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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Dealing Effectively With Idiots 🌭

Our story today is about idiots, but it doesn’t start there. It started in prison, with our author getting his skull bashed open by a homemade morning star:

That is an excerpt from a webpage written by a mysterious, unnamed karate master advertising access to a secret move. It’s a move he invented as a teenager that made him King of Supermax, and it can be yours if you order now. Obviously, this is completely awesome, so I’ll let him continue:

You’ve maybe already spotted something about the author’s writing style– he never says something once and clearly when he could repeat it again and again across twenty sentence fragments. You’ve fully read the beginning, middle, and end of the story he’s telling, and he will tell it again hundreds of times. He goes on for 8808 words, and that’s real, I counted them…

If he ever sells a second fighting move…

He will technically have a novella…

A fucking sweet one.

Suspiciously similar to video games of the time, his enemies were muscled beyond human proportions and carried all manner of item pickups. But they were no match for our hero’s special… it was called the Blackout, a “controversial” move that does something no other attack does… amplify pain. The author somehow found a way to make attacks hurt. Let’s learn more.

This is going to sound crazy, but The Blackout sounds like a nose punch. Like, a punch to the nose. But that would be nuts. There’s no way. No way.

I mean, this is a nose punch, right? Sure, he added on some stuff about mercifully granting your enemy his pitiful life afterward, but this sounds like someone who got hit in the nose once and immediately knew he’d discovered life’s secret cheat code: it sucks to get hit in the nose. There’s no way this nerd has been in a real fi–

Holy shit. Okay, only a couple dozen people have eighteen UFC fights, so this is either a hilariously brazen lie or the author is a world-famous fighter I’m certainly familiar with. I’m rooting for the first, but both possibilities rule. We won’t find out for now, because he starts over on the story about him Double Dragoning through the supermax prison as a teenager, now with wildly different details:

There are now three thugs, and the ringleader has a shank equipped. Their only mistake was bringing their noses. Also, our hero’s “2 world championships” have somehow become “7 world fighting championships.” Which probably isn’t a mistake because he’s also smart now. “Great job on the prison tests,” said the warden! “You’re familiar with all the tests we give here in prison. Oh, your pain scores are also quite good. Hmm… a 9 in cooking as well; excellent stats all around,” added the warden character who never makes another appearance.

I’ve never wanted such a clearly fake story to be true more. The author beat every level of a fully armed prison and the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame inducted him for it! This is the story Frank Dux would have made up if he had a Super Nintendo. You’re probably ready to order one The Blackout now, but maybe you don’t spend much time fighting prison gangs and you’re wondering if the move has any uses other than self-defense. Yes! Here’s a story of how you can use it around the kitchen:

Do you have a sex criminal fucking your pork rolls? Not anymore you don’t: BLACKOUT.

I love every detail of this, but not everyone is a child molester defending his food impregnating den. Some situations don’t call for shutting off someone’s brain with The Blackout, which I still think is just a nose punch. Luckily, the author tempers his invincible supermove with a philosophy of peace.

The Seven Nations held a meeting! To vote on whether the wasichu who killed a prison with nose punches should take charge of their sacred peace pipe!

And they voted YES.

It was an unusual honor. Fucking insane, almost.

And he still has it.

He didn’t even throw it away.

So he can find it pretty quick if there are any pipe smoking emergencies in the Native karate community.

Where was he.

Sorry…

The author got a little lost during his free association. He went from “I never go looking for a fight” to “In fact, I was entrusted with our nation’s most peaceful artifact” in five sentences. Incredible.

Anyway…

He gets back to his sales pitch.

After thousands of words, the author still hasn’t shared his real name. But as he’s explained several times, he earned the prison nickname “BAM” from all the nose punchings he did. However, keep reading and he’ll “reveal the very disturbing way he earned his prison nickname.” I don’t want to spoil anything, but he got it from the obvious reason he’s already said many different ways. When you run into concentrated madness like this, it’s hard to know what exactly happened. Did he accidentally copy and paste every draft of his fake life story into the same document? Is this the top 30 entries in a Final Fight Coloring Book Writing Contest? Maybe this is just what your memoirs look like when you get hit in the head with many padlocks.

Wait, so the Blackout is illegal in the UFC? That means I was wrong about it being a nose punch. In fact, the only face attacks that are illegal in the UFC are eye gouges and fish hooking. And I hope it’s an eye gouge, because otherwise this man wrote a detailed guide on putting your fingers in your cellmate’s mouth.

Biting is also illegal in the UFC. It could be a bite? A nose bite? Assuming the author is honest and correct, two things he definitely is not, nose bite is my current best guess for the Blackout.

