue over a CCTV setup. “That’s it! Go on… inhale deeply!” Evil Martha insists, statistically giving at least one Canadian child an extremely specific fetish which they now pay artists thousands of dollars a month to bring to life again and again.

Evil Dr. Cooper excitedly tells Martha that glue can ruin the inside of your nose and cause brain damage. Now a pair of children appear on the screen and he exclaims draculously, “Alright! Glue… for two!”

He’s genuinely psyched that these kids might die from concentrating and inhaling glue fumes. Martha is less sanguine. Even as an evil hallucination, she doesn’t have the bold determination to transgress normal human ethics required of a true scientist.

Melvin reappears, hollering “don’t listen to them!” Then he wakes screaming up amidst a veritable smorgasbord of inhalable adhesives. Dr. Cooper (real, non-clown dracula version) is untroubled by this, simply saying that Melvin performed the day’s experiments without waiting for him.

But what exactly was the experiment? Gather up a bunch of volatile chemicals and make a dog honk on them to see what kinds of brain damage he gets? Dr. Cooper runs down all of the things that chemical fumes can do to you, up to and including fucking killing you to death, and we’re out.

The strangest thing about “Nothing to Sniff At” is that there are two versions of it. There’s the English one we’ve been discussing so far, and a separate French version. I don’t mean that there are two dubs — I mean they seem to have shot two separate videos using different versions of the same puppets.

Compare and contrast. Here’s Melvin in the English version again:

And here he is in the French one:

What the fuck happened to him? That French-Canadian glue must hit a lot harder. As they say in Quebec, “attache ton chapeau quand tu renifler de la colle, c’est le sperme du diable!” But it’s not just Melvin. The draculas look different, too. Or maybe they just cranked the lights up because they weren’t afraid to show those glue-sniffing Francophone kids the true face of evil.

Melvin even has different hallucinations in the French version. The bricked up door is gone. In its place are a series of nightmarish faces which rush towards the camera.

How can we explain this? Maybe French-Canadian kids in the ’90s were just more hardcore and needed to be really terrified to stay off the glue. I don’t know. I do know that nearly all knowledge of Dr. Cooper and His Friends has been wiped from the internet.

For decades, the Canadian government has tried to hide its felt-covered shame. No more. Those responsible have now been brought to justice.

Dr. Cooper died under house arrest after being convicted of using government funding for unsanctioned human and animal drug trials.

Melvin the dog was reunited with his twin. Together, they ran an unsuccessful ballot campaign to ban glue from Canadian households.

Martha smoked weed again and died.

Mike started a podcast with two of his friends who thought they should record their conversations because they were so funny but also, like, really smart? He currently makes several million dollars annually through direct sales of his personal nootropics track.

Drug-smoking machine was rescued and placed with a loving family on a farm in Saskatchewan, where it still resides today.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham, who was inspired to build their own drug-smoking robot but forgot what they were doing halfway through.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Hunk Week: Big Lenny🌭

What is a hunk? Must a hunk be handsome and well-groomed? Or might he simply be, as the term suggests, an enormous, unwieldy slab of beef?

For too long, a restrictive understanding of hunkdom has stifled inquiry into the subject. On the occasion of this Hunk Week, I submit that we move towards a more expansive definition. And so I present to you an article that I probably could have written at any time over the past two years of my tenure at this website, but decided to try and shoehorn into this celebration of studly meat monsters purely to trouble the category of hunks.

Maybe I’m just yearning to trouble some categories because it’s been years since I left grad school. Or maybe it’s because following trends is for fucking cookie cutters. Yes, it’s finally time to talk about the man, the myth, the misfit maniac himself: Big Lenny.

I have been obsessed with Big Lenny for over half a decade now. He first came to my attention as well as that of the broader community of online lunatics through his association with an amateur bodybuilder named Jason Genova. In the 2010s, Genova acquired the particular sort of internet antifandom that blossomed in the dark corners of forums and social media as a result of his boastful YouTube videos and his odd behavioral and verbal quirks. He had a habit of coining terms like “pissening,” a combination of “sickening” and “piss” that, much like “bimonthly” can mean twice a month or every two months, can refer to something kicking ass or sucking shit.

