4 COVID Restrictions Will Be Called A New "War On Christmas"

Fox News' astonishingly stupid "War on Christmas" narrative is somehow in its 16th year. Now imagine all of the Americans who seethe whenever a cashier says "Happy holidays" start hearing from Tucker Carlson that The Left is using COVID hysteria to put Christians in jail. As proof, he cuts to a clip of cops in some Democrat-controlled city breaking up a Christmas pageant for violating COVID bans on large indoor gatherings. We already had these stories back in the spring:

What does the reaction to that look like when we're in full War On Christmas mode, when all of conservatives' most paranoid fantasies are suddenly coming true on camera?

Now imagine Tucker cuts to a clip of a weeping woman, saying she was just told they were cancelling their city's annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony ("My grandmother is devastated! This could be her last Christmas!"), a clip that is run side-by-side with footage of the massive BLM protests from the summer. "So the left says this is okay to do during this supposed deadly pandemic, but Christians can't celebrate Christ's birthday?" Tucker will say. "We all know the real agenda here."

Jesus, I'm making myself mad just imagining that in his voice.

Oh, wait, it gets worse. Now imagine Trump is coming off a lost election, loudly proclaiming every day that it was stolen due to mail ballot fraud. He now has literally nothing to do with his day but stoke the culture wars full-time. He's taking to Twitter every four minutes or so with some version of, "Just as we told you! As soon as a DEMOCRAT is ELECTED they make CHRISTMAS ILLEGAL! This time next year, being a Christian in America will get you PRISON! LIBERATE BLITZEN!"

At that point, what are city and state governments with active outbreaks to do? Just allow the gatherings to happen to avoid the backlash from people who believe they're literal martyrs? And keep in mind...

3 No, There Won't Be A Vaccine By The Holidays

The best-case scenario for a widely-available COVID-19 vaccine is sometime in 2021. If everyone has been vaccinated by Christmas of next year, that would be a massive victory worthy of a parade. (Remember, they have to manufacture billions of doses.) And there's definitely danger of a second wave hitting in the fall due to a whole bunch of factors (people staying indoors due to the cold, healthcare systems stressed by the usual flu outbreaks, the public having totally given up on distancing by doing things like reopening schools, etc). So you could have an okay October followed by a November where COVID springs back to life like the henchman at the end of Die Hard.

So now imagine infections are rising again, but lockdowns have become politically untenable and you have most of a country that hasn't engaged in any big family celebrations all year. Maybe there's a feeling of relief after the election, a sense of having crested a hill. So who is going to be in the mood to socially distance again? "Haven't we sacrificed enough?!?"

Keep in mind, nothing that we've canceled so far has anything like the national cultural significance of Christmas -- nothing compares. Christmas is the embodiment of the modern American religion, this weird blend of Christianity and consumerism, a celebration of all the things we still believe in: Family, generosity and, uh, winter, I guess? Sorry, I can never figure out how Frosty fits into it. The point is, it's no surprise people get worked up about any perceived restrictions. But that's a problem, because ...

2 Every Holiday Tradition Is A Potential COVID Bonanza

Imagine it's late November. The news is showing us video of packed airports, packed planes, packed busses, packed train terminals. Millions of trips to see elderly relatives and have Thanksgiving dinner with a dozen unmasked people crowded around a table. It's the equivalent of picking up America's lingering COVID hotspots and shaking them out like pepper across the continent (more than 55 million Americans typically travel at Thanksgiving). On Black Friday, those people will pack malls, department stores and restaurants. 

If that triggers an even greater rise in infections, how do you stop the much worse version of that scheduled to come a few weeks later? Black Friday is actually not the busiest retail day -- shopping only gets more frenzied as Christmas approaches. And you can double the travel stats I just cited -- an astounding 115 million Americans travel at Christmastime. Then there'll be even more indoor family gatherings, plus Christmas plays and concerts, church services, parties ... all of the prolonged, indoor, mask-free contact that got us into this mess in the first place.

And if you think it was hard keeping Americans out of bars and restaurants over the summer, wait until you see the reaction from parents who've been socialized to believe that failing to provide a good Christmas for their kids is gross parental malpractice. Think about how many of their own childhood memories revolve around Christmas, how aware they are that they won't get many of them before the kids turn into cynical teens. Think about how much they'll be guilted by their own elderly Trump-loving parents into making the trip ("We haven't seen the grandkids since last year!").

Even if these hypothetical parents have been playing perfectly by the rules every minute up until then, wouldn't this be where they draw the line? ("I mean, even world wars stopped for Christmas!")

1 The Economy Will Be Absolutely Desperate For Holiday Cash

An average retailer depends on the holiday season for 20 to 30 percent of their sales for the entire year. Now add in all of the revenue to various industries from the travel I mentioned above -- plane tickets, roadside restaurants, gas stations, hotels. Now imagine an utterly devastated economy (and please note that you haven't seen the real devastation yet -- government cash has been largely keeping it afloat) and how businesses large and small will be starving for that influx of year-end spending.

That means shutting down in-person shopping and eating will be just as much a political non-starter as shutting down those holiday gatherings. Maybe that'd be okay with strict compliance with masks/distancing/sanitation, but I'm guessing stores absolutely will not want to be the subject of viral fistfights for trying to enforce mask rules during an already-tense season. Keep in mind, if Trump has just lost his election, you'll have around 40% of the country believing the COVID response usurped their king and you'd better believe they'll be in a fighting mood.

Look, if we're lucky, this whole column will come off as alarmist nonsense by the time the solstice arrives. But it feels like the holidays could be the culmination of everything the virus and Trump has done to us, all of those simmering tensions reaching a boiling point. I don't know what the resulting shitstorm looks like but I'm thinking it won't be good. So, uh, maybe buy my book before then.

You can pre-order Jason "David Wong" Pargin's book Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick on Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, Bookshop or any place books like this are sold. You can also follow him on Twitter, his Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube or Goodreads, or any of the many accounts he's forgotten about.

Top image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock

5 There's A Big Joe Biden Scandal Coming

No, I don't have any inside information about Joe Biden -- I've only met him once, in 2002, when we were both competing in the X-Games. But I know how the news media works. Remember Hillary's emails? You know, when the New York Times and other outlets took a non-story and feverishly covered it as if those emails included pictures of Hillary's human sacrifice altar? And how they created the impression that the 2016 race was between two equally-corrupt candidates?

You'll get the Joe Biden version of this, probably around September. It doesn't matter how damning the actual facts or sources are; it will become the subject of around-the-clock coverage just the same. That's not because of any dark conspiracy on the part of journalists, unless you consider capitalism to be a dark conspiracy (in which case, you know, fair enough). Media outlets need ratings and clicks to keep the lights on and once the summer is over, the "Trump is flailing hilariously" narrative is going to get stale.

The media's biases are driven by their audience and what their audience wants is drama. In an election year, this means they need A) new and fresh storylines and B) a close election. So newsrooms will be digging frantically for something in Biden's past and they'll no doubt find it (if politicians were good people, they wouldn't be in politics). The conservative outlets will pick it up first (maybe Fox News or The Daily Caller) and other outlets like CNN will have to jump on it or risk losing audience. As a result ...

4 Trump Will Stage A Big Comeback In The Polls

Right now (late June) all of the polls average out to about a 10-point lead for Biden. For context, at this point in 2016, Hillary was up by about six. As for whether Trump can come back by November, well, on one hand, you could point out that he never made up the difference in 2016 -- the final polls still had Hillary up by four and then it turned out they were off by two (Hillary won the popular vote 48% to 46%). But on the other hand, Trump is now the goddamned president.

The electoral college, a system set up so that empty pieces of land get to cast votes, is arranged so that Trump could lose this election by around five points and still get a second term, thanks to the corn fields that love him. So when I talk about Trump making a comeback in the polls, keep in mind that he doesn't have to gain back all ten points (which would require something like Biden admitting he accidentally created COVID-19 while operating a bat-fighting ring in his garage). If Trump can get it back to where he's down, let's say, 48-44, I'd absolutely expect him to win in November.

"But," you say, "doesn't everyone hate him now, after weeks of headlines about COVID-19 deaths, Black Lives Matter protests and *waves hand to indicate the state of the world in general*?" Not really! Trump's approval rating never moves more than a couple of points either way -- the pandemic and the world generally being a shitshow have dropped his approval to 41%, which is actually up a bit from this point in 2017, right after he took office.

He has a rock-solid base of 40% or so, and then another five to six points of "I'll express my displeasure in conversation but really don't want my taxes to go up." Some of those people will start showing for him in the polling once the media narrative flips to "Trump comeback" in the fall. That's when you'll see headlines about a "surprisingly strong" debate performance from Trump, that kind of thing. Again: The media's goal is for it to be anybody's ballgame on election night.

BONUS PREDICTION: Around October, Trump will propose a massive middle class tax cut.

3 They'll Use COVID-19 To Try To Stop You From Voting

A few weeks ago we saw horrifyingly long lines at Georgia polling places where people waited up to seven goddamned hours to vote. If you follow this kind of thing, you may recognize Georgia as the state where, in 2018, the Republican governor won by 55,000 votes after purging 670,000 voter registrations. Listen up, everybody: This right here is the real battleground.

Restricting voting access has been part of the gameplan for a while, but COVID-19 has given Republicans the greatest gift they could have hoped for: In order to suppress votes in 2020, they can simply do nothing at all.

A shortage of poll workers, plus infection precautions slowing everything down, means November will be a mess unless we let people vote some other way -- most Americans can't afford to spend an entire work day standing in line. Meanwhile, Republicans have exerted legal and political pressure nationwide to prevent any expansion of voting by mail (acting under orders from Trump himself, who recently claimed mail voting would allow evil foreigners to steal the election).

There are thus all sorts of complicated legal battles playing out in various states. Take Florida, a state that Trump literally cannot win without: Voting rights groups have already filed a lawsuit there demanding a bundle of changes to overcome limitations caused by the pandemic. For example, COVID-19 has seriously screwed over the normal processes for voter registration (often done door-to-door or at public events) so changes would need to be made just to maintain the status quo. To keep turnout down, the Republican governor there can simply make some accommodations while quietly refusing others.

In an election that is destined to be close in the electoral college (all presidential elections are close these days) and even closer when it comes to the Senate, a hundred thousand blocked votes in minority neighborhoods is all it will take to change world history. Stopping those votes requires nothing other than inaction. It's kind of like that scene in Breaking Bad where Walter White kills Jesse's girlfriend by just standing by and allowing her to choke on her own vomit.

2 Trump Will Try To Create Some Foreign Policy Drama

"Three U.S. aircraft carriers operating on doorstep of South China Sea", says the headline from June 21st. "Deployment -- first of its kind since 2017 -- likely intended to send a message to Beijing." Get ready for a lot of that between now and election day.

I don't think Trump will start an all-out war just to win an election. I actually don't think he wants to fight a war in general (remember when pundits insisted the assassination of Qasem Soleimani meant we were in all-out war with Iran?). But he can still do something that generally shifts the national mood onto some kind of war footing, thinking that Americans will rally around the flag (and, by extension, their current president).

If I had to guess, I'd say it will involve China somehow, complete with lots of talk about how every American COVID-19 death is really China's fault (they've actually been beating that drum for a while). Whatever he does, it doesn't have to include any cruise missiles taking flight; it just has to dominate headlines for a few weeks (pushing aside whatever scandal he has going at the time) and make Trump look Strong and Presidential to his fans. Lots of tough talk, some warships moving into disputed waters and a resolution that Trump can spin as China backing down. Maybe they'll sink a boat at some point, like a small one or something.

Fox will eat it up, then MSNBC will howl that this is WWIII. Trump will then spin the outrage into, "Democrats are rooting for China!" It will all be stupid as hell. That, of course, leads me to the one prediction I'm most confident about:

1 This Will Be The Dumbest Shit Any Of Us Have Ever Seen

As many of you know, I write sci-fi books about how dumb the future will be which is a good career to have if you'd personally like a future full of strangers mocking you for being wrong. The future is, after all, always crazier than we think -- remember all of those year-end 2019 posts making predictions about 2020, or even dumber, the whole next decade? Did a single one predict a pandemic? Well, let that be a lesson to us all: What dominates headlines in October will be something so asinine that no one could have guessed it in advance.

This is the world's safest bet. At the end of the day, the media just can't help but operate on Trump's not-quite-human wavelength, engaging in a petty back-and-forth that always winds up helping him. Mockery of his weight, skin tone or how he drinks water just boosts his image as a regular guy who's getting picked on by the media elites. Journalists, meanwhile, still think they live in a bizarro world in which catching Trump making racist jokes or sexist boasts actually hurts him in the polls. Anyone who thought the Access Hollywood tape would sink his chances was badly out of touch with middle America and probably still is.

The result is a president who thinks/knows that the media's obsession with the Dumb Bullshit of the Week makes him their puppet master, so he's motivated to keep pushing it further and further. He'll repeat outrageous lies, he'll continue to perform everyday tasks in a way that makes him seem like an alien wearing an ill-fitting human suit. Only he's sensing that he's in the endgame now. All bets are off.