Finally, the author includes a call to action in his sales pitch. After an avalanche of redundant words he put a button going, “CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO OF THE FORBIDDEN NOSE BITE ALONG WITH MY PRISON SURVIVAL BO–” oh my god. Fuck. Did you see what he said!? Included with every order is the author’s full name. Amazing. Amazing in an unprecedented way. The fucking greatest bonus feature any karate move has ever included.

Well, the joke’s on you, Mr. X. Because sports keep pretty good records, and if you are 14 and 4 in the Ultimate Fighting Championship you are either Stipe Miocic or Ketlen Souza.

Except maybe you’re not since neither of those people bit their way through a prison. Or are 5’7″. I’m also told by the nighthawks they are not currently protecting the ancient peace pipe of the Seven Nations. Plus, and this might have been a mistake, you included the same identical graphic of your book six times except one of them has your real name:

So your name is Jermaine Andre, and no one is going to believe this, but you really were a 2012 inductee into the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame!

He was lying about most of the other stuff, but not by a lot! He actually does have a 14-4 record in MMA, but only one of his fights was in the UFC in 2000 (he lost to Lance Gibson by knockout) and he didn’t have seven world titles. Also, I can find no record of any prisons found full of dead bodies with missing noses. Still, it is the most unbelievable twist that this maniac talking about a secret unbeatable move had a real fighting career. This means he’s absolutely unteachably stupid, or he thinks you are.

Maybe it’s the second! Because clicking the link for Jermaine’s free (definitely nose biting) video brought me to a page with no videos and an offer to buy his prison survival ebook, along with his Navy SEALs karate book, plus FBI kung fu for $37! A $97 value! You save $50.00! Wait, that doesn’t sound right!

But I guess it is!

Something about a grifter ex-con who can’t remember things or do math made me wary to give Jermaine my credit card, so we’ll never learn what The Blackout is, though we all know it’s 100% a nose bite. However, now that I decoded his real name from subtle clues and the time he showed us his real name, I could do the next best thing to learning a secret move that can kill anyone– I could buy one of this idiot’s books. And oh my god, you’re never going to see this coming:

Jermaine, martial artist and excellent prison intelligence test taker, wrote a book on dealing with idiots in 2012. Why the duct tape? Is Jermaine kidnapping the idiot? Murdering them? Kind of, but reverse it. According to the… I guess you’d call it a “joke” on the back, Jermaine, the author gagging a prisoner with duct tape, is the idiot. And if you don’t read his book, this is how you’ll die. It’s dark! Strange! Also, reverse it again!

On the copyright page, Jermaine repeats the photo and says it’s now a non-idiot dealing with an idiot. Okay, we are not off to a great start, but it could be worse. He could have started with “Webster’s Dictionary defines idio–”

Oh my god, this book is going to be so goddamn bad.

Wait, forget what I said. This is going to be incredible. Jermaine is going to use his martial arts ability to, if I’m understanding it correctly, counter strike idiocy itself. Basically, this is aikido for dumb. Or to put it another way, if someone is stupid, you reverse it so it’s you who is stu… oh no. I don’t think this is going to work. Let’s give him a chance, though! The Seven Nations didn’t give him that peace pipe for nothing. First idiot!

This is… not what I expected. This is barely anything. I’m supposed to ignore a Road Rager? I thought the 8-Time Supermax Champion of Knife Prison would have a cooler way to deal with an angry driver than “nothing.” How about intimidating them by holding up one of the human heads you pulled off a shiv-wielding pork roll fucker on your way to your car. Why not roll down your window and jump onto their hood? This is advice you’d give a second grader being bullied by a first grader. Disappointment is too small a word for what I’m feeling. This is like running into Steven Seagal at a buffet and instead of telling you the secret of redirecting any attack he says, “Forks are useful for food, they are the ones with three pokeys instead of a scoop; use a separate dish for pudding. Plus, I’m not Steven Seagal. I get that sometimes.”

Oh, are you trying to manipulate me? I’ll ignore you– reversal! We are only on the second idiot, and Jermaine has already repeated his plan of doing nothing and hoping the bad things go away. This is the precise opposite of “effective” and “dealing.” It’s also worth mentioning these people aren’t really “idiots.” He could have called Effectively Dealing with Idiots something like Summer Soups for Dentists or Pork Roll Sex Positions and it would have been no less misleading. Maybe Jermaine just needs a simpler kind of idiot, like a rude drive thru teller…

All you do is drive off and call his manager the next day? You goddamn Karen, I thought you were an 11-time World Inmate Kumite champion. What good is that if you have to take shit from a kid at Wendy’s? This is cowardly and petty garbage. This is a story a cop’s wife would make up if she dropped his chicken nuggets on the way home.