The Genovaism par excellence is “enjoy the ments,” a phrase derived from his stuttering pronunciation of the text on a motivational poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Commenters soon became addicted to the “ments” generated by Genova’s antics. He was precisely the kind of attention-seeking, dim-witted, self-aggrandizing maniac that the internet loves to hate. And as he became aware of his “fans,” he attempted to mobilize them into a personal army of pisstroopers, directing them against companies who declined to sponsor him, other bodybuilders, and eventually just about anybody who annoyed him in a practice he dubbed “Order 66.” Yes, that’s from Star Wars. Yes, he called himself the Dark Lord of the Sith. Yes, he tried to have a hip-hop career under the name J Cream where he rapped about having vanilla flavor and being on disability.

Through Genova, the internet was introduced to a colorful cast of characters who came to be known as the Delray Misfits, named after the World Gym in Delray Beach. Of these men, one in particular stood out. I mean, fucking look at him.

Big Lenny, aka Leonard Persin, aka Fat Fucking Lenny, aka the Tom Platz of Abs, aka Mr. 18 Forever was a sight to behold. He was an enormous, bald man with yellowing eyes and skin darkened with the drug Melanotan to the point that he confounded the average white American’s keenly honed race-sense. His physique fluctuated depending on whether or not he was gearing up to compete, but even at peak performance he exhibited a huge, muscle-bound stomach as a result of steroid use, a condition known as Palumboism.

Big Lenny was, in other words, a freak of the human physical form. He pivoted to bodybuilding after failure to achieve success as a football player — his father’s dream for him — and subsequently being kicked out of the air force. Certainly, Lenny attained a unique look as a result of his training regimen. But if that were all there was to him, he never would have developed the cult following that he did. See, Big Lenny embraced the identity of the freak. It was a key part of his philosophy, which he frequently expounded upon, mouth and nostrils twitching, in the early Delray Misfits videos and later on his own YouTube channel, The Big Lenny Show.

In Lennyism, a freak is an individual. A misfit. A maniac. Opposing the freak is the “cookie cutter,” someone who wants to be like everybody else. Someone who fears and avoids pain. Who lacks discipline. Who is addicted to porn. Who uses drugs. Who has a lot of tattoos. Who is a vegetarian, maybe, or a communist? It’s not always clear.

Lennyism is a chameleonic belief structure which requires years of study to even begin to understand. For instance, is banging transgender women, or “tantentens” in Lenny’s dialect — referring to a tanned babe who looks like a ten and has, ideally, ten inches — an enjoyable pastime or a sin? Is America the land of opportunity or was it, as Lenny once suggested, a mistake to declare independence from the white-run British Empire? You may as well ask if a dog has Buddha nature. Mu.

Anyway, we’re not here to talk about Lenny’s confusing and oftentimes objectionable philosophy. Judge not a man by his words, but by his deeds.

Deed the first of Big Lenny: furtively gobbling an entire raw egg. Please, watch the entire video. It’s twenty seconds long. It will be the best twenty seconds you spend today and on each subsequent day of your life.

It’s a perfect piece of film. First, there’s the exaggerated crunch as Lenny pops that egg into his maw. He turns to walk away, before the cameraman Andrew asks him “what the fuck was that?” The question causes him to swivel towards the camera, his expression that of a dog caught in the act. We push in on Lenny’s face, remnants of the egg visible between his still-chewing teeth as he insists that he doesn’t have anything in his mouth, eyes darting back and forth wildly. “Is that a raw egg?” Andrew asks. Lenny knows he’s busted. No use denying it. “Don’t let the viewers see this,” he pleads. Too late. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it all.

There’s something that troubles me about this video, and it’s not the obvious thing. See, egg shells contain perfectly good calcium. No sense in wasting it — unless you’re a cookie cutter. No, that’s not what bothers me here. Having viewed this footage thousands of times, what perplexes me is why Lenny should feel any shame or insecurity about his actions. Isn’t caring what other people think of you the mark of a cookie cutter? Should not a freak be proud of his freakishness? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If you taser Big Lenny, will he fall down?

That last one wasn’t rhetorical. This is deed the second of Lenny: weathering the storm.

“It’s not if I’m ready or I want to do it, I have to do it,” Lenny says before exiting the World Gym one morning, nostrils flaring in anticipation. He pulls his shirt off and stands on a grassy patch of land by the parking lot, explaining that he is afraid of needles. The camera pans to the right, revealing a boy who can’t be older than eight or nine years old. By volume, he is approximately one eighth of a Lenny. The boy raises a Taser as Lenny flexes, saying “this is for you, Christina!”