Trump rode to the White House on a simple machine: Intentionally doing or saying outrageous things, then playing the victim when the backlash comes. Now there's nothing for him to do but keep the pedal to the floor until the engine explodes. All we can do is hang on.

1 We Don't Need Movies (Or Even Plotlines) About The Pandemic

Maybe you saw headlines about how Michael Bay is working on a COVID-19 movie (or maybe they'll coyly call the pandemic something else, to make it even more obnoxious). This is a dire example of a creator badly misunderstanding what people want out of him.

Nobody is watching Michael Bay movies to help put current events into perspective. We watch so that, for a couple of hours, we can view the world through the eyes of a shallow pervert who never stopped being sixteen years old. It's a excursion into an uncomplicated universe where every single human is either a sex object or comic relief, where commuters never slow down no matter how many cars are exploding in front of them, where cops drive Ferraris and keep machine guns in the trunk. A world where everything is so problematic that nothing is.

But I don't even need that powerful pandemic movie from a good director, ten years from now. I don't need it from anyone, ever.

In fact, I'm good with every future movie just completely ignoring the fact that COVID-19 ever happened. I'm fine if the romantic comedies of 2022 feature unmasked characters having a meet-cute at the chocolate fountain at Golden Corral. Nobody is going to be pissed that they're not following CDC guidelines, for the same reason nobody wants to see James Bond stop to fumble with a condom. His protection is a two-pronged approach of not giving a shit and letting a guy smash him in the nuts for an hour and we love it.

Well, I would rather take a turn in the nut-smashing chair than watch Adam Driver's 2025 Oscar-nominated role as a Trump-era CDC whistleblower in The Germ of Truth.

2 We Don't Need You To Evoke The Imagery Of The Pandemic, Either

Hey, remember how after 9/11, action directors started adding scenes that looked a whole lot like Ground Zero? You know, where victims are running screaming through city streets covered with ash as buildings collapse around them? Like in 2005's War of the Worlds:

... or 2016's Batman V Superman:

... or the King's Landing attack in Season 8 of Game of Thrones?

I'm told it's supposed to work on a subconscious level, like you'll be watching the scene and out of nowhere this emotion is welling up inside you. For me, it's something like, "I suddenly wish I could sneak into this director's house and take a shit on his pillow, because fuck this."

Right now, a whole bunch of filmmakers are likewise thinking of ways to incorporate COVID-19 imagery into the thing they're making, in the same way that not even in Star Trek can we escape shots of buildings collapsing into gray clouds.

They'll pitch horror movies about invisible, infectious threats ("It's a DEMON that POSSESSES anyone who gets within SIX FEET!"), disaster movies about incompetent governments that wallow in denial ("You'll kill us all, President Denny Tromp!"), dramas about everyday citizens betraying their neighbors via piggish stubbornness ("Help YOU barricade your windows? Why, because the government is spreading LIES about a ZOMBIE APOCAL-AHHH!! I AM NOW A ZOMBIE, DUE TO MY HUBRIS!"). I swear they're probably rewriting The Matrix 4 to have a "computer virus" subplot. For an audience looking for an escape, it's like running into your boss on vacation.

Look, I know that under normal circumstances we use stories to hold a mirror up to society. But these are not normal circumstances and the world is nothing but mirrors now. If I try to watch a TV show about wacky vampire roommates, every single ad break will include some fast food chain's ad featuring employees in masks reassuring me that we can get through this together. Tupac could reveal himself to be alive and drop a brand new album with Joe Exotic guest-rapping on eight of the tracks and the headline would be, "Surprise Tupac Release Boosts Music Industry Struggling With Coronavirus."

3 Actually, You Can Scrap Your Trump Movies, Too

You know what? Now that we're here, just apply everything I said above to the entire Trump era. I don't need a goddamned movie five years from now where Jonah Hill wins a bunch of awards for playing Steve Bannon. I don't need a star-studded HBO miniseries about Jared Kushner or Michael Flynn or James Comey or Sebastian Gorka or Tom Price or Scott Pruitt or Anthony Scaramucci or Rex Tillerson or Paul Manafort or Jeff Sessions or Michael Cohen or Eddie Gallagher or any of the other names I just got off the "Trump Scandals" Wikipedia page.

For five straight years, we've been locked in a cramped hamster cage surrounded by screens playing Trump outrage news 24-7, drinking from a drip bottle full of Donald Trump's piss. If, after all that, you still want this guy invading your Movie Night, I think it's safe to say you have a fetish. Just leave the rest of us out of it.

I also don't need fictionalized non-Trump presidents with wacky hair and spray tans turning up in biting satires starring Hugh Laurie, I don't need science fiction movies about a populist Prime Minister on Future Earth demanding to build a Space Wall (you know, the way Star Trek: Picard wound up being about Brexit).

We've been living Trump Era Despair every minute of every day. We dream about it at night. I don't need creators to dramatize it or skewer it -- that's like watching my house burn down and having somebody show up to sell me a commemorative bucket of fire. Instead, give us what the Lord of the Rings trilogy gave us after 9/11: Escapism that speaks to timeless themes about courage and loyalty and all of the other things that have seemingly vanished from the landscape. That's what we need.

You can pre-order Jason "David Wong" Pargin's book Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick on Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, Indiebound, or any place books like this are sold. You can also follow him on Twitter, his Instagram, or Facebook, or Goodreads, or any of the many accounts he's forgotten about.

Top image: Nattakorn_Maneerat/Shutterstock

4 The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake

Don't worry: the other stories are modern. This story is the only one from Powdered Wig Times. And there's a reason for that.

On the morning of Sunday November 1st, 1755, the Portuguese city of Lisbon experienced an earthquake. This was a Sunday morning in 1700s Europe, so most people were at church. Lisbon's big stone churches collapsed on them. Lisbon's wooden buildings caught fire. And Lisbon's non-squished, non-burned residents fled to the city's waterfront, only to get top-roped by a tsunami.

Charles F. Richter proposed his earthquake-measuring scale 180 years after this earthquake. Measuring the 1755 quake's scale requires an educated guess. And seismologists guesstimate it to be in the 8.0-9.0 range, give or take a few murder-tenths. We know the devastating shaking reached Morocco. We know further tsunami waves reached Ireland. The quake's psychological toll dominates Voltaire's Candide.

In America, we call that kind of catastrophe "an act of God." Why? Is it because we are all devout Christians? (Survey says [red X and buzzer sound].) Is it because insurance companies literally call it "an act of God" when they "adjust" your disaster benefits? Is it because God is culpable and the authorities plan to arrest Him?

I think the answer is simple: "an act of God" is a relic of how Christian Europeans used to think. It's also how the occasional modern asshole thinks. And I'm not saying religious belief is antiquated. I'm saying believing "earthquakes are God's corporal punishment!" is antiquated... if you are reading this blog after 1755.

Fast bibliography here: I made this blog out of stories we did not cover in this Cracked Podcast episode. (Buy Jason Pargin's upcoming book!) The stories spring from Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. (Buy Rebecca Solnit's books!) Solnit's work on Lisbon cites pioneering disaster researcher Russell Dynes (RIP) and his journal article linked here.

Dynes argues the 1755 Lisbon quake was a (European/Christian) turning point. Lisboners treated that natural disaster as a natural disaster. Which makes a huge difference! If God did a quake to you because you're bad, what can you do but lie down and take it? God might even respect you for taking your lumps, instead of fleeing, and forcing Him to shake each new location you flee to.

Portugal treated this natural disaster like a natural phenomenon. So they rebuilt without shame. They updated their building codes. A royal minister nicknamed Pombal organized this painstaking parish-by-parish survey of the quake's damage, because he wondered if they'd learn anything useful from doing that. That kind of data was new. It was a forerunner of modern seismology!

Pombal's efforts didn't bring back the dead. But his efforts mattered, down the line. Because every natural disaster has a partially man-made result. We choose how to rebuild. We choose which tools Future Leaders will have in the next crisis. And those Future Leaders might receive our tools, waste the tools, and try flimsy ass-coverage when someone calls them on it. But if we're lucky, they'll make those tools count.

3 The 1985 Mexico City Earthquake

Stats from Solnit: an 8.0 quake, with aftershocks at 7.5 and 7.0. At least 10,000 people died. Around 800,000 people ended up homeless. And Mexico's dishonest, lazy, corrupt federal government took a terrible crisis and made it worse. Let's flesh out that last idea, because it's a hard one for modern Americans to relate to.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is a Mexican political party. It held uninterrupted power in Mexico from 1929 to 2000. I'd describe its style of building code enforcement as "freestyle kickback acquisition." And in 1985, Mexico City's comprehensive building collapses made that obvious. As Solnit puts it: "The earthquake literally cracked open the facade of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party... and revealed the corruption underneath. ... The era of the earthquake was akin to that of the civil rights movement in the United States, when what had long been the status quo was found to be intolerable. When that happens, change follows."

Ordinary Mexicans took heroic action against the quake and their government. They formed teams of volunteers called brigadistas, providing aid and relief the government wouldn't. Students laid down in the path of government bulldozers, because government 'dozers tended to sweep away rubble before pulling screaming survivors out of it. The government also attempted some shady property stuff, using the quake's messy aftermath as cover for helping rich developers evict inconvenient poor folks. But one citizen put on a lucha mask and created a character called "Super Barrio", a wacky wrestler drawing national attention to the scam. He's credited with stopping 10,000 evictions. He's awesome. And I hope it's copyright-safe to show you his picture.

Mexico had an execrable federal government going into their disaster. They had one afterwards too. According to Solnit and others, the PRI followed up its 1985 quake bungling with 1988 election fraud. The PRI stole the election by claiming the electronic voting system crashed. The PRI got away with this because Mexico had an electronic voting system, and electronic voting systems are almost impossible to safeguard.

So it's worth remembering a government might get away with bungling a crisis. Especially if that government undermines the voting systems designed to hold them accountable. Mexicans had to agitate for another decade-plus before they gained multi-party democracy. It's still a flawed democracy. The PRI stole another election in 2012. And I think if we Americans peg our expectations that low, we can fight for change without getting our hearts broken by change being slow and imperfect.

2 The 1993 World Trade Center Attack

Fast facts: in 1993, terrorists blew up a van full of explosives in the World Trade Center's underground parking garage. Six deaths, more than one thousand injuries. Pre-9/11, this was what people meant by the phrase "World Trade Center attack". Also, many of you were born post-9/11. According to math, most present-day 18-year-olds were born after 9/11. That math in no way freaks out your elders.

If you are a teen, I wonder what you think about Rudy Giuliani. I'll bet he strikes you as a funny television lawyer slash fossil. He's like if Abe Simpson had Lionel Hutz's job! Or like another reference, from after you were born! ("Something something Barry Zuckerkorn." Thanks for coming through in a pinch, TV From 2003.)

In 1994, Rudy Giuliani became the mayor of New York City. In real life! Voters picked that Abe Hutzerkorn guy twice! So he supervised the forward-looking security planning after the 1993 attack. Experts recommended creating an Office Of Emergency Management command center. Giuliani agreed. Experts recommended putting this command center in a secure location in Brooklyn. Giuliani disagreed. He put it in World Trade Center Building 7 (!) on the 23rd floor (!!). The city finished the command center in 1997, and evacuated the command center in 2001. Because it was too close to Ground Zero! So New York City's nerve center for responding to 9/11 was not usable during 9/11.

This 100% happened because Rudy Giuliani wanted to look cool. Rudy wanted to do his Heroic Winston Churchill cosplay in style. He wanted photo ops with a non-bunker background. Rudy also wanted to run for President in 2008 in style, which meant burying this fact instead of addressing it. So he arranged a 2007 Fox News interview. He blamed a lower-ranking city official for the Emergency Operations Center's location. And Fox News's Chris Wallace replied to Giuliani by presenting him with a memo. A memo written by the lower-ranking city official, in the 1990s, recommending the Brooklyn site. It turns out even a broken clock is fair and balanced twice a day.

It also turns out crisis preparation is not something you do for the 'gram. You must prepare for a crisis like a nerd, in a basement in the not-cool part of Brooklyn. Or you prepare in a stylish way if that works the best and saves the most lives. Or you wear the damn mask, because demonstrating good public health behavior matters more than your three-plus years of desperate Churchill cosplay.

1 1940s British and German cities

You don't need background here, right? World War II. Planes dropped bombs on cities. Also the Nazis lost, and it's good they lost. You know all of this.

But unless you've read Rebecca Solnit's amazing book, you don't know the story of U.S. Army Air Corps Captain Charles E. Fritz. I can't find his picture.

Fritz was a trained sociologist. At the end of the war, he helped the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey study bombing campaigns' impact on civilian morale. How did Londoners hold up under 12,000 metric tons of bombs that killed 30,000 people? How did urban Germans handle 45,000 bombs hitting their cities within one year? And 3,000 tons of bombs hitting Berlin in one day? And the incineration of at least 18,000 Dresden residents in one firebombing?

The study's short answer: British and German populations were not demoralized by those record-setting bombardments. Furthermore, "people living in heavily bombed cities had significantly higher morale than people in the lightly bombed cities." The team even studied Japan's (non-atomically) bombed cities, to check their British/German work, and got similar data.

