4 Unintentionally Hilarious Guides for Depressing Situations

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It's usually not OK to laugh at the pain and misfortune of others, but I found a collection of books and videos that were accidentally designed to do exactly that. That's what this article is about, so I'm sorry, unfortunate people -- things still aren't going your way.

Do-It-Yourself Coffins For Pets and PeopleDale Power, 1997

Coffins Coffins Do- -It-Yourself o-It-Yourself For Pets and People For Pets and People Dul - Dale Power 0o A Dale Power oe Work ScHKer Blook Woodworke
Pets and people are ticking time bombs of storage space issues. One day they are beloved family members, the next they are cluttering up your garage. How am I supposed to get rid of all these grandparents and birds? I can't put them outside and hope the raccoons have forgotten how to push over a trash can! I don't have time to defrost the freezer, and it's not always practical to wait until the next hunter's moon when I again must feast on innocent flesh. Agh, with all this frustration I'm starting to get why people scream when they see dead bodies.At least that's how I thought until I got Dale Power's illustrated guide to coffin building. It shows, in amazing full-color detail, how to build a resting place for any size of dead thing. "But nothing I love ever dies!" you might be saying. That's okay, because these coffins have hundreds of ordinary household uses. Just look:
You will be surprised at the number of uses you will come up for the boxes you make - uses far different from those for which you will finally need th

Coffin Tip #1: When a coffin book author starts talking about "surprising" uses for a sarcophagus, don't drink anything they give you.

Look at the furnishings around your home, if you examine the shapes you will see that almost everything looks like a box. A bookcase is only a box sta
Why shouldn't I store my extra blankets in a coffin? I can think of two good reasons ... it's fucking crazy and ghost pox. I guess it's still the only way to kill bed bugs, but after they cross over, they become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.I get that there are a couple advantages to replacing all my furniture with coffins. Maybe I'm a vampire who likes to fall asleep in front of the TV. Maybe I have a bag of cat parts I want to hide in plain sight. But don't expect me to believe that there's a
third advantage. No wait, I forgot corpse sex-- a home full of coffins would be perfect for that!

Coffin Tip #2: If you are in a friend's home and notice their coffee table and bookcase are coffins, stab them with a sacred dagger and carefully leap to the side. Their blood will be mostly made of angry crows.

From the intro, I was expecting most of the construction plans to sound like "Did you know a child's fingernails still grow when it's dead. Try holding races while you wait for your coffin glue to dry!" But it turns out making a coffin is really complicated. Once he gets started, there is no time for banter. Each of the hundreds, maybe thousands of steps is pictured ... sawing, sanding, gluing, clamping, staining-- if you buried me alive right now, I could not get any more sick of looking at coffins. But something about
Do-It-Yourself Coffins for Pets and People kept me riveted, and I think it was the will-they-or-won't-they relationship between the fingers and the sawblades.
4 Unintentionally Hilarious Guides for Depressing Situations

I grew up with a healthy fear of saws. My shop teacher had lost so many fingers that when he waved goodbye it looked like he was shaking a leaky water balloon. The author must have had the same shop teacher, because some of his very first advice is to always use a pushing device when you're feeding wood through a saw. And then this advice is ignored. Flagrantly and often. Every page has closeups of delicate human fingers inching towards spinning blades ... it's like when a nipple slides dangerously close to the edge of a bra -- it's so much more intense than if she just yanked her whole boob out. This book is the softcore version of a table saw accident. It's what murderers masturbate to before their parents let them watch Hostel.

This birch plywood coffin is finished. The staining is done. It only needs a coat of polyurethane varnish to be complete and ready for action.

Coffin Tip #3: If someone, at any time, describes a coffin as "ready for action," never die next to them without a partner. In the industry, we call this a "coffin buddy."

Grieving for DummiesGreg Harvey, PhD, 2007

Empowering advice with the loss of a loved one on coping Grieving FOR DUMMIES Greg Harvey, PhD Anodieiom oe Doat oarioe anf Goureilieng foreword by Co

We all grieve in our own ways, except for dummies. They use this special book. Grieving for Dummies has pages and pages of cold psychological data to sooth any type of loss. Did your boyfriend die? Maybe your roommate? Your mail carrier? Your landlord? That's really suspicious, lady!