Brief aside: Christina is not Lenny’s girlfriend, wife, or relative deceased in a tragic lifting accident. She is Christina Broccolini, a French-Canadian actress best known as one of the hosts of the 2000s series Mystery Hunters, which is essentially Unsolved Mysteries if you replaced Robert Stack with perky teens. It’s unclear how Lenny became aware of her, but he believed she was a kind of “spiritual healer.”

Cynics will say it was a dangerous cocktail of GHB, HGH, and exogenous testosterone which allowed Big Lenny to stay standing after the Taser prongs hit him. I believe it was his faith in Christina Broccolini. Regardless of the explanation, there are the plain facts on film: Lenny stumbles backwards, grinning and grunting, then tears the wires out of his stomach, leaving the darts embedded in his flesh before launching into a diatribe about cookie cutter drug addicts.

Both the Taser and egg incidents took place at the Delray Beach World Gym. But gradually, we got more of a picture of Lenny’s life outside of bodybuilding, and it wasn’t especially pretty. So, in 2017, the misfits put up a GoFundMe asking for $250 to hire a cleaning service to deal with Lenny’s pad. They received four times that within a span of hours. You might be thinking that a thousand dollars to clean someone’s house seems like a lot of money. Brother, it wasn’t nearly enough. Readers of a sensitive disposition and anyone currently eating may want to skip this next section.

From the jump, Lenny’s house is a nightmare. Not pictured here is the patch of ground where he says he pisses daily, next to the outdoor washing machine he once took pictures of a trans sex worker urinating atop. A lot of Lenny’s life revolves around piss, and his house smells so bad his associate Brad can’t even bear to step inside.

And it’s hard to blame him. The place is terrifying, a filthy mire of trash and unidentifiable stains.

And it probably goes without saying, but the bathroom looks like something out of a survival horror video game that also kills you in real life three days after you play it.

But the piece de resistance in Lenny’s pad is the steak pan he keeps in the freezer. It’s there for a “very good reason,” he says. The reason is that he used to just leave it out unwashed after cooking his steaks and it started to fester with maggots. That didn’t deter him, though: he just ate the maggots. Free protein!

It’s hard to say if he was joking or not, since Lenny displayed some self-awareness of his image and was keen to capitalize on his niche microcelebrity. And so, when Jason Genova retired from bodybuilding and disappeared from the internet, and the Delray Misfits scattered as the World Gym shut down, he teamed up with Robert “Robzilla” McGowan Jr. to shoot video content out in a society that was entirely unprepared for contact with him.

Around this time, Lenny also said that he was taking on personal training clients. And here I have to admit that in the darkest depths of my pandemic malaise, strung out on what at the time I thought was a lot of ketamine but which turns out to be much less than it takes to coup the United States government, I considered taking Lenny up on his offer. It was these videos of Lenny unleashed upon an unwitting world that made me reconsider.

Here, Lenny mumbles “oh my god, Marcia Brady” around a mouthful of blonde stranger toes. In another video, filmed at a Boca Raton hotel with Jay Masters, aka “The Bedroom Bully,” Lenny invades a boomer pool party, remarking to the camera “I would imagine these older women are really good at anal sex” before picking one up and swinging her around. She and the rest of the women react to Lenny’s presence as one might to a loose gorilla — with nervous acquiescence to its whims and a conspicuous effort not to show it their teeth.

Lenny follows this up by delivering the world’s worst karaoke rendition of REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You.”

In light of these episodes, I decided against traveling to Florida to get molested by a racist orange Shrek. Instead, I paid Lenny to do a Cameo for my Dark Souls character.

And as it turns out, that was the closest I would ever get to meeting Big Lenny. The life of a maniac misfit is a hard one, and a few years ago they started dropping one after another. Jay Masters passed away in July 2023. Robzilla followed him on August 14, 2023 at just 31. And in October of last year, Big Lenny died at 54 of congestive heart failure.

What is Lenny’s legacy? Some funny videos? A dedicated following of forum dwellers who probably followed his life more closely than anyone who actually knew him? A trail of rattled Floridian female gym-goers? All that, certainly, but there’s one more thing I seldom see mentioned in connection with him.