Fritz and the team disagreed on what this data meant. His colleagues claimed British people withstood bombing thanks to British innate toughness. His colleagues claimed German people withstood bombing because Hitler forced them to withstand it. But here's Solnit's description Fritz's analysis:

"Fritz's first radical premise is that everyday life is already a disaster of sorts, one from which actual disaster liberates us. He points out that people suffer and die daily, though in ordinary times, they do so privately, separately. And he writes, 'The traditional contrast between "normal" and "disaster" almost always ignores or minimizes these recurrent stresses of everyday life and their personal and social effects. It also ignores a historically consistent and continually growing body of political and social analyses that points to the failure of modern societies to fulfill an individual's basic human needs for community identity.'"

Don't misunderstand Fritz. He's saying disasters are bad. Also if you are Lyndon Baines Johnson, please don't misunderstand Fritz. Because Fritz went on to find similar results in his studies of North Vietnam.

Solnit cites Fritz to say disasters are an opportunity to build community. You gain a context for connecting with others. A good reason to Zoom with an old friend on a weekday afternoon. You can't end the war against 1940s fascism or against 2020s ignorance all on your own. You're rolling with a context outside your control. But you can (socially distantly) win the war against loneliness. As a Dresden survivor once said, "the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured." So thanks for reading. And hang in there. And go kick this thing's ass by saying hi to somebody with the same device you used to read this.

Alex Schmidt makes The Cracked Podcast and made you this blog too.

5 Escape Games

Escape Games are just text adventures brought to life for nerds. Specifically, Dad Nerds. They started popping up in major metropolitan areas in 2010 but today you can probably stroll past one or two in any typical midwestern strip mall. You can tell how many are in a town by how weird the names get. They all start out called some variation of "The Escape Game," but as a town gets more and more crowded and "The Escape Game" name gets scooped up, you'll inevitably get companies called Departure Frolics or Elopement Sports.

They're themed around James Bond-like spy narratives or Indiana Jones-style architectural digs. Being an extremely low-stakes version of Harrison Ford is every Dad's dream. By that I mean, "you get to be a version of Harrison Ford that doesn't get crushed to death by a rock if you screw up." The worst thing that can happen to you at an Escape Game is you fail to win a bumper sticker that says I Escaped! (Or "I Frolicked With Extreme Zest" in the more off-brand versions.)

Losing that bumper sticker is a huge deal for Dads though. First of all, losing money is very un-Dad, and that sticker has a retail value of at least fifty-four cents. The more important prize is bragging rights. "Oh you didn't Disenthrall yourself from the Lark on time, guess your dumb-shit kid sucks at puzzles, huh Ron."

4 Making Craft Beer

There was once a time when drinking something other than Natty Lite was mildly transgressive. Now, the male protagonist in every third Hallmark movie owns his own brewery. When a trend has made its way to the Hallmark channel, it's officially dead. That's why I'm so looking forward to the world premiere of the new Candace Cameron-Bure movie, A TikTok Vaping Christmas, Yeet: Brought To You By OnlyFans.

It's weird that we have a word for people whose hobby is drinking and it's "alcoholic," but making your own alcohol to drink is a totally separate and much more respectable thing. I guess these days if you're a true craft beer person you have to make it yourself because 90 percent of beer production is done by two companies, including craft labels like Blue Moon (owned by MillerCoors), Goose Island (Anheuser-Busch), and Boddingtons (also Anheuser-Busch). So there is a certain coolness factor in taking money from big corporations with a moderately priced homemade IPA.

Still, if you were making a horror movie where someone was bitten by a Were-Dad and then found himself slowly transforming, the pivotal morning post-transformation scene would have him waking up in bed with a Home Depot smoker and a six-pack of home-brewed pilsner. That's the most Dad you can possibly get. If I haven't convinced you yet, please know that this onesie exists:

3 Alamo Drafthouse

When Dad's aren't consuming their own smoked meat and beer they must seek sustenance elsewhere, and where better than a dark room with a comfy chair, where a Die Hard movie might be playing? There's something about kicking up your feet and eating a burger that's just so Dad. Maybe it's the iconic image of a Dad in an armchair, reclined, in his underwear, with a beer as he watches a sport (competitive ribbon dancing, I assume).

Also, they do yell at you if you text during a movie, which while it's something I wholeheartedly agree with, it's also a total Dad move. Alamo Drafthouse is the cool Dad of movie theaters. It's like sure, you can come to my house and watch a movie, you can drink a little bit, no big deal, but you follow my rules, son.

When Alamo Drafthouse was just a boutique theater in the Austin warehouse district that showed cult movies and sold cheap booze they were pretty cool. Now they've hired a CEO who was formerly an executive at Starbucks, the biggest brand to ever ruin something that was once cool. Bringing in a Starbucks CEO will mean lots of expansion and good things for Alamo Drafthouse's bottom line, but it'll also mean its Dadification is complete.

2 History Podcasts

I'm not sure it's fair to say that history podcasts were ever counterculture cool, but they were certainly once for young people, some of whom wore fedoras. Those people were pre-Dads just waiting to blossom.

History has always been well established Dad territory. Dads have loved old Westerns since they were new Westerns, and World War II, and telling you common history facts that you have to pretend not to know because it makes them happy. It's your obligation as someone who loves their Dad to let him tell you that Teddy Roosevelt was actually kind of a badass.

Podcasts are supposed to be the next big thing in the media industry. In the first ten months of 2019, 129,000 new podcasts were launched. If you Google "How many history podcasts are there?" the search engine just spits out the infinity symbol. You can really see how Dad-like these shows are when you peruse their merch selection. If there's one thing Dads are known for more than loving history, it's loving puns (and boy howdy do history podcasts love puns).

1 Record Collections

Record collections are what I call a fluctuating Dad Thing. They went from being super Dad to counterculture but they've swung right back around into Dad territory, just like ironic mustaches that morphed over time into normal mustaches without anyone ever noticing the change.

If you've got a Crosby record player with five albums from Best Buy (likely candidates include the Guardians Of The Galaxy soundtrack, Hotel California, and Nas's Illmatic), start calling your exes, because congratulations, you're a Dad! (This includes me. I'm a total Dad.)

Bands can go into Dad territory real fast. Remember in 2012 when Paul Ryan said his favorite band was Rage Against The Machine and Tom Morello called him, "the embodiment of the machine?" It was the best possible response, but that doesn't mean that on that day Tom Morello didn't also say a silent prayer for the crossing of his music into the nether-realm of Dad stuff. Yes, due to the inexorable passage of time, Rage has joined long-time residents Steely Dan and Jimmy Buffett who'd passed over long before.

It's not just your taste in music that makes owning a record collection a Dad thing, though. If you're like me, you got a record player in college and then realized after one move why having thousands of hours of music in one tiny device that fits in your pocket is so damn convenient. Records are heavy! Even if you own like twenty of them, no one wants to be the one to carry the record box during the move. Is there any better quality of sound that makes actually working out worth it? (I personally will exercise when I'm dead.)

It's a major Dad thing to cling to those precious twenty records you bought in college, hauling them from apartment to apartment so that twice a year you can listen to a copy of Midnight Marauders that you got at Walmart so it'll sound slightly better than if you streamed it on Spotify. It's not good or bad. It's enjoyable ... just in a Dad way.

Top image: Halfpoint/Shutterstock

1 Pile Of Poo

...perhaps better known as "the smiling pile of poo emoji" or "the poo emoji."

I've learned a lot about emoji. One learning: every emoji has an official name. The official name for this emoji is "Pile Of Poo". Any other description is technically inaccurate.

But like, c'mon, that emoji is too bizarre and cartoonish to be called a "Pile of Poo." Right? That's like seeing the giant Snoopy balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and calling it "a dog."

Anyway let's get into its origins. One myth to dispel right away: it's not chocolate ice cream. It is shaped exactly like the top of the ice cream emoji, but that's a weird artistic overlap and nothing more. It's the opposite of that story about how Homer Simpson was almost secretly Krusty. Ain't no chocolate in that swirl.

The poo emoji's origin dates back to the origin of all emoji. Super short version: in 1998, one designer working for one Japanese cell phone carrier created 176 tiny images. Then his company attached each image to a code point. Those 176 images + code points were the first emojis. So on that company's phones, each image could be typed like a letter, number, or other character.

Technical stuff here: when you type a letter or number or other character, you are selecting a code point. Thanks to a digital non-profit named Unicode, the code points for letters and numbers and other characters match up across all digital devices and platforms. Thanks to Unicode's efforts, I can type the phrase "thanks to Unicode's efforts" and know those same letters will pop up on your device.

The first emoji were a hit. Other Japanese cell carriers rolled out their own sets, to keep up. But the different carriers did not coordinate their emoji images or their emoji code points. So if you texted a friend who had a different cell phone provider, your [smiling face] could output as [frowning face] or [middle finger] or [terrifying string of broken code].

Luckily, Unicode adopted emoji and standardized the code points in 2010. But for the 12 years before that, emoji were a lawless mess. The emoji system was like the Wild West!

Policed by Twitter's brave emoji sheriffs.

And here's another amazing thing: in 2007, Google launched an internal project called "Mojo" to add emoji to their Gmail e-mail service. There's an amazing oral history of that project written by Lauren Schwartzberg for Fast Company. And you're gonna want to click that link, because they've got the incredible original Gmail "pile of poo" emoji. It is faceless. It is more realistically gross. And it has an animated cloud of flies buzzing over it. Go look at it!

More fun stuff: Google's team fought each other bitterly over whether to allow the pile of poo emoji in their emoji set. How did the poo win out? According to Google's Darren Lewis, "We argued that [omitting the pile of poo] would add complication to the system and take longer--that's usually a good way to get a feature in." You're reading that right: America has the pile of poo emoji because our instinct to be lazy overwhelmed our instinct to censor everything.

And by the way, the emoji set has many Japan-centric entries. Notice them sometime! If you are not Japanese, the time you spend scrolling through the Food & Drink emoji category (featuring dango, oden and the classic fish cake with swirl) might be the most multicultural part of your day. For real! It's multicultural! Even if you're only swiping through the Food & Drink category to find erotic fruits!

Japanese culture also gave the world Dr. Slump, a popular 1980s manga, adapted to anime, featuring friendly cartoon pile of poop characters. That's a key touchstone for the Pile of Poo emoji's style. And you've probably never even seen it!

And the Pile Of Poo emoji's cultural rabbit hole runs deeper than that. This great Dan Hopper piece details the rise and fall of the proposed "frowning pile of poo" emoji. Short version: Unicode sees the logic for adding it, but doesn't want to open the floodgates for endless further poo-faced facial expressions. Also this great Ian Fortey piece reveals how the Pile of Poo emoji drove Jordan Peele to quit acting. Short version: the makers of The Emoji Movie tried to cast Peele as "Poop", and that mere offer convinced Peele he should focus on directing full-time.

One bizarre emoji had a worldwide ripple effect. An emoji that's a combination of Japanese cell phone innovation, American laziness, and a slice of manga/anime canon I know very little about. That is how we got the most famously weird emoji.

2 Person In Suit Levitating

But how did we get the least famously weird emoji? Did you even know this is an emoji?

It's true! Check your phone. He's in the section after the faces. In between the set of dancing people and the oddly robust set of Playboy Bunnies. And...huh? Why is that an emoji? Who decided to equip every keyboard on Earth with a mystical thin Blues Brother?

For the answer, I turned to my friend Joe Veix, an incredible comedy writer and Internet spelunker. He delved into the origins of "Person In Suit Levitating" for Newsweek. It's a story that begins in the late 1990s. A rich time for dopey Internet experimentation. America had nothing to do but watch Michael Jordan win, enjoy its unprecedented economic prosperity, and fool around on The World Wide Web.

In our era, we stay home and stare at our browser all day because of a global pandemic. In their era, they stayed home and stared at their browser all day because browsers were thrilling new technology. Browser innovation was the hot tech field. So when Internet Explorer 4.0 (lol so 90s) was in development at Microsoft (lol so 90s), they equipped that browser with "Webdings" -- an Internet-optimized version of that goofy Wingdings font no one needs. Microsoft staff built out Webdings to include 230 characters.

If you squint at the right side of the fifth row of that Webdings character set, you'll see a proto-version of Person In Suit Levitating. And he got in there because [TRIGGER WARNING FOR INTENSELY 1990s STATEMENT] a Microsoft employee loved ska.

Jerry Dammers was the keyboard player for a ska group called The Specials. In 1979, he founded a company called 2 Tone Records to release the group's music. And his band & label put out this album exclusively in Japan. The fella on the cover there is a fun version of the band The Specials' logo: a man dressed in sunglasses, a black suit and a porkpie hat, because that outfit was typical of the "rude boy" style of the British ska revival.

You might think that makes this emoji Japan's fault. But no! This emoji was Made In The USA! Microsoft typography department employee Vincent Connare loved ska so much, he got his hands on this rare Japanese LP. Meanwhile, Connare's manager complied a list of concepts for Microsoft's team to symbolize in Webdings. The list included "jump." Connare saw that, thought "my Japanese record collection", and a weird Webdings character was born.

Wedbings launches. Years pass. Unicode standardizes the world's emoji set. And then in 2014, somebody asked Unicode to turn that oddly specific Webding into an oddly specific emoji. And for some reason Unicode said yes.