No matter what the deceased was to you, there is a chapter for dealing with the loss of him, her, or it. The book gets oddly specific and the fact that there are sometimes terrible cartoons and jokes makes it all really fucking weird. The author must be a little league coach when he's not sucking at grief counseling because he doesn't seem to care if anyone wins; he only want to make sure every possible type of grief gets some playing time.

Our condolences on the loss of your FRIEND named DICK. Maybe your Dick died from the same thing that killed my husband's dick... MARRIAGE! Our condole

It might seem overwhelming, but there is an exhaustive table of contents for the griever on the go. If you've lost an ex-wife to a sudden strangulation, you'll want to skip right to the chapter about whether or not you can blame God. You know, if I can keep it real for a second, the problem I've always had with books for dummies is that once your reader has agreed that it's okay for you to call them a dummy, there's no point in the author having respect for them. And the author of Grieving for Dummies doesn't-- this might actually be more condescending than Xbox 360 for Dummies.

CHAPTER ONE Pley ar from Xber 380 e non 360 Online Communication Xbox FOR DUMMIES Fags Dieower all the N-Words omtetaimment talent hiding in A Referen
Since the reader is an idiot,
Chapter 9: The Loss of Pets lets him or her know that most domesticated animals have shorter life spans than humans, and one day you will watch that thing die. So now I get why they were laughing at me at the cake store when I paid for my fish's next 50 birthday cakes in advance, but why the fuck should that make me feel better that it's dead? If people took comfort from the stupidly obvious, they would read coffee cup warning labels at funerals.
REMEMBER Did you lose a son or daughter? A lot of people find this upsetting because of emotional attachments that can develop with a child. If the cl

Okay, so after hundreds of pages of comfortless facts about the miseries of misery, the grief-stricken reader has theoretically dealt with his or her loss. Then on page 267, the fucking book hits you with this:

The 5th Wave By Rich Tennant POET'S RESPONSE TO DEATH ORICUTENNANE OF A LOVED ONE Denial Anger Acceptance Elegy
What!? Is this to make the misery of my dead family pale by comparison? Was this included as an example of why people shouldn't draw fucking comics while they're watching cancer spread? This cartoon is so tragic that if you look at it while thinking about your dead loved one, your memory of them will look you in the eye and shit on the floor of your brain forever. Maybe this book works on idiots, but
Grieving for Dummies will turn a non-dummy's grief directly into hate. And you won't believe how the book ends. Spoiler alert:
with Dummic Do More 12x 12k Basics Scrapbooking Oui DUMMIES NC Du Tickle ribs! my Poker Golf Kit Cocktail DUMIES DUMMIES DUMMIES MuC Grilling DUMMIE
I'm not sure how appropriate this is for the occasion. "Do you miss your dead husband!? Then you'll love Sudoku!" And it's not only inappropriate, it's potentially damaging-- if your departed loved one was a fucking idiot, a
Grilling for Dummies apron that says "Tickle my ribs!" is only going to remind you of your loss. You'd have to start the whole book over!

The Couples Guide to Great Sex Over 40Dr. Culley Carson and Diana Wiley, M.A., 1993

Sinclair Sex VIDEO The LIBRARY Enjoy Best Of Over Your Life 40. Collahoration With The Newsletter After Sex Forty ir Many people mistakealy beliese th

I know what you're thinking: sex over 40 isn't depressing! That's because you're thinking about milfy 41-year-olds. There aren't any of those in this video. Before I begin, I want to qualify that I like older ladies. I've dated women in their 40s since I was in my 20s, I will continue to do so when I'm in my 70s. Here's what I like about them: you've probably heard that women know whether or not they're going to sleep with a guy within the first five minutes. And while that's usually true, I've seen a lot of women in their 20s and 30s change their minds after six beers and a finger. Women over 40 have already seen themselves do that enough times to take that into account; they operate like they've just had six beers and a finger at all times. They still might not want to sleep with you, but you'll know that quickly and with unwavering certainty.

So what I'm saying is that I was really looking forward to
The Couples Guide to Great Sex Over 40. But five minutes in, I realized I was going to be doing a lot of terrified shrieking. For example, these two have included a "fur mitt" in their lovemaking. Because when the lights are off, every guy wearing only a potholder is Chewbacca, am I right, ladies?
RAHRR! WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON BACK THERE?
Most of the couples in the video are "Over 40" in the same way an abortion is "Almost a Baby." And before these 60-year-olds begin their sexing, they are interviewed about sex "after 40." This is their chance to educate the world about the wonders of mummy sexuality, but all they do is go down the list and verify every single stereotype there has ever been about old people boning. I learned so much from the aged: genitals don't work on either person, their pee is as untrustworthy as coloreds, they throw their backs out, ear hair ... by the time they start their actual sex I was half expecting them to ram into each other on their scooters and complain that all this damp weather is making their knee act up.