In a video where he describes the origins of the term “cookie cutter” — he learned it from a man who looked like Columbo, apparently — Lenny mentions that he’d been training at the World Gym in Delray Beach since it opened. And you know who else was working out there back then?

Yes, 9/11 hijackers Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. It’s impossible to know for sure, but it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that during their short time at the gym, the pair were on the receiving end of a Big Lenny lecture about porn addiction. Or, the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center might have witnessed Leonard Parsin lean over his gym bag and stuff an entire egg, shell and all, into his hungry mouth. Would such a hypothetical encounter have redoubled their resolve or, perhaps, instilled a fleeting moment of doubt in their aims? None can say.

All I can say is this: Big Lenny had weird energy. He was a man whose incoherent, deranged worldview was no doubt influenced by the prodigious amounts of Soviet chemicals, testosterone, and MDMA he routinely consumed, not to mention his abusive upbringing by an overbearing father. In many ways, he was a piece of shit. In some, he was an inspiration. He was a contradiction, a nontraditional hunk, a testament to the extremes which the human organism can attain with sufficient drive and single-minded madness.

So RIP Big Lenny. Thanks for the ments, I’m glad I never met you, and may flights of big-dicked lady angels sing thee to thy rest.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sarcophski, a walking slab of beef who always eats the entire egg, shell and all.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Holy Heroes Catholic Legos🌭

The LEGO crucifixion of Jesus Christ. What? Huh? Yes. No! Yes. Sorry. The LEGO crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The Holy Mass: On Earth As It Is In Heaven teaches Catholic ideas with LEGO bricks. To do that, they re-enact every moment of Christ’s agony, with LEGOs. They pair a Mel Gibsonian fixation on Good Friday’s literal blow-by-blow with a tedious child’s fixation on staging minifigs. They don’t just put a LEGO Jesus on a LEGO Cross. They give Him His trademark unfair spear wound, straight from a LEGO-Legionnaire.

Is this choice of medium appropriate? No! Of course not! A tasteful Biblical artist doesn’t plunder their kid’s brick bin. Even the most penny-pinching Calvinist knows you gotta class up your God Stuff. Decent worshippers require decent basics: a crucifix in a nice hardwood, an altar-flanking pair of dove tapestries, one gross of the second-cheapest candles. Meanwhile, this book is by and for Catholics. Catholics spend. I promise Martin Luther failed to thesis-nail that out of us. In order to achieve Catholicism’s awe through finery, you must use one of the Trinity Of Fancy/Faith-y Art Supplies (oil paint, Carrara marble, Minecraft). This dopey LEGO book isn’t on that level. It fails to achieve Catholicism’s deluxe-trim sanctity. However, this book is the LEGO equivalent of Papal Splurge. It’s the highest-quality publication I’ve ever hotdogged. One copy cost me almost $40. That sum I rendered bought me a glossy 225 page hardcover graphic novel. Almost one thousand pictures of LEGOs. Its makers customized, hacked, and staged several Biblical epics worth of Danish petrole-toys. Unfortunately they photographed an unimaginable heap of LEGOs without learning to focus their camera. This LEGO Bible gets blurry. Still: there’s no lensing issue they can’t overwhelm with minifig crowd size.

This book is hard to summarize. Why? As far as I can tell, it’s written by gentle doofuses. Catholics with more wisdom or more cunning would’ve stuck to one premise. The Holy Mass: On Earth As It Is In Heaven has four premises:

1. Explain the elements of Catholic Mass.

2. Summarize the entire Christian Bible.

3. Recruit boys to become priests.

4. “Typology”

How would you do all that in one book? Also what’s “typology”? Patience, my dear Doggzchildren. All shall be revealed. Don’t make me construct a ruler out of LEGOs and slap your wrists with it, after also constructing a nun’s habit out of more LEGOs. LEGOs! What can’t they build? Their adaptability is the thrilling opposite of Catholicism. This book feels like the moment in a spicy novel when LEGOs and Catholicism consummate their enemies-to-lovers kiss.

Back to the book’s premise: yes, this book covers all four premises. They don’t do that well. Reading this book feels like running a marathon by running one hundred miles, in one hundred directions. It counts, but why? Are you some kind of sadist? Do you get off on pain? If you do, would you like to join the fake monastic order from The Da Vinci Code? If you answered “yes” please don’t hunt me. If you answered “yes” in Latin, you have to tell me.