That kind of thing can just happen! Because anybody can propose an emoji to Unicode. And if Unicode says yes, it gets it add it to every digital device on Earth. Anybody can do that.

Weird, right? Anybody in the entire world can do that.

3 Bison

...including me! Alex Schmidt! Your pal! I proposed the bison emoji. Unicode said yes. Also you can't use it yet. The emoji rolls out to world keyboards sometime in the fall of 2020.

It took more than a year of research and effort to create the bison emoji. It's brought a lot of great folks into my life. It's the subject of my new podcast, so PLEASE SUBSCRIBE because no one blog can contain the full story. But here's a little bit of it.

When you saw that "Bison" entry header up there, did you immediately know what that is? You should have! After all, the American bison is the largest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere. The American bison is the official national mammal of the United States. And the American bison...is the animal basically every American calls "the buffalo."

You probably didn't hear "bison" and see that in your head right away. Because in America (number one country) we call it the "buffalo", because of our proud heritage of making mistakes. If the National Park Service is right, the French word "boeuf" ("beef" in American) got misused and mixed up around bison one too many times. So if you say "buffalo", you gotta hope people know you're not describing Africa's Cape buffalo (the one from Big Buck Safari) or the Asian water buffalo (the one from the emoji keyboard). In our interconnected world, the word "buffalo" is just plain confusing. It's as if "buffalo" lacks a standardized global code point.

I had many reasons for putting more than a year of effort into proposing the bison emoji. (Subscribe to the podcast to hear them all!) And one reason is that a bison emoji is a clearer representation of that species than America's most common word for it. I think this fixes that issue, a little bit! Just by making this little guy an option!

It's not a huge deal. It's not changing anybody's life. Also that Emojipedia drawing of what the bison emoji might look like is insanely swole, so this is turning out more erotic than I'd planned. Anyway, I like the idea of the world's communication being a little bit clearer. I hope you'll listen to the podcast about that and more. And I hope you're looking forward to your future bison emoji.

Top Image: Mego Studio/Shutterstock

5 "Freedom Means Doing The Opposite Of Whatever The Government Tells Me!"

My favorite thing about Americans is that we hate being told what to do. If the government issued a health decree demanding we stop eating french fries, millions of Americans who've never eaten a fry in their life would immediately say, "Whoa, according to my watch, it just turned French Fry O'Clock, motherfucker! I've just issued a health decree of my own demanding the president eat my entire ass!"

But my least favorite thing about Americans is that we don't like the responsibility that comes with the freedom. The people yelling loudest about "regulations" don't seem too keen on regulating their own lives (my man, your town wouldn't need stiff fines for littering if you'd stop chucking taco wrappers out the window of your pickup). Sure enough, the moment the experts urged people to stay home to stop COVID-19, lots of us defiantly flocked to crowded beaches. But who, exactly, were we defying? The government? The virus? Death itself?

In a perfect world, sheer concern for our neighbors would have kept us indoors without having to be told anything -- we didn't need new laws to tell us how contagious diseases work. Common sense should dictate that it's madness to boast that you're "willing to risk it" when said risk is immediately transferred to everyone around you without their consent, including the sick stranger who won't get a ventilator because your sorry ass will be using it to stay alive. Hmm, it's almost as if our society has built up selfish dicks as a heroic archetype...

4 "In A Disaster, It's The Tough Loner Who Survives!"

I've talked before about how in the 1980s, Westerns fell out of fashion in Hollywood and were replaced by post-apocalypse movies. It was all the same plots; often a lone wanderer turning up in some sparse, dusty settlement (Mad Max instead of Shane or 1960s-era Clint Eastwood), the "Indians" were replaced by mutants/zombies/bandits and the evil sheriff or plantation owner became a flamboyant, sadistic warlord. But it's the exact same fantasy: In a mythologized era without alarm clocks, bills or dress codes, we would be free to become what society really needs: A Lone, Grizzled Badass.*

*Don't worry, the women still have shampoo, razors and makeup.

These heroes have no friends. They serve no master. They obey no rules. They are men of few words but many knives. Also, they can eat my whole ass -- in the real world, they're the ones stripping gun store shelves bare during the pandemic, because surviving the disaster means defending their stacks of toilet paper from the rampaging "bandits" they're sure are coming. "But who are these bandits?" you might be asking. Well, if you're reading this, it's you. In an apocalypse fantasy, it's the Lone Grizzled Badass vs the mindless hordes, aka, literally everyone else. Their entire worldview is based on the idea that when the chips are down, the whole of society will be reduced to a mass of hungry mouths.

So who cares if those mindless masses get sick or don't have any hand sanitizer because a badass bought it all? They're not real people, they're the background threat the real people will have to overcome. Never mind that these hordes are, in fact, the very people who are manufacturing and delivering that hand sanitizer, that they're the nurses and the trash collectors, that it's their labor that keeps the lights on and the cell phones working. It's like when billionaires build apocalypse shelters to escape ... their own customers and employees, I guess?

Some of us literally prefer the fantasy of mass death to the reality, which is that workforce specialization has turned the entire concept of rugged independence into a selfish, childish daydream. Maybe you can learn to grow your own food and purify water, but you sure as hell can't manufacture vaccines or perform a root canal on yourself. Side note: I'm convinced you could kill the post-apocalypse genre forever just by attaching a device that lets the audience to smell the characters. Though I guess the fantasy genre would die with it.

3 "If I Prepare For A Disaster And It Doesn't Occur, Then The Preparations Were A Waste!"

Confession time: Prior to this whole thing, the only emergency supplies in my garage were a chainsaw and a chainmail codpiece. Plus some scented candles in case the power went out. And why not? You can literally live for decades without ever realizing how unprepared you are for an actual emergency. "What, you want me to buy a bunch of bottled water and canned goods and then just toss them in the trash when they expire? What a waste!"

But the real shock of the Corona Crash has been finding out that apparently our entire infrastructure was operating on this same, "only plan for what you need five minutes from now" philosophy. The US government's emergency pandemic stockpiles were tiny and withered. The billionaires who scolded the poor for not having six months of emergency cash immediately screamed for government bailouts after a single week of bad sales. It turned out everyone was hurtling down the same proverbial highway with no brakes or headlights, completely nude and steering with our proverbial knees so we could use both hands to light our proverbial meth pipes.

Gee, I wonder if this is because the ruling classes always pissed their pants if we ever tried to save money? When Millennials stopped wasting cash on diamonds, the media cried that they were "killing" the industry. Consumers saving instead of spending is considered a dangerous red flag for the economy and every massive corporation will fly into action to make sure that doesn't happen. All of our pop culture is built around shaming people for doing it.

If you save money, they'll tell you, you're depriving your loved ones of a full life ("Remember, an average wedding costs $34,000!"). If you cut back to plan for the future, they say you're not "Living in the moment." If you stock up on emergency supplies you're a paranoid prepper, if you wash your hands too much you're a germaphobe, if you worry about potential disasters then you need to "Stop and smell the roses." You know, for your own mental health.

In fact, if tomorrow we all collectively decide to slow down, simplify our lives and save for a rainy day, I can tell you exactly what the media will call it: A Worldwide Economic Collapse.

2 "If Someone Warns Of A Disaster And it Doesn't Occur, It Means They Were Wrong And We Should All Laugh At Them!"

You know who should have loved the idea of a civilization-threatening pandemic? Donald goddamned Trump. Remember how he tried to drum up panic about how refugees were bringing new, exotic diseases into the USA? Or how he played up the Ebola threat in 2014 to demand travel bans from Obama? His whole deal is using the threat of "foreign" disease and demanding drastic action in response. It's red meat for his base -- remember, the whole psychological underpinning of social conservatives is believed to be a stronger innate sense of disgust (thus the constant reference to foreigners being dirty or unsanitary, the stereotype of the sexually promiscuous being disease-ridden, etc).

Well, here we have a lethal pandemic that A) the media says started in China (he hates China!) B) was exacerbated by a cover-up by their evil government C) supposedly originated in unsanitary foreign meat markets and D) would thus require a travel ban. It so perfectly fits the ugliest parts of Trump's philosophy that I'm kind of surprised he didn't ground every international flight the moment the first cough was heard. This guy masturbates to videos of foreigners crying at airports.

But he didn't do that, partly because he has an even stronger fetish for rejecting the advice of know-it-all "experts" and partly because every president knows there isn't a lot to gain by preventing a problem. Winning a war gets you a second term and a statue; maintaining peace means high school history classes will skip your administration entirely. Well, it's the same in everyday life. If you save a drowning child in a lake, you'll get your face on the local news. If you put up a sign and a fence that keeps all children out of the dangerous lake entirely, you're just the cranky jerk ruining everybody's fun. "Look, it's the mean 'no swimming' guy! Eat my dry ass, old man!"

1 "Handling This Is Surely Someone Else's Job!"

Another thing I've mentioned before is that our system depends on making everyone feel powerless, even though each day is a frantic stream of real, consequential choices. This drives some of us to the Lone Badass fantasy, but others are drawn to the opposite, equally untrue belief that the system is so corrupt that no individual's choices actually matter.

The people who buy into this aren't heading to the beach in defiance, they're doing it because, well, what difference does one more person make in such a big crowd? Likewise, why donate to a charity to support laid off workers? Surely the government will take care of them. Why cover your mouth when heading to the grocery store? The billionaire who owns the chain should supply the staff with gear.

It's just basic game theory: why should you make the sacrifice if there's a chance someone else can do it instead? If you don't buy up all of the toilet paper, some other hoarder probably will. Why should they be the one who gets to spend quarantine doing their wacky Mummy character on Tiktok?

In the end, our inability to prepare for the worst is really just A) an inability to grasp which hypothetical futures can actually occur and B) an unwillingness to see strangers as real humans whose needs overlap our own. I can tell you from experience that it's possible to live most of your life without these flaws ever getting exposed, in the same way that a flimsy chair can last forever as long as nobody sits on it.

But now the disaster has come to sit on us all, our legs are cracking and we've all got a certain amount of ass we'll soon have to eat. Those of us lucky enough to live through it will hopefully learn the right lessons. If we're really lucky, we'll have time to forget them all before the next time the shit hits the fan. Stay safe, everybody.

You can pre-order Jason "David Wong" Pargin's book right here, or follow him on Twitter, his Instagram, or Facebook, or Goodreads, or any of the many accounts he's forgotten about.

4 Sudden Unemployment Looms Around Every Corner

To see how the world of work is terrifying in ways that it didn't used to be, just look at the word "layoff." A layoff used to mean that you were actually "laid off," meaning you were idle while the shop was idle. When the shop got going again, they'd call you back up. When the word was coined, it meant a worker taking the pedal off the gas. Now it means crashing over the median and smacking into oncoming traffic.

So tens of millions of us live in fear of that sudden unscheduled meeting ("Can I see you in my office?") or just showing up to work one day and finding out your keycard doesn't unlock the door anymore. It's not like it's an unreasonable fear to have -- unemployment is a killer. And I mean that literally. You're twice as likely to experience a stroke, have a heart attack, and experience that ultimate life event (dying) when you're laid off. It's why recessions even make it more likely for people to die, full stop.

In America, unions have all but disappeared and that means that the vast majority of workers are functioning under the rules of "at will employment", which means you can be fired at any time, for any reason, without warning, with no recourse (unless you can somehow prove it was due to discrimination against one of the few specific protected classes). And even if you think you can prove that, the layoff thing can make it hard to consider paying a lawyer to help you take legal recourse.

That insecurity can be lethal because it's not just about the paycheck and health insurance; we define ourselves by labor. It's the first question we get asked by strangers, it's the first thing mentioned in any news story about us ("Local Elementary School Teacher Arrested After Nude Food Fight At Country Kitchen Buffet"). Even if we take long breaks in the stockroom and are just biding time until we can use the copier to make our sweet zine, we still spend half of our waking hours at the workplace. It's likely where we have most of our social connections. And it can all be yanked away at any moment.

And if you're working in the gig economy, it's even more tenuous -- Uber doesn't have to fire you, they just "deactivate" your account. "You weren't fired", it implies, "you never worked for us at all."

3 "Learn To Code" Isn't An Answer

Joe Biden, famous anti-malarkey presidential candidate, recently got up on a stage and basically said "Learn to code!" to a bunch of coal miners facing the death of their industry. These people spent their whole lives mining coal, worrying about black lung, and fighting wars with mine bosses. But coal is going out of style (something about how it's slowly rendering the earth uninhabitable) so time to shift gears, right? It's just that simple!

If you're young, it's not just Joe telling you to learn to code. Everybody's telling you to code, or to major in business, or to suddenly learn all sorts of practical things. "Well, don't major in Literature, you big doofus! Do something useful like business!" It turns out, though, that students are doing just that, putting on their big-boy ties and majoring in business. It's the most popular major by a long shot. The second most popular? Health sciences. That wave of unemployable scarf-wearing writer kids we keep hearing so much about? Yeah, Business majors outnumber them by about ten to one.

