Category: Main

New post up at 123ish: The Putin-Trump Madness Vortex!

I know the story has dominated the front page and top of the news hour for the past two years now, but I fear most of you out there just haven’t been impressed with what a huge global thing this Putin-Trump collusion thing is. Visit my recap of the most insane depths of the story by way of conspiracy theories rotating around Vladimir Trump, Donald Putin, or both. In my tribute to the late, great Robert Anton Wilson, I just dig up the rumors and mix them all up in a tasty crazy salad and serve them cold.

You think you’ve heard it all about this story, but did you hear about the time traveler theory? The killer mutant robot squid-octopus? The slave-children of Mars? I rounded up more crazy theories than a Russian hooker can pee on. If you’re scared from realizing you don’t know what’s truth and what’s fiction anymore – you’re not nearly scared enough!

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If You’re Mad At Bill Maher For What He Said About Comic Books, Come At Me

Let’s wade into some more controversy with the latest Internet temper tantrum: Bill Maher’s remarks on comic book fandom after the death of Stan Lee. While his timing is admittedly tone-deaf, his impression is spot on, however poorly articulated. I crack into the nut of the matter: toxic fan bases.

Don’t you hate it when you’re just enjoying some work of media just because you happen to like it, and some raving idiot out there has to ruin it for everybody? That’s what we have here.

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New At 366Weird: The Movie I Never Dared Pitch For The List!

After all these years as a staffie at 366WeirdMovies.com, the list is finally filled! And so it is now safe for me to utter The Movie Which I Dared Not Name – a film so bad, it drives celebrated Chicago film critics to fits of live televised rage.

I got to thinking about it via GoodBadFlicks – one of my favorite YouTube review channels – and their heartwarming defense of one of my favorite weird movies, Nothing But Trouble (1991). What the hell, why not embed that here:

Nothing But Trouble was my veto-proof nominee for the list of weirdest movies ever made, and I’ve caught a lot of flack for it, though everybody has to admit yes, it’s weird. My point (and it’s echoed repeatedly on the site) is that a movie doesn’t have to be good to be weird.

 

New at 123ish: Star Wars Conservative, Star Trek Liberal

If the Star Trek franchise paints our future under the Federation as, to quote one editorial, “Bernie Sanders on steroids,” then where does that leave competing nerd franchise Star Wars? Under the oppressive thumb of a big bad authoritarian Empire or under the slightly-less-crushing domain of a centuries-old religion guarded by mystics in drab cloaks carrying funny colored sticks, that’s where!

How I came to my epiphany: Star Trek Is For Liberals, Star Wars Is For Conservatives. Let’s see how many nerds I can piss off at once!

 

New at 123ish: Real Men Aren’t Threatened By A Razor Commercial

#Woke advertising: It’s in, it’s hot, and it has the diapered Manbois crying in their Internet playpen! I say “Good show!” Let us dive into an exploration into online toxic male supremacy and how a razor commercial got their balls in a wringer.

This is the brilliance of the Gillette commercial: The story isn’t the commercial, but the reaction to it. It makes the Manbois blow their cover.

UPDATE: A collection of Manbois reacting to Gillette’s tolerance manifesto:

UPDATE:

Conservative women respond to reports of attempted rape that makes the victim feel in danger of her life with “LOL That’s normal!”

“If you genuinely think that all men attempt to rape women in high school, the correct response is to be incandescent with rage.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with people.

 

New at 123ish: Why Horror Is Dominated By Catholic Tropes

Director William Friedkin last week complained the sequel to his ground-breaking 1973 film The Exorcist sucks runny demon eggs. I can’t disagree, but I will point out that he is responsible for breaking the horror genre in two and dooming us all to a lifetime of rehashed exorcism cliches.

Here, I tackle the meaty subject of why The Exorcist dominates horror culture right to the modern day, and ask if we will ever move on past Satanism, Ouija boards, priests clutching crucfixes, and nuns-nuns-nuns.

UPDATE – BONUS BUCK: I ran out of space in that article to talk about the “Satanic Panic” movement in the ’70s-’90s, a scare-tactics campaign by the American Christian church that grew more shrill by the year with shock media. Satanic Panic was one of the biggest contributors to turning American Christianity, originally more left-leaning, into the movement of Neocon bigots we know today. But I ran across this video preserved on the channel of the excellent archivist Josh Hadley which gives you an adequate taste for the atmosphere of the time. Feast your eyes and ears on the hilariously paranoid conspiracy theorists at Jeremiah Films, with “The Pagan Invasion – Devil Worship – The Rise Of Satanism.” No, this is not a parody.

New at 123ish.com: Let Comedians Say What They Want – That’s Their Job!

Are you offended by what Louis C.K. says? Or Aziz Ansari, or Kathy Griffin, or, for another example I forgot to include, Bill Maher and his ill-timed rant about comics right after Stan Lee passed?

So am I! I’m offended every day, but I have discovered a wonderful secret to cure perpetual offended syndrome! It’s a hard cure, you have to work for it. Here’s a meme to pass around social media and help others find this path to enlightenment:

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New 123ish Post: The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays

Every year during the holidays, when dealing with clients from all over the world and having to explain to my fifth Australian what Thanksgiving is and why my whole family’s visiting for it, I vow to write this guide someday. Thanks to the marvelous venue that 123ish.com has turned into, I finally got it done!

So: The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays. Find out why Groundhog Day is so weird, why we can’t predict when Easter will strike, and why your American team-mates might even need October 30th off. Even if you’re native, you’ll still learn something because I’ve tucked away some little-known chestnuts about the origins of the colored-in days on the United States calendar.

If anybody else has a similar guide for another country, I’d love to find out about it. In fact, if you’re not from the United States, why not write an international guide for your country’s holidays? I, myself, would like more insight on what, for example, a “boxing day” is.

 

The Top Five Most Remarkable Commemorative US Coins

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.

Commemorative coins exist in a strange twilight of monetary policy. Three committees of Congress oversee the decisions for whom and what gets commemorated, namely, the Committee on Housing, Banking, and Urban Affairs; the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the House; and the Citizens’ Coin Advisory Committee. One can well imagine the kinds of spirited debates that take place as everybody pushes their own pet project.

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Strategic Money: Coins And Currency Of World War II

This is part of a series of blog posts I wrote for a coin collecting site circa ~2015 that seems to have disappeared off the Internet. Note any prices mentioned in this series are from 2015.

More than any other conflict in world history, World War II was a battle of wits. It started with cryptographers fighting the first international “hacking” war in attempting to break the German Enigma machine code; it ended with the scientific race to develop and deploy the atom bomb.

In between, each nation involved challenged its brightest minds to hatch the most advanced schemes to come out ahead – and the money of this era reflects that struggle in its historic record.

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