Now: please truly notice those premises. The second one is a doozy. This book does it. They depict the entire story of the Christian Bible in LEGO figurines. That requires some, uh, choices in terms of bricks. Such as their “cover it? don’t cover it?” approach to The Beginning.

There’s also a focus on the entire Book Of Exodus. Probably because the actual LEGO company did an Egyptian set at some point, I assume? Either way, behold God’s blurriest Old Testament miracles.

We also discover the wonders of the Virgin Birth, and get a tasteful depiction of Mary’s pregnancy. I say “tasteful” because I assume there’s a creepy Sexual LEGOs fandom in some online pit or darkweb or subreddit. I refuse to check. I choose to be confident the opposite of Sex-LEGO-Reddit is “to depict ‘preggo’, glue an anodyne plastic dome on a boobless minifig’s frontals.”

These Bible tableaus see-saw between high effort and low effort when it comes to miracles. Here’s LEGO Pentecost:

It’s pretty alright yet pretty mid. They did Photoshop up that heavenly dove. But they hot-glued weird hot glue drops on the foreheads and called it “firewisdom”. Similar half-effort goes into the angels. One of them is the best panel in the book. They made a badass Archangel Michael swing a flaming sword at a LEGO Satan…

… another page presents another LEGO Satan ruling HELLEGOs. It’s all sincerely impressive…

…until you turn the page, and see the next angel. The angel who announces The Immaculate Conception is a winged cornball with slant bricks for legs.

This book also features what I can only describe as “LEGO Catholic Saint Baseball Cards.” Generating these seemed hard. It involved a lot of hacking LEGO Hair Bricks to look like baldness and tonsures.

Have you ever played “peekaboo” with a baby? I assume you get the same experience if you approached the authors with a minifig, take its Hair Brick off, and reveal its default baldness.

Overdue disclosure time: I grew up Catholic. Is that relatable to you? “And also with you?” Ha ha. That’s a li’l joke for us Former Catholic Kids. (The game show judges also would’ve accepted “And with your spirit?”) Due to my upbringing, I took a big interest in this book. I was also surprised to learn a few new pieces of saint lore. For example: Saint Francis Of Assisi (the one who likes animals) had so much of a connection to Jesus, he developed stigmata. I learned that from this book that presents Catholicism through LEGOs. Guess how they presented that stigmata?

Wow. No stigmata could be less respectful or more sanitized. Either go all the way and Photoshop some hands-gore, or yada-yada the grimness as aggressively as my Sunday School teachers did.

When “Gay and Gamboling Mo” posted this book on the Discord, I had questions. Why is there a book cover where LEGO Jesus dies for our sins? Is one of our sins the creation of LEGO bricks that will never biodegrade? Who published this book? Why were they able to grab “Holy Heroes dot com” before anybody else? Is it a sin to found a Catholic learning company that’s so profit-motivated, both its website and its parent organization don’t qualify for “.org” domain names? And how empowered am I to citizens-excommunicate “Gay And Gamboling Mo” from the Catholic Church? I don’t know if you Hotdoggin’ Youth Groupers know the latest slang, but I do, and one common street term for homosexuality is “Gamboling”.

After asking one real question and then wasting a lot of time, I ordered this book from HOLY HEROES DOT COM (a project of THE SOPHIA INSTITUTE DOT COM). Its back cover features the smallest load-bearing legal disclaimer I’ve ever seen.

Its contents offer greater nightmares. At least three elements of this book are weirder than crucifying LEGO Jesus or summoning LEGO Satan. For example: the introductory pages. This doesn’t need an intro. If you bother, make it faff. A basic “thanks be to God”, then on with the show. This book’s first pages ignore my too-late tips. They detour into priest obsession. They dedicate the book to priests…

…followed by a prayer that readers will decide to become priests…

…followed by a poem titled “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest”.