But doing the practical thing and majoring in something marketable, like business, often leads you to finding yourself drowning in the hundreds of thousands of people who did the same thing. What'll set you apart? And with all the debt you'll incur, should you even go to college? Should you try to find a co-op school? A boot camp? An apprenticeship? A plumber can't make more than a coder, right? Wait, they can? And we'll need more of them, going forward?

Speaking of coders, will we need as many as we used to? No? Wait, isn't a coder the same thing as a software developer? Ok, so I should be a developer then? Can I become one doing an income sharing program? Man that sounds great. Wait, do income sharing colleges that teach you to code suck too? Goddammit.

Therein lies the second terror of modern work: finding out what work is going to be viable ten years down the road is as hard as trying to keep your work once you get it. You have to make a ton of decisions about the kind of work to do and you'll never be able to stop asking those questions so long as you live.

1 The Only Long-Term Answer Is Relentless (And Exhausting) Curiosity

What used to be a particular personality type -- the person who is constantly learning, and constantly curious about others and how they live their lives -- is apparently now a requirement. You need that person's restlessness and addiction to novelty, their confidence to always be trying new things in spite of failure.

In the old world, confidence came from knowing your shit. Learn enough about the dingleberries and the gimbalhoppers of your line of work and you could speak on it with authority. But that authority is constantly shifting beneath our feet. Things we thought were solid are now amorphous, and at any moment your entire knowledge base can suddenly become useless. "Everything you spent thirty years learning how to do? This robot has it built-in from Day 1. Your severance is this commemorative coffee mug. The handle broke off."

It seems like from here on out, confidence comes from being able to ask the right questions and being able to interrogate why and how we do things. It comes from realizing that you don't know anything, or that what you know might become meaningless by this time tomorrow. For those of you who are already locked into the Industry of the Future, just understand that it's a rough goddamn world out there for the vast majority of us. So have a little mercy for everybody putting in a day's work. Especially those coal miners trying to become coders, proverbially or otherwise.

5 Nier Automata's Director Hated Waking Up Early

Nier Automata, a 2017 action RPG about a rad combat android, sold millions of copies and was beloved by critics, too. It also saved gamers the trouble of creating their own erotic fanart of the protagonists, so, ya know, win-win-win. The game was the brainchild of developer Yoko Taro, who'd made his name on the Drakengard franchise (which the Nier games spun off from.) And despite his prior success, all of Taro's previous achievements pale in comparison to Nier Automata, a project he almost gave up on because of his sleeping schedule.

Look, game development is often plagued by overlong hours that prevent developers from sleeping enough, but that's not really the case here. Taro just didn't want to wake up early, which was problematic because it prevented him from working with the rest of the team for a big chunk of the day. Taro defended his position that starting a workday at the deathly early hour of, umm, 9:30 AM as a freelancer is impossible, and this caused constant arguments among his team.

In an interview, Taro stated he considered straight up just canceling the game because of his sleeping schedule. And before anyone pulled the "Oh, Taro. You're a famous game developer. You must be joking. I bet you don't even sleep at all!" card, he clarified that he was dead serious.

The game ended up getting made, indicating that Taro got his act together and started waking up when his mates needed him, right? Wrong. Taro just got the company to give up and allow him to get into work, not merely at a later time, but whenever he would finally wake up.

4 Five Nights At Freddy's Happened Because Of A Bad Line In A Review

Five Nights at Freddy's was the surprise horror hit of 2014, replacing zombie and ghosts of old with haunted animatronic figures capable of terrifying anyone below the age of 13. But despite being a commercial success and spawning several hit sequels in a short amount of time, the tale of FNAF is full of despair. Scott Cawthon was in the very hardcore business of Christian games until game journalist Jim Sterling shared some harsh opinions on a game by Cawthon called Chipper and Sons Lumber Co.

In his scathing video commentary, Sterling noted how the the supposed-to-be welcoming characters in Chipper Co. unintentionally had "dead terrifying soulless eyes," before realizing that hell, everything else in the game looked terrifying, too. The words took a toll on Cawthon, who later realized that, like any great supervillain origin story, he could use his skills to make something intentionally scary.

And truth be told... he didn't. The animatronic beasts from the FNAF series are scary on their own and the atmosphere of the games certainly helps, but nothing is more frightening than a monstrosity intended to be adorable. Still, by pivoting to horror and working with some neat new mechanics, Cawthon got a deservedly huge following. Great to see he managed to revive his career by simply switching genres in a way that made him and everyone happy. Well, except for Jesus apparently, as Cawthon's Christian followers have seriously debated whether or not he's sold his soul.

3 Dark Souls Is The Result Of Reanimating A Video Game Corpse

Demon's Souls is what got the ball rolling for the "Souls" genre, the biggest thing in the 2010s gaming scene if you don't count Fortnite and online harassment. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game's creator, was a 30-year-old social studies graduate when he started coding for From Software, and he managed to convince the company to let him work on Demon's Souls. The big wigs gave him the reins of the project, which might seem like some proof of Miyazaki's advanced social manipulation skills, but that's not it, or at least not all there was to it. It's because Demon's Souls was a dead-on-the-water project no one wanted anything to do with.

The development had been a mess, and the team had failed to create a solid prototype. They only told Miyazaki to do whatever he wanted with the project because it couldn't possibly get worse than being a total failure, which it already was. Miyazaki introduced so many original mechanics that the completed Demon's Souls had nothing other than a name in common with the project he'd picked up, and the rest was history. And on top of its various revolutionary mechanics, there's another remarkable aspect about the Souls games that came about because of hardship: Its storytelling.

The storytelling in the Souls games can be described as obtuse, and that's by design. Young Miyazaki used to read books in English when he didn't have a good grasp of the language, so he replaced words he didn't understand with familiar ones. Miyazaki has since repurposed his childhood experiences into a type of storytelling that's deliberately incomplete. By making players fill in the gaps with their imagination, Miyazaki makes them feel they are co-authoring a story and gets the perfect excuse for not creating a cohesive narrative.

2 Silent Hill Exists Because Of A Failed Attempt At Failing

For making Silent Hill, the best horror series in video game history, its developers earned the awesome name of "Team Silent". Pretty neat, but originally they were just a bunch of people Konami had no clue what to do with. The team first met in a room paved by very thin ice where Konami put developers coming from failed projects. In the wake of Capcom's Resident Evil, everyone was trying to ape the survival horror genre, so Konami tasked their in-house group of rejects to scare gamers into giving them money.

Unlike most troubled development stories, upper interference wasn't at play here. Konami didn't actually care about Silent Hill, as this simply about selling a game, not about making a game worth selling. Team Silent felt so free they thought Konami had forgotten about them. Weirdly, most of Silent Hill's chaotic development spawned from internal disagreements.

The original game was directed by Keiichiro Toyama, a man who successfully created a Lynchian nightmare despite having no previous experience directing. And that's the least strange of the bunch.

Akira Yamaoka, the now legendary composer renowned for the game's iconic soundtrack, only joined the team because the previous composer had called quits. Yamaoka's ideas for an industrial score were so brazen that others thought they were too horrifying. He eventually got them to cave in through what I assume was a completely legal use of noise torture.

Another remarkable aspect of the games is its beautiful yet creepy cutscenes. They were all made by one man, Takayoshi Sato. He had no serious 3D modeling experience and had to convince the team that videos were actually important for the narrative. He failed, so for 3 years, he didn't go home because he had to render the videos at night when the computers weren't being used for anything else.

The success of the Silent Hill series is the result of a perfect storm of madness, and Konami probably feels blessed they kept Team Silent. Just kidding, Konami disbanded Team Silent and outsourced the development of every game after Silent Hill 4, effectively destroying the series.

1 Red Dead Redemption Owes Its Life To Ringo Starr

Red Dead Redemption 2 made headlines for the terrible working conditions Rockstar Games imposed on its dev team. That's terrible, but while RDR2 might have shown Rockstar at its worst when it came to dealing with workers' rights, it didn't show Rockstar at its weirdest. The success of every prior game in the Red Dead series was the result of a bizarre chain of events.

Before the series hit the critical and commercial stratosphere with Red Dead Redemption, there was SWAT, short for "Spaghetti Western Action Title." SWAT wasn't even a Rockstar game at first, but a Capcom game. And why were they trying to make a Western? Because one of the big shots at Capcom had just got inexplicably starstruck after watching a Western film starring legendary genre actor Clint Ea..Ringo Starr, duh.

The levels of passive-aggressiveness during development were high to the point that characters were all spoofs of members of the dev team. Eventually, after floundering around with the project, Capcom just gave it away to Rockstar in exchange for the publishing rights in Japan, despite not believing it would ever actually get published anywhere. The final product was eventually called Red Dead Revolver, a game so average it's the main reason the sequel has the word "Redemption" in its title.

Red Dead Redemption did turn out great for the most part, but its development wasn't any less of a mess. An unnamed source claims gross mismanagement made sure the game was a disaster up until just a few months before its release. Wow, a whole few months? In the video game industry, that kinda seems like a slam dunk.

4 Countless Famous Female Writers Needed Male Pseudonyms To Get Taken Seriously

The problem here isn't that readers won't buy books written by women -- it's that they seem to think women can only write for other women. Thus you get the Bronte sisters (the ladies behind stuff like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights) using male pen names because their writing wasn't considered "feminine." Mary Ann Evans (who wrote Middlemarch) went by George Eliot for the same reason. Even Little Women author Louisa May Alcott took a male pen name so her non-March-sisters stories would be considered credible. Using a female name often relegates your work to the world of fluff, as Jane Austen could attest, were she alive and able to complain about the frilly pink covers on her biting social satires.

The practice continues today, even though we're past the point where medicine could argue that the female brain is physically incapable of writing on universal themes due to the loss of blood during menses. Even J.K. Rowling, the first person (man or woman) to become a billionaire through writing books, had to publish crime novels under a man's name. Although to be fair, nobody seemed to take Robert Galbraith seriously either. Rowling's real name is Joanne, and she originally was told to publish Harry Potter using the unspecified initials "J.K." so that boys wouldn't be ashamed to be caught reading fantasy books about a little wizard boy written by A GIRL.

If one of the most successful writers of all time has to pretend to be a dude, what hope does the rest of us have? Not much, if your experience is anything like author Catherine Nichols, who submitted proposals under her real name and then under the pseudonym "George." George's manuscript was requested 17 times, while Catherine's manuscript was only requested twice.

3 Kathrine Switzer Dispelled A Stupid Marathon Myth

A long time ago, when medical science wasn't as advanced (the 1960s), women weren't allowed to run in the Boston Marathon. It was believed that the distance was too much for their fragile bodies, and there were too many risks involved. Their uteruses could fall out, and oh the horror, their feminine features would turn into that of a man's. You can't exactly have women jogging when it could make them into infertile uggos.

It finally took a woman using a name that looked like a man's name to teach people otherwise. 19-year-old Syracuse University student Kathrine Switzer had been running unofficially with the men's cross-country team because her school had no women's team. After talking with her coach, Arnie Briggs, she decided to run the Boston Marathon. She hadn't gotten to the point where her reproductive organs were tumbling out of her, but she could run 26.2 miles, which gave her the confidence to know she could do it.

There wasn't an explicit official "No girls allowed" rule, but no woman had ever participated. Switzer signed up for the 1967 marathon as "K.V. Switzer," because if there's anything that throws off the patriarchy, it's initials. And that was all she did to hide her gender; she even wore lipstick on the day of the race. It was all fine to a point, as some of the men running with her thought it was pretty badass. Then everything went to hell.

The race manager, Jock "This can't be his real name" Semple, appeared out of the blue. He tried to rip off her bib while screaming and cursing at her. Switzer's boyfriend, a 235-pound former All-American football player named Miller, shoved him away, allowing Switzer to continue the race. Switzer and Miller pressed on, but they later got into a huge fight and he ditched her. Because if there's anything you need while running 26.2 miles, it's getting into a public fight with your significant other.

Switzer felt more determined to finish the race because Semple had tried to kick her out. "I turned to my coach and said, 'I'm finishing this race on my hands and knees if I have to.'" she later said. Not only did she finish, but she finished before her boyfriend, who had called her "too slow" right before he peaced out. They must have made up, since they got married in 1967 (though they divorced in '73).

As a result of Switzer's run, the Amateur Athletic Union (AUU) ... banned women from competing in races with male runners. (It was just too much drama!) A group of women, including Switzer, worked to get the decision overturned, and women were officially "allowed" to run the Boston Marathon in 1972. Switzer went on to have a long career as a runner, and even ran the Boston Marathon again in 2017. Her number was then retired by the race's organizer. No word on her uterus, though.

2 Rena "Rusty" Kanokogi Broke A Martial Arts Gender Barrier

If you've ever seen a six-year-old girl flip over a grown-ass man in a judo class, it's all thanks to one woman. Rena "Rusty" Kanokogi first became interested in judo after a male friend showed her a move. She wanted to fight in competitions, but there was one pesky problem: She was a woman.

Just like with the marathons, there wasn't a written rule preventing women from entering a YMCA judo tournament in Utica, NY, because they didn't need one. It was unthinkable. So when Kanokogi entered the 1959 tournament as an alternate for her team, she signed up as a man. She cut her hair short and taped down her breasts, because having the ol' fun sacks front and center is a dead giveaway.