Jesus Christ…

Here at 1900HOTDOG, I’ve known adventures. I’ve seen a woman vamp for an entire sex book about not quite putting it in. I’ve watched a couple shatter their minds against the task of listing 1001 places to bone. I’ve seen a man in mad desperation try to fill 62 pages with semen dishes. But I have never seen anyone more helpless, more completely fucked than this martial artist who gave himself the task of inventing and then defeating 50 idiots. So far he has only ignored them or called their manager on them, ideas too basic to even engage with. We might as well put our idiot bashing nunchucks away, because we are reading the Passive Dumbfuck’s Guide For Remedial Breathing.

I’m shocked Jermaine’s idea for dealing with haters is to ignore them and hope they go insane and their life spins out of control for unrelated reasons, but what is that comment at the end? You “wouldn’t want them in your entourage anyway”? What does it mean? I understand he self-published this book while caught up in the media hype of being one of Missouri’s only 11 inductees into the 2012 Martial Arts Hall of Fame, but does he expect us to believe he leads an entourage facing off against rival entourages? This is the sad kind of delusional. I miss when Jermaine was defeating white supremacist gangs with illegal face karate. Maybe he’ll come up with something better for the next idiot, ordinary retail sales associates!

I like that Jermaine is getting more assertive. This fucking idiot came at him like he was going to sell something only to get hit with the perfect martial arts counter of “I’m only browsing. A-and also I have no money. Wait, sorry, come back please. Do you have this in a size passive-aggressive-bitch junior? Of course I can pay for it, I was lying earlier when I said I had no money. Dummy.” A perfect, effective way to handle this ordinarily impossible scenario. Thank God for this brilliant book.

So if someone is verbally abusing you, set a trap by wearing a cup! Then, the next time they humiliate you, punch yourself in the dick and tell a very long, very weird joke using wordplay about words no one has said. Of course, that’s only Phase One. Phase Two is waiting for everyone to get it… to understand what you’ve done. You’ll know Phase Two is over when you find yourself beginning Phase Three: explaining the joke. Like a winner. Like a martial arts winner! Keep in mind, this is the hypothetical best case scenario as imagined by the plot’s author. In a real world application, it might not go this well.

We’re a quarter through Effectively Dealing with Idiots, and all of Jermaine’s wisdom could be replaced with a coin that says IGNORE on one side and KAREN on the other. By the way, there is no text on the even-numbered pages of this book. Jermaine gave himself two pages for each idiot, but none of them needed more than one, so there’s a lot of blank space. It might not seem worth mentioning, but all of these things come together to create a truly unique monument to failure. “As a master of brutal, unstoppable martial arts, I leave unsanitary resteraunts, those idiots, and notify the proper authorities, half a page of blank space, one full page of blank space.” In a lot of ways it’s beautiful, like a swan too stupid to swim.

I think some of the book is trying to be funny, but it’s a problem. Jermaine’s idea of a gag is “haha kill your ex-girlfriend with a shotgun” and then he steps on his own joke by making sure you murder her with a legally registered shotgun with which you are properly trained and has been stowed in compliance with your county’s gun storage laws. Furthermore, and this is no laughing matter, follow the rules of engagement when gunfighting any former lover. The most important thing is fun. Now, let’s get out there and kill some idiots.

Do you have a home intruder? Get rid of that idiot in many subtle, easy steps! Start with the usual: act boring, offer no snacks… standard martial arts defense. The next part can be more complicated. Be a bad conversationalist and sometimes leave. Since idiots who don’t know when to leave are excellent at picking up non-verbal social cues, your passive aggression should work. If not, work your way up to asking them to leave by informing them “you don’t appreciate uninvited visits.” If that doesn’t work, you can try changing your name and abandoning your home. Martial arts!

As a master martial arts instructor, Jermaine advises anyone receiving unwanted sexual attention to shrink into themselves sheepishly and to reduce the number of dates you go on with your stalker to the lowest number possible. Whenever possible, huddle in this prison of fear forever. Maaaaaartial arts!

God damn it, Jermaine is asking to speak to the manager again. I’m going to skip ahead and see if I can find a crazy one. Hold on, wait wait wait what the fuck:

What? Someone is hitting on your girlfriend, so you ask him to taste your body on her lips!? And you’re claiming you’ve done this more than once!? Madness. I don’t even have a joke. What I do have is this, a perfect neural map of Jermaine’s mind:

It was clear almost instantly this was not a book about intimidating idiots with our nose bite or roasting them with our wits. It turned out to be a book about rolling into a ball and hoping a manager, God, or anyone would punish everyone around you. Yet as feeble as this book is, I’m not sure I could have imagined we would deal with a dirty joke by fleeing from it. I get we can’t make the dirty limerick guy choke on his own blood, but this is pathetic. Jermaine Andre writes like a liberal arts major in an Adam Corolla routine, and that’s it– that’s the worst thing you can say about someone.