“The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest”. What a phrase to print in Comic Book Font From Internet. Also how dare you, book. You shall not dogwalk me into a crass joke about The Bad Priests. How cut off from culture do these authors have to be to sit down, in this decade, and title their Catholic poem “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest”? It’s 99% of the crass joke! Jokes about pedo-priests are like jokes about Nazis, or Bill Clinton. An overused premise about unpunished criminals. I thought the last “priests/altar boys” joke died off years ago, in the alley behind the dingiest ChuckleHut. Nope! Wrong! Turns out this book’s brickster dullards stumbled into a new joke, through the self-judo of turning the force of their earnestness against themselves. That’s the only way you title this “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest.” I wish they’d re-title that title. The famed poet “Author Unknown” won’t stop you. I could think of a hundred alternative titles in the time it takes to ignore one homily. I could get a better line than “The Beautiful Hands Of A Priest” if I used CathGPT.

Speaking of creepy priest hands, this book spends way too much time with the star of its cover. “Father Joshua” isn’t your typical Catholic priest. He’s a LEGO minifig with a confusing “in midst of charley horse” peg-face. Or if you’re nasty, a “peg-face” peg-face.

Don’t worry: Father Joshua doesn’t do anything weird. Admittedly, he maintains that “Cenobite describing pain and pleasure” facial expression at all times. He also makes us watch him get dressed. That part has a purpose. F-J demonstrates the range of priestly vestment colors. Fun fact: those colors correspond to the Catholic calendar. Is this type of basic information about Catholic Mass included in the LEGO book about Catholic Mass? No it is not. Father Joshua does not go over that calendar element. Instead, Joshy Boy assigns a vague vibe to each vestment color. He does this in the tone of a middle school principal running the one annual assembly about Why Character Counts.

These vestments are also hilarious in the broader context of the book. Why? They’re delicate miniature clothing, made with enormous care… and that care did not extend to every other minifig’s outfit. Much like the Satan/Angel disparity, I cannot overstate how distracting the minifig outfits are in this book. Some of them are intricate textiles I couldn’t sew in a thousand years of trying. Others are whatever was painted on the standard LEGO sets these folks wasted. The funniest example is one of this book’s TWO COOL TEENS. I skipped this part of the format till now. TWO COOL TEENS are the connective tissue for every Biblical scene and priestly goon-grin in this book. The TEENS even invite you into the book from its cover.

Let’s take a closer look at the TEENS. “Cynthia” is an Irish-ish gal. Throughout all 225 pages of the book, men mansplain Mass to her. Is this evangelism? No. It’s more patronizing. The book specifically establishes that she’s been to Mass every week for a long time, and only got around to forming basic questions about it when a man helped.

The main mansplainer is our other TEEN. His name is “Fulton”. His character design is Han Solo Fred Durst.

You see it, right? Han Solo Fred Durst. The exact head of a LEGO Fred Durst, atop the body of this standard Han Solo minifig.

It’s like a cruel joke about the perfect celebrity for ten year old boys in 1998. When I opened this book, and saw “Fulton” on page one, I said “Han Solo” out loud to my cats. Then I wondered if that minifig’s chin-notch is the Durst goatee, or a Durstian jaw-dimple, or a third Durst Feature beyond my layman’s understanding. Any answer fits. You couldn’t customize a more Bizkit Brick.

I’m pleased to share a Fred Durst quote with you. He once lamented his red backwards ballcap as his “clown costume”, i.e. a social prison. To my delight, the LEGOTEENDURST escapes that prison, in the most upsetting way. Late in the book he removes his cap, because you can’t wear a hat in church. When “Fulton” takes his hat off, it should result in the common mortal struggle of matted-down hat hair, or the common LEGO Man head situation of “plain.” Instead, LEGBIZTEEN removes his cap to reveal an uncanny perfect LEGO Hair Piece. It feels like he replaced his hat with a Poxco Pocket Toupee™.

He’s even more Solo-ish now…but it’s sad? Also are you aware of the relationship between the LEGO brand and Star Wars? Twenty-odd years ago, Star Wars saved LEGO from a flirtation with bankruptcy. Now there are endless variations on Star Wars LEGOs. To the point that most of the interesting clothing options for LEGO minifigs are Star Wars characters. Especially if you want, say, a LEGO figure whose clothes-paint resembles interesting textiles and robes. This book accidentally turned most of The Greatest Story Ever Told into a sacrilegious Lucasfilm/Bible crossover event, because Jedi kind of wear monk/disciple/history shirts. “Luke Skywalker is a lot like Jesus if you think about it,” says the torso of this book’s Jesus. “And these blast points… too accurate for Sand People,” replies the chest of Thomas.