A male teammate got injured and was unable to compete, giving her the opportunity to make history. Knokogi won the match, but would ultimately lose her medal. After the competition, she was asked if she was a woman, and since the thing was already in the bag, she thought it was OK to come clean. It wasn't, and she was promptly stripped of her award. Every hero has an origin story, and what happened at the YMCA was Kanokogi's. From that day forward, she vowed revenge ... or at least advocacy.

"Had I said no," Kanokogi told The New York Times, "I don't think women's judo would have been in the Olympics. It instilled a feeling in me that no woman should have to go through this again." She believed so passionately that women's judo should be an Olympic sport that she mortgaged her house to help finance the first women's judo championships at Madison Square Garden, knowing a world championship was necessary for her goal. Kanokogi ended up becoming a seventh-degree black belt, and became the first woman allowed to train with the men's group at the famous Kodokan Judo Institute.

5 J.R.R. Tolkien's Grandson Made A Movie So Bad It Closed After One Screening

J.R.R. Tolkien's was married to a total 1920's smoke show. No joke, if this woman were alive today, she would be hawking makeup on YouTube, or Instagram modeling, or some other hot girl job. Her name was Edith, and she and Tolkien had four children together (nice). Their family tree is full of talented people, including the only blind fencer competing in Britain, an award-winning sculptor, a successful poet, and more. But while the rest of the Tolkien family was putting all of that Legolas and Frodo slash fiction money to good use, Grandson Royd Tolkien was producing terrible, terrible movies.

The first feature film Royd Tolkien produced was called Pimp. It was about a Pimp, and friends, it doesn't sound good. You can watch Pimp for $2.99 on Amazon if you want, but to say it doesn't come highly recommended would be an understatement. It grossed $205 in theaters. No, not $205 million or $205 thousand. $205. This wasn't helped by the fact that it was publicly shown in one theater, only once, so it didn't have a ton of time to make money.

You can also save your $2.99 by just watching the trailer. It's only a minute long, but feels like a full 2 hours.

Pimp holds a Rotten Tomatoes score so bad if they put the cursed video from The Ring on a big screen, it would have more commercial value. Critics and audiences agree nobody likes Pimp! Royd also produced a movie called Tontine Massacre, which looks like it was trying to coast on the success of The Blair Witch Project about ten years after that success died.

It seems like he gave up producing in 2010 in favor of taking bit parts in fantasy franchises like The Hobbit and Game Of Thrones. Which, honestly was a public service on his part because he probably has enough family money to be churning out Pimp sequels forever.

4 Meghan Markle's Whole Family Is Insane

You'd think the weird side of Markle's family would be the one she married into where the grandparents are also cousins, but they don't hold a candle to her American family. We've written about it before, but Markle's nephew named a strand of royal wedding weed after her, Markle Sparkle, and one after her newborn son, Archie Sparkie. That baby is going to have a dope story to brag about to his first-grade class.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, where all terrible things happen, Markle's half-sister, Samantha, is trying to suck every ounce of fame out of Meghan like a New Jersey Housewife version of Dracula. She's publicly called Meghan. "Cruella De Vil and Witchy Poo," and tweeted that, "If our father dies, I'm holding you responsible."

Meghan cut ties with her sister and her father, Thomas Markle, after he also tried to cash in on her fame with staged paparazzi photos of himself getting ready for her wedding. After Meghan stopped speaking to her father, he continuously went to the media to make statements like, "Everything Meghan is, I made her," and "they have Meghan treating her father in a way that Harry's mother, Princess Diana, would have loathed." Nothing screams, "I'm sorry I took advantage of you, Meghan" like invoking the name of her tragically deceased Mother-In-Law, right?

Since his loving tactic for screaming at the media that Meghan is mean to him has evoked a shocking lack of giving a fuck from Meghan, Thomas Markle has decided to make a documentary. It's called Thomas Markle: My Story, and it's revealed things like "I don't know who she is now" and that he lied in a Piers Morgan interview. I know, I know. High stakes stuff.

3 Bill Clinton's Half Brother Was A Coke Dealing Lounge Singer

This is somehow both the most and least surprising Bill Clinton fact. It probably isn't easy growing up the younger brother of a future president, especially when your career trajectory is sending you toward either a Las Vegas residency or a minimum-security prison.

Roger Clinton Jr., Bill Clinton's younger half brother, was code-named "Headache" by the Secret Service. With that kind of reputation, it's not hard to imagine why the extremely shoulder-padded man behind the album Fantasy of Love could somehow be annoying.

Clinton began his singing career by warming up audiences for the sitcom Designing Women. He was a touring musician while his brother was the Governor of Arkansas and would occasionally crash at the guesthouse of the Governor's mansion between gigs. During this time he apparently also had a lil side hustle going because he was arrested for selling cocaine to an undercover police officer. He plead guilty (probably because the exchange was videotaped) and spent a year in prison. Bill controversially used his presidential power to pardon his brother for his past cocaine arrest on his last day in office, which is the sleazy government equivalent of the action hero sliding under the closing door at the final second.

While Bill was serving his terms as President, Roger took full advantage of his new name recognition. He was introduced by Willie Nelson during a performance at Farm Aid, did a three-episode guest arc on The Nanny as himself, and appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman. Wow, coke dealing lounge singer who appeared on The Nanny is the most 90s resume you could possibly have.

2 Dane Cook's Brother Stole 12 Million Dollars From Him

Dane Cook isn't exactly known for being an upstanding guy. There are past accusations against him of joke theft from multiple comedians, there's the fact that he started dating a girl who was twenty-six years his junior when he was 45, and just, you know, all of the things that come out of his mouth when he talks. But it still sucks that he trusted his half brother Darryl McCauley to be his business manager, and McCauley repaid that trust with the theft of 12 million dollars.

McCauley served as Cook's business manager from the early 90s to 2008, and Cook originally hired him to help him escape his job as, seriously, a corrections officer. When Cook decided to move from his home state of Massachusetts to Los Angeles, he decided to hire a new business manager, promising his brother a different role in Dick Jokes llc.

That was when Cook discovered that from 2004 to 2008, McCauley had been sending him fake bank statements. McCauley had done crazy things with the stolen money, like stashing $800,000 in the walls of his home and forging a check from Cook to himself for three million dollars. Or, roughly enough money to buy a yacht and name it the USS Lolscrewmybrother.

Once caught, McCauley was sentenced to five to six years in the same prison where he once served as a corrections officer and ten years of probation after that. He was also ordered to pay Cook $12 million in restitution. So, if you know anyone looking for an experienced business manager, hit him up!

1 Tommy Hilfiger's Son Is Obviously Rich And Questionably Talented

Tommy Hilfiger's son is a semi-successful rapper who goes by the name Rich Hil. Presumably, the nom de plume is so he won't get any preferential treatment from the rap community for being the son of the dude who invented polo shirts.

When I say he's semi-successful, though, please understand I don't mean that he's talented. He raps like Christian Bale's Batman trying to whisper you a secret as slowly as possible. If you're curious where Hil learned to rap, it was, of course, on the mean streets of Philadelphia. His parents allowed him to visit on weekends away from the family home in Connecticut (with a bodyguard of course).

Hil was recently signed to Warner Bros. Records, supposedly after they asked The Weeknd who he would like to work with and The Weeknd listed Rich. I'm not an expert on rap or anything, but that was totally a prank The Weeknd played on Warner Bros., right?

Hil raps about universal concepts like love, breakups, drinking too much, and rehab. However, after a recent arrest for possession of a metric butt-ton of marijuana, he told The Observer, "I learned that alcohol and coke? Is kind of for faggots. You know, like, in my eyes. I'll drink alcohol to get lean, don't get me wrong, but, like, something about people who are addicted to alcohol and cocaine, they seem like fags to me. Not 'fags' as in 'gay'. I have nothing against gay people. Mad people in my family are gay."

That's a quote the creator of Entourage would call too on the nose for parody. No celebrity offspring has ever been a better example of why you shouldn't tell your kids that you're rich.

5 Age Of Love Lied To Its Contestants And Its Star

In January 2007, Australian tennis star Mark Philippoussis suffered an injury to his "good" knee which Dr. Hamish Osborne predicted would force him out of the game for anywhere from four weeks to eternity. Separated from his true love (tennis) and with lots of extra time on his hands, Philippoussis figured he'd say yes to finding love in lady form by starring in a Bachelor-like reality show.

But to up the drama, producers didn't tell 30-something-year-old Philippoussis or the female contestants the gimmick they had in store: He'd have his pick from a group of 40-something women (Cougars) and group of 20-something women (Kittens). Producers told the Cougars that the show was "about successful, empowered, positive women ... We didn't mention that there was a bachelor that didn't know that they were older." So to recap, they were told they were picked for being badass, when the tagline was basically "Would a guy date these old, OLD women when he could also date YOUNG women?"

The show was hosted by soap opera star and officiator of Howard Stern's wedding Mark Consuelos, which is somehow both a very random and a deeply appropriate choice. Each week, Philippoussis would go on a date with one or two of the women, then eliminate one in the standard dating show way. Really, a missed opportunity not to do some sort of gimmick whereby he'd eliminate the cougars in one way (like over a landline) and the kittens another (like via text). Yes, I know that's playing on stereotypes, but this whole show is, so maybe it wouldn't have been as bad if they leaned in even harder? Alas, probably not.

Related: 6 Ways To Improve Reality Dating Shows (With Cruelty)

4 The Parents On Parental Control Were Truly Bizarre

Each episode of Parental Control, which managed to run from 2005 to 2010, opened with a set of parents introducing their absolute angel teen / early 20-something child ... but wait, there's a problem! Their kid has a terrible significant other. By "terrible," the parents mean they're spoiled, rude, or in one case, pick their nose and fling the boogers wherever they may go. (The booger-flinger is also a "fake punk," which the parents somehow spend much more time dwelling on.)

The parents were of course left with no other option but to go to an MTV-orchestrated cattle call to find their kid a new beau, where they asked totally normal questions that would definitely help them learn about compatibility, such as this one:

When each of the parents pick new potential lovers for their child, they head to their living room with the terrible significant other to watch the child go on two completely staged dates. Predictably, the terrible significant other continues to be spoiled, rude, or an excavator of their nose. Less predictably, the parents are TOO into the dates. Many of them seem very horny for their kids.

Episodes ended with the child deciding whether they would stay with their terrible significant other or go on another date with one of the complete strangers who agreed to go out with them without ever seeing a photo or hearing any information whatsoever about them. Surprisingly enough, there is no correct choice. It was such a thin premise that the show only ran for ... 273 episodes.

Related: Another Dating Show With No Balls

3 Beija Sapo Told A Terrible Version Of The Frog Prince

The MTV Brasil show Beija Sapo is an acid trip in which contestants, who are dressed up as toads, compete for a kiss from a "prince/princess" on a cartoonish-looking castle set. If they win, they become the "prince/princess," which doesn't really mean much beyond getting a title, but hey, that's kind of how it is in jolly ol' England too.

It's obviously an homage to the classic tale of a princess befriending a frog, where as her reward for looking past his slimy, wart-ridden exterior, the frog transforms into a handsome prince. However, in the original Brothers Grimm story, the frog transforms when the princess throws it against a wall, rather than kisses it. That honestly might be a little healthier.

Back to Beija Sapo: Audience members also get in on the action by competing to kiss the eliminated contestants via seeing who can scream "Help me out, Cicarelli!" (that's the name of the host) the loudest. And this isn't some little peck on the cheek. The "lucky" audience members get a mouthful.

At one point, Beija Sapo was the highest-rated show on MTV Brasil. It was also innovative for being the first Brazilian show to broadcast a queer kiss before 8 p.m.

Related: The 5 Most Clearly Staged Reality Shows In TV History

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There isn't a great way to explain the concept of Dating In The Dark without sounding redundant. Contestants date in literal darkness while being filmed with night-vision cameras, ostensibly to see if "love is blind." Different activities get contestants as close as possible without penetration, including massages, groping, and one wherein they sniff each other's clothes. As creepy as clothes-sniffing sounds, it just might be the most legit activity a reality dating show has done to help people pick a mate. There is some evidence that unwashed clothes pack enough pheromones to signal to a potential mate if they'd be a good match to make a baby with. So keep that in mind every time you see the pile of dirty boxers from the father of your child. There's science behind why you're still with them.

The game ends when contestants see the light (literally) and have 15 seconds to decide whether they're still into the person they've been blindly humping.

Dating In The Dark began as a Dutch show (Daten In Het Donker), and international versions were created for over 20 countries, including the U.S., the UK, India, and Slovenia. I guess you can't argue with a show that's (relatively) simple to shoot and easy to explain. That is, unless you're the Guardian writer who said, "There were birdhouse webcams that got higher ratings [than the UK version]," and that the show "seemed to validate the worst of humanity's impulses."

Related: 14 Dark Realities That Reality TV Shows Don't Show You

1 Naked Attraction Put A Lot Of Genitals On Display

If you've ever thought "Dating shows are fun, but it'd be great if the contestants had an even more superficial connection," then Naked Attraction might be for you. For five seasons, UK viewers were treated to contestants in glowing boxes, which showed their naked bodies from the waist down (yes, their genitals were out and about).