This seems handy. If you think someone might be a thief, lay a childlike trap using all the guile of a man who was legally dead for seven minutes after he got hit in the head with a padlock!

This made me fucking gasp.

His idea to counter a loudmouth is to lie in wait for an opportunity to deliver a one man play about them? “Hark, countrymen! Lend me your ears to hear the tale of Loudmouthus, the truck! Guys, hold up, I’m doing a bit where Gary is a truck because he won’t shut up a-and I have a pedal bike, on the highway. I know that’s weird; this is sort of a premise heavy comeback. Let me finish! See, this is an allegory where our need for attention is vehicles but Gary’s is bigger than mine, because I am so normal. Hey! Be quiet! There’s a lot more! Martial arts!

Push the button for the operator! That’ll show that dumb robot!

One of the things you notice in books like this is that as you get deeper into them, you can see the author losing perspective on who he’s writing it for, and what wisdom might be in general. This is no longer a book for people fumbling through normal situations. It’s so much less. Jermaine has been out of wisdom for 29 entries, and this is now a guide for horses making their first phone call. This is potentially the most dogshit stupid, useless tip about anything that could ever be possible. There does not exist a person for whom this is advice. Jermaine went from 8-time MMA Earth Champion to writing the first book for mashed potatoes.

I’m going to ignore the casual racism here because Jermaine makes a good point– all destitute foreigners deserve our contempt. But this, and I don’t need to tell anyone this, is the opposite of advice. Does Jermaine not know you get kicked to the back of the line when you hang up? When you disconnect, the call center doesn’t go, “Let’s rally, people! That passive aggressive dick is going to call back any second, and when he does I want him given top priority, and everyone speaking better English!” I don’t even know what you call this behavior. It’s rude and entitled, but not in a way anyone will know about. This is like the homeopathic essence of a Karen… a missing hiker demanding the name of her quicksand’s supervisor.

Okay, you have a bad boss? Here’s what you do: work really hard. Focus up and do a great job. Kiss his ass if you have to, and dedicate your life to making him and the company money. Next comes the easy part: keep doing this until you are laid off or dead. Martial! Aaaaaaaaaarts!!!

Are you in a bad relationship? Get out of there! DUMP THEM! Or you know, you could stay a bit longer. You might look like an idiot, but would that be so bad? Idiots run teams of highly motivated employees and are resteraunts. Maybe if you stopped laughing at their jokes and were more boring they would leave on their own. Maybe hang up and call back until you get a better person.

What are we, a fucking magical cat? We’re giving quests now? With exposure therapy traps designed for “idiots” to overcome their fears? How did this happen? It’s all nonsense, but I’m most troubled by the word “constantly.” Did you picture readers luring their friends past dangers with a cache of treasure more than once? “Hey! Who keeps putting all my fig newtons at the top of this towe– by gosh, my fear of heights is gone! This seems like the work of martial arts.”

Ha ha ha that should do it! Of all the infantile ideas this padlock-brained lunatic has thrown around, this could be my favorite. This is a man who has bitten the nose off multiple white supremacists, and his take on racial intolerance is the exact thing every 4-year-old says the moment they learn people have colors. “Um, technically, those are wrong. White? Try Pink. Yellow? Hello, more like Sunset Peach. What was my point? Oh my god, was that my whole point!?” Anyway, great job, Jermaine. Racism solved.

Alright, this is a food one, so we already know how he’s going to handle it. I think Jermaine might be out of surprises…

… is he somehow getting more passive aggressive? He got rid of his TV and turned his life into his roommate’s least favorite pie rather than confront him. I’d joke that his style of martial arts seems to be limply punching his own dick, but he already did exactly that. Come on, there has to be a real piece of advice somewhere in this book.

No, that’s ignoring again…

… and that’s asking to speak to the manager again.

What the shit? He told us to be the “kiss @ss” 13 entries ago, and now he’s giving us advice on how to deal with people like us? I think the stupidity is collapsing in on itself. I don’t know what to do! I’ve never seen this style of martial arts!

Jermaine writes like a 9-year-old refusing to accept the results of a spelling bee. This motherfucker is writing his dream comeback to a rude smoker, and he brings up his own farts twice. Once to be a pedantic twat and again to be a pedantic twat. There is no weirder way to put any of this. If Jermaine added, “Mayhaps I remove this sandwich from its bag and we use it to c-collect one of your farts, m’lady,” it would be no weirder. It might even improve. Which means I find myself organically saying that if Jermaine wrote 50 Ways to Ask Strangers to Fart in a Bag, it would be a better book.

What an unbelievable twist ending.

No one could have seen this coming.

Not even the grand practitioners of Black Dragon kung fu who are technically pinkish…

This whole time, the idiot…

… was Jermaine!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, master of the True Dragon Blackout Technique, which is leaving a two-star Yelp review under a pseudonym.