One of this book’s four premises remains. It’s called “typology”. “Typology” is both separate from Star Wars and the most Star Wars-coded idea a religion could offer. You might’ve assumed “typology” has something to do with fonts and typefaces. You also might’ve thought “typology” refers to any of the dozen-plus definitions of the word “typology”. You’d be wrong! Wrong, in twelve or more ways! You’re even dumber than the Sith Lord Cain, who slew the Jedi Padawan Abel with a red lightsaber or a Darth cubit or Noah’s Star Destroyer.

“Typology” is a profound Catholic concept, claims this book. “Typology” is the astounding revelation that the Old Testament of the Bible foreshadows the New Testament of the Bible. Surprise: the first half of the Bible relates to the second half of the Bible. I know what you’re thinking: “duh.” Or “yeah? probably?” Or, “I’ve been to a church service around Christmastime, and it featured the key Bible passages that relate to Jesus’s birth, because every church does that every year, so I’ve heard about the Old Testament prophet Isaiah predicting a Messiah will come, and the Messiah will be born to a virgin, and that prophecy was known way back in Isaiah’s time and Jewish people spread it around so that’s the plot reason the Three Wise Men in the New Testament bother to look for a Messiah. Every Christian on Earth knows the gist of this. Regardless of whether you believe in Christianity, that’s one of many simple ways the two halves of the Bible link up with each other.” Good job if you said that last thing.

Anyway: what is “typology”? “Typology” is a dumber and more pointless way of seeing parallels between the two testaments. Here are some examples. The examples are insights like “both Testaments involve blessings” and “both Testaments feature mountains” and “thorned plants existed.”

Kings! Kings plural! This proves the Catholic Bible is true, because the hearsay in the New Testament has symbolic relationships to the hearsay in the Old Testament, if you treat both sets of hearsay like those “match two pictures” flashcards for toddlers. Here’s another description of “typology”: two major cultural works, created decades apart, have matching easter eggs. Does that sound familiar? It might if you remember that notorious clip of George Lucas talking about the story beats in the Star Wars prequels. How is this LEGO Catholic book getting even Star Wars-ier? I need this book to stop throwing my mind in Sarlacc Pits. Or that lion’s den Daniel escaped. Which this book would probably depict with plastic tentacles.

Do these authors know they don’t need to reinvent the wheel? They can repeat other people’s Catholic ideas. That’s fine. That’s encouraged! For two thousand years, Catholics searched for meaning and wisdom in a shifting series of scriptures and papal bulls. Monks spent centuries becoming some of the only literate people on three continents, just to wring more value out of one sacred text. The makers of this LEGO book take that proud tradition, skim it maybe, and end up saying “it’s like poetry, sort of, they rhyme.” Then they turned most of the members of The Last Supper’s so-big-you-phone-ahead restaurant reservation into Obi-Wan Kenobis.

In my hotdoggery, I’ve discovered intentional evil. I’ve found malfeasance, and scammers, and a movie’s producers exploiting one Chinese actress in order to foist Versailles Pierce Brosnan on a billion moviegoers but then losing that audience and shelving their movie for a decade because the government of the PRC shamed the actress for alleged tax fraud and by extension a lack of patriotism. You know: the three kinds of bad things. This book is different. I’ve skipped its authors’ names and backgrounds because they seem fine. I think they 100% mean well and love (Catholic) God. The stumbles and shallowness and Obvious Jedi in this book feel like honest mistakes. The blunders of an outsider artist. A parodist could never.

That said: I wish these dinguses picked a lane. Do one thing well. Either explore deeper faith, or hack better LEGOs. Either google “Thomas Aquinas”, or branch out and make Star Trek minifigs like a normal weirdo. Nobody benefits from this clusterfaith of a book. Just like nobody benefits from HOLY HEROES DOT COM’s product lines of hacked LEGO sets, depicting boring Catholic situations.

Faith is a mystery. Capitalism is a machine. I’m just one little guy making the best of those powerful forces. So I can’t complain if any of this plastic garbage works for anybody. Whatever raises you up on eagle’s wings, amirite? All I know is this: no matter how skilled a writer they give it to, there will be a creepy, shrunk-the-kids, grope-your-blood-cells vibe to a franchise starring “Father Leopold: The World’s Smallest Priest.”

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Adrienne Hisbrook, a LEGO theologian trying to justify why the baptism set has sharks.