The person vying for a date would get to eliminate a contestant based on their physical "attributes." Then the eliminated contestant would strut out of their box, while the remaining boxes would slide up to show a little more skin.

Once one contestant remained, the person doing all this genital judging would remove their clothes too (really, it's only fair) and have a little chat with their date. The actual date would take place promptly at 9 a.m. the next day (the sexiest time of all). Since the show included said date, an episode would take an entire 12 hours to film! For all their time and potential humiliation, contestants didn't get paid to appear; they did it all for the exposure (SORRY).

Naked Attraction wasn't a hit with everyone. Ofcom (the Office of Communications) received a lot of complaints that it wasn't appropriate for broadcast, but they ruled that it was no big deal, since there wasn't any direct sexual contact. You know you have something special on your hands when you have to defend your show with "Hey, they're not doin' it on camera!"

For more, check out Why Dating With Depression Is So (Bleeping) Hard - People Watching No. 3:

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1 "Mysterious Hairy Creature" Myths Have Been Around Forever

Today we know Bigfoot as the shill for Jack Link's, but the original notion of the big hairy lug is, as so many things, basically a bunch of concepts all bundled up together -- most of them not of the friendly, fuckable persuasion. Instead, ol' 'Foot began as a nasty piece folklore that used to terrorize us and make us afraid of the dark and the woods around us.

Native Americans had their own sets of myths about ghouls in the woods, going back further than anyone knows. Dsonoqua were hairy cannibal women that would kidnap and eat kids. Then there were the Buk'wus, small hairy monsters that similar to pukwudgies, who were basically the violent dickheads of the forest. Then the Europeans who took over the land brought their own sets of myths, including the "wild men of the woods." While most of these wild men were supposed to be shaggy hobos gone native, they became a generic term for anything hairy that one might encounter in the woods, animal or otherwise.

Finally in the 1920s, an agent named J.W. Burns coined "Sasquatch," cobbling together a couple of Salish words, like sokqueatl and soss'qtal, into a catchall term for anything big, hairy, and bear-like running through the forest (possibly after you). Likely because it was fun to say, the term spread, and today we all know Sasquatch as the "official" name of whatever species Bigfoot is supposed to be. But how did we get from there to a national obsession with Bigfoot boners?

Related: The 5 Most Baffling Sex Scenes In The History Of Fanfiction

2 A Series Of Hoaxes Brought Bigfoot Into The Modern Era

Back in the days of legit mountain men and lumberjacks (before they got their style cribbed by hipsters), everyone knew that reports of Bigfoot were kinda full of shit. The stories start in earnest in 1811, with an explorer named David Thompson, who reported what the Bigfoot crowd like to say was a first encounter, but which he recognized as the footprints of an old bear.

It makes sense, since bears have oddly human-like feet and the guy was an experienced outdoorsman and not a credulous moron who automatically assumed anything he came across was a new species of ape-man. He further didn't believe the stories because he recognized that while natives told legends about live creatures, no one had ever claimed to see the remains of one -- unlike today, when a cooler filled with a Halloween mask and a bunch of guts commanded a news cycle.

There were a few more encounters in the intervening years, but they were few and far between until we skip ahead a century and a half. Interest sparked up again when Ray L. Wallace "discovered" a set of footprints 1958 in California -- by which I mean he created clumsy wooden stamps, stomped through the woods, and then sent the story to the press. Those footprints were, well, big, so the name "Bigfoot" was used to describe both the creature and the category of Quentin Tarantino's Pornhub searches.

But Bigfoot really went big time with the Patterson-Gimlin film, shot by Bluff Creek (a bit on the nose there), California. You know, the one in which he's caught in the Abbey Road cover pose that has graced every piece of Bigfoot merch since. Of course, that Bigfoot was a guy in a suit (made by the top gorilla suit maker at the time, Philip Morris) named Bob Heironimus. Patterson was a conman cowboy known for check fraud and dine-and-dashing, and his is a wild and woolly tale about a man who ended up scamming the very people he leaned on to help him fake the Bigfoot film in the first place.

Still, the same credulousness that created a huge market for shake weights and penis enhancement pills has kept Bigfoot alive into the present day. And now that Bigfoot has set up camp as a mysterious, intriguing, and possibly dangerous figure in the modern imagination, let's figure out why people wanna fuck him.

Related: The 7 Most Sexually Deviant Creatures In Folklore

3 The Fantasy Of Sex With Magical Creatures Is As Old As The Written Word

Go to Genesis (the book of the Bible, not the bitchin' band), and it practically opens with weird sex. Take the Nephilim; a bunch of angels got cast out of Heaven, slapped some Al Green into their 8-tracks, and then got it on with the ladies of Earth, poppin' out a bunch of half-humans in the Biblical version of the X-Men. It's a tale most people skip over when waving this book around as a beacon of unvarnished truth, but it's in there.

Meanwhile, almost every culture in the world has legends of beings like succubi and incubi -- demon types who have sex with men and women, respectively. The idea of being "hagridden" (literally ridden by a hag or witch or demon) persists to this day, thanks to people seeing "shadow beings" during sleep paralysis. They report the things they see when nightmarishly frozen as getting a little somethin' somethin'. It even changes from culture to culture -- West Asians, for example, report having sex with genies.

Fast-forward to the modern era, and we have myths about aliens committing sexual assault to make hybrids. If your belief system leans more toward ghosts than aliens, you'll probably get molested by one of those instead. Doris Bither, the woman who inspired the classic '80s horror flick The Entity, said she was repeatedly violated by an ... uh, entity ... which followed her as she changed houses and basically wrecked her life for years. As awful as it was for her, others have enjoyed their ghost ghost encounters, to the point that there's a term for it: spectrophilia.

Which brings us back to the main point: By the 1800s, men and women alike were coming forward with tales of being kidnapped and/or sexually assaulted by a Sasquatch. Variations on these supposedly true stories would turn up all over the world, and certain audiences for these harrowing tales suddenly realized they had a new fetish.

Related: 6 Tips For Turning Awful Fan Fiction Into A Best Seller

4 Now Bigfoot Erotica Is A Booming Business

In 1977, Judith Frankle and John Cotter wrote a book called Nights With Sasquatch, detailing a woman (coincidentally named Judy) who is taken into captivity and constantly ravished by a Bigfoot. Unfortunately, it's not written as sexily as it sounds, but it's a good starting point for this genre. Four years later came a porno called The Geek, which was apparently 15 minutes of Bigfoot clapping them cheeks.

And when the internet reached maturity in the 2000s, everything that had once been niche became mainstream. You may remember that Bigfoot porn hit the news a couple years back when, in a congressional race for Virginia's 5th District, the Democratic candidate, Leslie "No Jokes About The Last Name, Please" Cockburn accused opponent Denver Riggleman of enjoying Bigfoot porn based on his writings. He denied it, of course, but he also went on to win. Turns out that, politically speaking, possibly popping wood for Bigfoot isn't seen as a dealbreaker.

Authors like Virginia Wade have taken advantage of the affordability and accessibility of eBooks to reach this audience in ways never before possible (she reportedly was making $30,000 a month in sales at one point). And why not? Books and movies about sexy vampires and werewolves took over pop culture not too long ago. And like those stories, Bigfoot erotica seems to walk several lines at once. It's not quite bestiality, because he's often portrayed as a devolved human, but he does toe the edge between sex with a human and sex with an ape. (The ability to climb trees with your feet seems like a good cutoff point.) That is sort of the premise of King Kong, after all.

Bigfoot also falls somewhere on the spectrum of the caveman fantasy. Even more brutal than the Harlequin covers of men in pirate shirts, Bigfoot can be rough in a way that wouldn't otherwise be acceptable, because it isn't a man doing it. It's dangerous, taboo, and exotic -- all elements that certain people have yearned for since masturbation was invented. And really, it's easy to argue that this is better than fetishizing a Fifty Shades-style abusive rich guy because, well, at least there's no risk of actually running into a Bigfoot.

For more, check out 4 Fan Fiction Subgenres So Weird They're Inspiring:

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5 Luis Bunuel Made One Of The Most Infamous Short Films Ever

If you're an experienced Cracked reader, there's a chance you've run across Luis Bunuel before. In 5 Sinister Old Films Way Too Disturbing for Modern Audiences, Bunuel has not one but two entries, and in 5 Old-Timey Movies Way Too Disturbing for Modern Theaters, he's got the #1 spot. In their time, Bunuel's films caused so many riots that at the premiere of Un Chien Andalou, he kept a pocketful of rocks to throw at any faces that seemed like they were up to no good.

Bunuel had nothing but resentment for the bourgeoisie, and wanted his film L'Age d'Or to piss off every major power structure in Europe. And boy oh boy did he ever get what he wanted. Fascists would crash screenings of the film and wreck shit, including artwork by Bunuel's friends Salvador Dali and Man Ray. After Parisian police banned the film completely, the Vatican got all copies of it pulled from circulation in 1934. It wouldn't be seen again until 1974.

Bunuel had a long career, including a brief stint working in Hollywood until he got kicked out of the studio system. Turns out verbally abusing an actress could be a fairly fireable offense even back then. And then there's the actual contents of his films. Land Without Bread features a real chicken getting its head ripped off, and Bunuel intentionally broke beehives that a donkey was carrying so that it would get stung to death on camera. So it's likely not very surprising when you also find out that he threatened his actors with a gun and dressed like a nun in public.

But to really get a feel for Bunuel's crazy, I'd recommend watching Un Chien Andalou. Not only does this product of a clearly abnormal mind manage to squeeze more discomfiture into 20 minutes than the Saw series did in nine movies, but it's also " the most famous short film ever made," as Roger Ebert calls it. Also, it was made in 1929. In a year in which all ten of the top-grossing movies in the United States were goofy musicals, Bunuel was putting razors against eyeballs for, well, some reason.

Related: 4 Bad Filmmakers Who Accidentally Made Smart Movies

4 There Is No End To Crazy Stories About Werner Herzog

If you're not familiar with Werner Herzog's body of work, you might be familiar with his actual body (bones, face, the works). He most recently played the Client in The Mandalorian, acting like the only person in any universe, fictional or otherwise, who would want to bring harm to Baby Yoda. But he's also had an extremely long, wonderful, and subversive directing career, and tales of his exploits are the stuff of legend.

You may have heard some of them before, like how he continued giving an interview despite coming down with a mild case of " shot by a gun." But eating a shoe and cutting off a man's leg with a chainsaw are only the beginning for Herzog, a man whose life is an unending misery circus of the kind usually reserved for the orphans in a John Updike novel. He walked 600 miles in the dead of winter to visit a friend, saved Joaquin Phoenix from a car accident, and tried to hypnotize his entire cast when he wasn't getting the performances he wanted in Heart Of Glass.

But hey, hypnotism beats promising to do severe bodily harm to yourself as a reward for a good performance. When making Even Dwarfs Started Small, a nice little family film about a group of people with dwarfism who overtake an insane asylum and crucify a monkey ...

... an actor managed to run himself over with a car and also light himself on fire. Uncle Werner then promised to jump into a cactus patch if the actor could avoid any more life-threatening accidents. The actor did, so Herzog kept his promise like a joyless Bavarian Wile E. Coyote. He later described this both as "[having] long spines sticking in my knee sinew" and " a little fun."

Herzog's work is divided into both fictional films and documentaries, and the latter are like going to the aquarium while on mushrooms -- you'll be educated, you'll be awestruck, you'll be frightened, and you'll weep. For example, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is a thoughtful 3D meditation about some of the world's oldest cave paintings, except for the part at the end that's about mutant future alligators.

But if you only watch one Herzog film, make it Fitzcarraldo. It's about how human futility inevitably drives us insane, or maybe it's just about dragging a big-ass boat through a jungle? In either case, this movie captures a blend of practicality and gibbering madness usually reserved for life hack videos, and had so many problems that the doctor traveling with the film crew ran out of anesthesia and had to sew up a camera operator's hand without it. This film came so close to falling apart so many times that Herzog literally pulled a gun on the lead actor and threatened to murder him if he didn't finish the movie. So yeah, it's awesome.

Related: 5 Famous Filmmakers Whose Dream Projects Were Disasters

3 Crispin Glover's Movies And Albums Defy Explanation

You've probably seen Back To The Future, right? Crispin Hellion Glover, the nerdy dad from that movie, moonlights as a director, and he's spent his career trying to answer the question "What if a movie had the capacity to hate?"

Glover wasn't in the BTTF sequels because the ending didn't have enough "love," so the studio instead used his likeness. This kind of spoiled working on blockbusters for Glover, so he decided to have the weirdest second act since Hulk Hogan's beef-and-concussion-addled brain dreamed up Pastamania. You know how famous people will record an album, because nobody tells the rich no? Glover observed this phenomenon and decided "What if I did this, but instead of music, it was what serial arsonists hear as they sleep?" And thus, this was born:

This song is the breakout single from Glover's album, one that also contains a rap about jacking off and selected readings from Glover's written works, which are ... hang on, let me take a photo of a random page from one of them:

Glover's album is notable for featuring a phone number in the liner notes that, until 2007, you could call and possibly talk to Glover about what any of this meant. You can also watch his bizarre music videos, or maybe his infamous appearance on Letterman wherein he threw a kick near Letterman's head, which got him blackballed from late-night shows for years.