Oh, but the sex is much more explicit than a scooter accident. It is full in-and-out elderly pornography. And there's something so extra dirty about watching people have sex when they're doing it for education and true love. My favorite couple is 50ish Ruth & Nick, who came ready to make a show out of it. They're each a few classifications deep into a BMI chart and, at least for a second or two, they're dressed in glittery underpants. I imagine that long ago there was a seamstress making a pair of satin panties for men in XXL and thinking, "No good can come of this." She was wrong. Nick makes them work.

Nick Ruth

Nick and Ruth's sex scene comes right after an informative section on pubococcygeus muscles. The video let me know that at a certain age, women replace these muscles to make room for bridge score sheets. One happy side effect of this is that when women over 40 go swimming, sea creatures are able to both visit and escape their pelvic floor.

Nick and Ruth hate all the cleanup of Ruth's pubococcygeus muscles dropping constant waste where she stands, so they incorporate a kegel exerciser into their lovemaking. It's like a dumbbell for your vagina, and with truly amazing porno acting skills, Nick pretends to give it to Ruth as a present. She is excited and fascinated by it like a caveman seeing a cigarette lighter, but no one seems to care that her bra somehow vanishes mid-conversation. Then, in glittery underpants, Nick insists on reading the instructions. "And then you put ... you insert it up... uhh... insert it up to the first
knob ." Ruth responds, "Eww, it's cold." I seriously cannot wait for geriatric sex -- it is going to be hilarious.

Wheelchair Workout with beginning Karatefeaturing Patrick Horgan with Sensei Gregory Aldred, 1996

WHEELCHAIR GO WORKOUT FOR IT! Patrick Horgan is not the kind of person to let life pass him by. Since his youth Pat has been an active swimmer. skied

Learning wheelchair karate is like learning how to improvise a dental dam out of a rubber glove. It's fun to practice and think about, but if you ever need to use it, it's only after some very bad personal decisions. Although say you do wheel into the kind of neighborhood that attacks people in wheelchairs, this video will still do nothing to help you. It's horrible. Even if it's for inspirational purposes only, it fails at that because its existence implies that there's an exploitable consumer market that is both disabled and stupid.

Before the workout, someone named Paul Southwick interviews handicapped athlete Patrick Horgan in a TV studio. Literally everything about these circumstances terrifies young Paul, and he's so damn nervous that he keeps reading Patrick's answers to the setup questions. Here, I'll show you an example. This is a word-for-word transcription:

WHEELCHAIR GO WORKOUT FOR W-WHAT CAN you M-HMM. TELL JUST THAT... WELL, THAT you CAN EVERYBODY OUT THERE CAN'T DO IT. JUST YyoLl NEED TO ELMINATE TH

So it's a little inspirational that Patrick didn't call him a dumbass and roll away. And it doesn't get any better when the karate starts. The instructor, unwheelchaired Sensei Gregory Aldred, seems to have learned karate from a video about wheelchair karate, which as far as I'm concerned, is now the very worst place a person can learn about karate. Oh, and don't think that Patrick is some long time student of Sensei Greg and together they've developed a special wheeled version of the ancient Oriental fighting arts. Sensei Greg saw Patrick come into his dojo yesterday and his eyeballs turned into dollar signs.

Sensei Greg begins the workout by sitting so close that Patrick can't move his right arm. It doesn't matter because by any standards, Sensei Greg isn't very good at karate. In fact, I've never actually seen anyone be so bad at anything and not die from it. Patrick follows along fine with only one hand since Sensei Greg's style of karate is mostly kegels.

When someone is more douchebag than warrior, they tend to embrace the "spiritual" aspects of martial arts. Sensei Greg is all over that stuff. Every fruity pantomime he does has some dubious cultural symbolism and he throws punches like he's mending a dress. But the worst thing about this video is that it retailed for over $20, lasts less than 10 minutes, and teaches you nothing. Three minutes of finger stretching, three minutes of arm-waving, and three minutes of watching Patrick throw punches for the first time is not a workout, and if anything will only make the viewer more handicapped. It's so fucking short that the video in its entirety fits on one YouTube clip. And speaking of, please enjoy:

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