But what motivates Glover to do all of this? Is it to raise money so he can buy a castle? Yes. But it's also all in service of his true passion: directing. So far, Glover has directed two excellent films in a planned trilogy: What Is It? and It Is Fine! Everything is Fine. I can safely say that these films are unlike anything else I've ever seen.

For example, the second film is about a wheelchair-bound man with debilitating cerebral palsy and a hair fetish who attempts to have sex with a series of beautiful women, and then strangles them to death. Believe it or not, this is the more palatable of the two, and you can watch the trailer here if you work from home and also live alone.

As a filmmaker, Glover's primary interest is raising questions. Is it immoral for this physically disabled man to have these sadistic and pornographic revenge fantasies? Are his violent urges justified since he's a victim of a society that only values bodies able enough to produce capital? Is our disgust due to the fact that we're seeing sexual depictions of the disabled, or because of the associated violence? Can I get my money back?

Related: 17 Times Filmmakers Almost Ruined Their Own Movies

2 Alejandro Jodorowsky Has The Craziest Film Ever Made (And The Craziest One Never Made)

Before Alejandro Jodorowsky was a filmmaker, he was a literal clown, so you know right out of the gate that this man has deep unresolved frustrations. His first film, 1968's Fando y Lis, was controversial upon its premiere in Mexico. And by "controversial," I mean it caused an actual-ass riot.

But this didn't dissuade Jodorowsky from directing, or from being a goddamn wizard. He created his own religion / complicated way to get laid called psychomagic, and I think the basic premise is that through tarot readings, people can understand the neuroses put on them by the ghosts of their ancestors and heal by doing avant-garde performance art. Jodorowsky claims he's even been able to perform miracles with it.

But it couldn't save Dune, which Jodorowsky agreed to make even though he'd never actually read the source material. His vision was a 14-hour epic which he hoped would "give the hallucinations of LSD without LSD," starring Orson Welles (who agreed to be in the film if Jodorowsky agreed to have the chef from his favorite restaurant cook all his meals on set), Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali (who demanded $100,000 per minute of screen time), and Jodorowksy's own son. Pink Floyd did the soundtrack, H.R. Giger did the art design, and famed comic book artist Jean Giraud did the storyboards. At this point, you're probably wondering why you've never seen what is clearly the greatest movie ever made, and the answer is that it was never made. It lost $10 million just in pre-production, and eventually the powers that be decided to give the project to a much more stable and normal director: David Lynch.

So if you're looking for a recommendation for a Jodorowsky movie, something relatively straightforward like Santa Sangre would probably be the responsib- Screw that, we're diving headfirst into the Hellmouth. Watch The Holy Mountain. It's a visually stunning film about how each of us, to truly reach our full potential, must undergo the terror of rejecting the comforting dogmas we've inherited and try to find answers for ourselves. It's also about a Christ-like character who wears a thong, eats a wax figure of himself, and has sex with a mountain. A limbless dwarf rescues him with balloons. A bunch of toads and chameleons get exploded for real. A wizard turns shit into gold.

The Holy Mountain is the result of John Lennon liking Jodorowsky's previous film so much that he made the president of Apple Corps offer Jodorowsky a million bucks to make his next film. Jodorowsky initially offered the starring role to George Harrison, who declined the role when he learned he'd have to show his asshole on camera. To prepare for this film, on the advice of his guru, Jodorowsky didn't sleep for a week straight, and according to an interview, he also did magic mushrooms. "She sent me mushrooms in a jar of honey. When I ate them, I became a lion. I went up to the roof and then I made a connection with every one of the stars."

Related: The Creative Processes Of Famous Filmmakers: Charted

1 Jan Svankmajer's Stop-Motion Films Are Nightmare Fuel

Jan Svankmajer is an animator in the same sense that John Wayne Gacy was a children's birthday clown. Whereas most stop-motion directors use the medium to animate, say, a cute clay model of a British man and his dog, Svankmajer instead decides to animate raw meat, tongues, and dead animals.

He's been making films since the '60s, but not continuously. The government of Czechoslovakia deemed his work subversive, and he was banned from making films until the '80s. But Svankmajer claims his films are apolitical, so maybe the government was just looking for an excuse to protect the fragile minds of their populace from something like this:

One of my favorite things about Svankmajer is that while some of his films are clearly aimed at adults (like Little Otik, a horror movie about a couple who carve a log into a baby, which then comes to life and has an insatiable appetite for human hair), some definitely seem to be aimed at children. He made a version of Alice In Wonderland wherein all of the nice animal friends Alice meets are played by taxidermied animals.

If you're happy that Svankmajer's mania is restricted to cinema, I have terrible news: His insanity spills over into the physical realm as well. The New York Times describes one of his art shows as featuring "illustrations in books onto which he's pasted images of eyes or genitals, or cut-up anatomical and scientific drawings with mismatched parts arranged in new configurations. His sculptures are fantastical animal amalgams, made from taxidermy, bones, fins, shells, horns or skulls." That write-up also includes a fun tidbit about a machine Svankmajer built to commune with the ghost of his dead wife. What do you expect from a man who started collecting razor blades at seven years old?

Svankmajer also claims to be on a government watchlist due to his habit of smuggling dead exotic animals into the country for him to taxidermy. So recommending your first Svankmajer film is like asking which drill bit you'd like your lobotomy performed with. So yeah, Lunacy. It's loosely based on some of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, and also the writings of the Marquis de Sade, so we're off to a good start already. It's a film about a young man who thinks he may be on the verge of a mental breakdown, and is tortured by meat-based hallucinations. He then befriends a man who claims to be the actual-ass Marquis de Sade. What follows is a series of bizarre mind games between the two designed to make the protagonist, and the audience, question their sanity. But even without those goals, it probably would've done that anyway.

William Kuechenberg is a film and television writer seeking representation (HINT HINT). You can check out his work on Script Revolution or view his mind-diarrhea on Twitter.

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4 A Secret Skyrim Boss Turns Into A Badass Sidekick

Statistically, if you're reading this, you've already played Skyrim a dozen times on six different devices, possibly including a particularly smart toaster. But we guarantee that there's still stuff left to find -- like a boss monster you can turn into your personal on-call ass-kicker.

Back in the heady days of The Elder Scrolls III, Karstaag was a frost giant who had it all -- his own castle, a crew of semi-willing servants, and a reputation that he was not to be fucked with. But fuck with him the player does, murdering him on the whims of some quest-giver. Two games and 200 years later, the player is back (as a different character) to besmirch the poor giant's name once more. In the Dragonborn expansion for Skyrim, you can desecrate Karstaag's remains, resurrect him from the dead, murder him again, then force him to do your bidding like some eldritch Pokemon.

Not that the game tells you any of this. You have to stumble upon Karstaag's skull poking out of a random cave wall by chance. Then you have to lug it over to the ruins of his old castle and get into his throne room. Oh, but the door is super locked, so you'll need to max out your lock pick skill to get in, or go the long way through a cave crawling with those little Riekling bastards.

Even once you get in there, you have to have the presence of mind to dump the skull on the throne. And if you've somehow done all this on a whim, your reward is an ice-cold can of whoopass. Karstaag doesn't take kindly to having his eternal rest interrupted. You'd better come prepared with your best potions and most expendable companions, because he won't go down (again) easy.

If you do manage to beat him, you still don't let him rest. In a final insult to his legacy, you can then summon him to fight for you whenever you want. Well, three times, anyway, before he packs it in and waits for whatever desecration lies ahead in The Elder Scrolls VI.

Related: 9 Video Game Easter Eggs That Took Years To Find

3 Tony Hawk Lets You Go To Hell (If You Try Hard Enough)

Tony Hawk Underground 2 takes players on a whirlwind tour of the best skate parks in the world -- Miami, Australia, Hell. You know, all the usual hotspots for *googles skateboarding terms* ollies. Not that getting to the Hell level is easy. You first have to finish the loosely connected thread of excuses to skate that passes for the story. That unlocks a bonus level that has you kick-flipping around what looks like Area 51, complete with a spaceship and little green dudes wandering around. And for a while, that's fine. It's just another playground for your sick tricks, or whatever the kids call it.

But it turns out this bonus level has its own bonus level. If you wall-kick off of two big red buttons, it opens a portal to some Mayan ruins. The locals are borderline-racist caricatures who are suspiciously fluent in boarding lingo.

The rabbit hole keeps going. Spray-painting five statues of the monkey god is considered blasphemous enough to open the actual gates of Hell -- which apparently looks like every other level in the game, but with red and brown walls. That's still not the end of it. If you grind along some giant ribs until they collapse, there are more buttons to wall-kick, opening a door to what looks like a seedy nightclub. Inside is Satan himself, who challenges you to a dance-off which consists entirely of moves that would look lame to even the drunkest of uncles at a wedding.

Then again, the game's story is about the player getting kidnapped by Tony Hawk in a van and being forced to participate in a skating competition against Bam Margera. So maybe we were in Hell this whole time.

Related: 5 Video Game Easter Eggs That Were Absurdly Hard To Find

2 Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night Hid Half The Game

The Castlevania series is basically a nonsense supernatural soap opera wrapped up in some of the best jumping and stabbing that gaming has to offer. But getting too stabby in Symphony Of The Night will rob you of literally half the game.

You play as Alucard, the bastard son of Dracula, who's on a mission to take down vampire hunter Richter Belmont, who's stolen Drac's spooky castle. In a daytime TV twist, Richter was the protagonist from the previous Castlevania game, Rondo Of Blood. And no, we don't know what a "rondo" is either, but it sounds like something that has a filthy (but oddly compelling) Urban Dictionary page.

Anyway, if you just beeline it to the end of the game, you'll face off against Richter in a pretty standard boss battle. Killing him triggers a 30-second cutscene of Alucard standing outside the castle delivering a half-assed eulogy about the folly of man. Roll credits. But that's the chump's way out. To get the real ending -- along with the other half of the damn game -- you've either gotta be super lucky or have access to YouTube walkthroughs. (Back before YouTube walkthroughs were a thing, you could only be lucky, or invoke an archaic totem known as a "strategy guide.")

First you gotta find two rings hidden in different rooms, then put them on and go stand near a big clock. That opens a secret room where you can get some Holy Glasses. Then, if you happen to be wearing those glasses when you go fight Richter, you'll see what's really going on, They Live-style. Spoiler alert for a 23-year-old game: Richter isn't a jerk after all! It's the old "Dark forces made me do it" defense. There's a weird orb floating above his head, and if you attack that instead, you'll free him and have to chase the real bad guy to a second castle in the sky.

This new castle is basically the whole game again, but upside down and back-to-front. Only at the end of that do you get the real ending, wherein you kill Dracula once and for all. (Or at least until Legacy Of Darkness, anyway.) It really makes you wonder how many other innocent "bosses" you've murdered just because a game tells you they're the bad guy. Have you ever just tried talking things out with Bowser? I didn't think so.

Related: The 5 Most Well-Hidden Video Game Easter Eggs Ever

1 The Sims 2 Lets You Befriend Sasquatch

The Sims series lets players live out some of their wildest and most unattainable fantasies, like gainful employment and home ownership. Or in the case of the Bon Voyage expansion pack for The Sims 2, finding -- and befriending -- Bigfoot. And unlike in real life, you don't have to go clomping around the woods with an amateur reality TV crew looking for unexplained hair and shit (although that's a free game idea right there). Nope, you can just dig up a convenient map to his house.

Still, it's not exactly easy to do. If your Sim digs for treasure in their backyard or while on vacation, they have a chance to find a weird map that leads to Bigfoot's humble shack. What, did you think he'd be roughing it in a cave? No way, Sim Bigfoot has class, right down to his panda-shaped lounge chair. Once there, you can interact with him like any other Sim. Bigfoot is down for chats, jokes, a boogie, a game of catch, or stimulating political discussions. And like other Sims, if you sweet-talk him just right, eventually you can ask him to move in with you. It's the perfect sitcom setup.

And Bigfoot isn't just a regular Sim with a paint job. He's taller, hairier, and has chiseled abs and an ass to die for. But he's also a complex being with his own unique personality and behaviors. Bigfoot isn't a fan of bathing, but he's real fond of food, eating nonstop even when he's not hungry. He's prone to tantrums, trashing the house and scaring the shit out of other Sims. But he also uses that barely contained rage to chase away burglars, so there are pros and cons. Bigfoot is also inexplicably good at everything, starting with all in-game skills maxed out. When he pops off to work in his adorable uniform -- a bowler hat, a vest, and no pants, Porky-Pig-style -- he almost always comes home bearing gifts and promotions.

But if you're hoping to someday hear the pitter-patter of little Bigfeet around the house, it's sadly not gonna happen. Bigfoot is not only sterile, but emotionally unavailable. The most you'll get out of him is a hug or a peck on the cheek, or a heart-to-heart about how he wants to focus on his career. See, they knew they had to program that in, because they anticipated that each and every one of us who stumbled across this secret would sooner or later try to fuck Bigfoot. Video games, everybody!

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5 Why Can't You Get A Hot Dog At McDonald's?

If you were opening a restaurant that mostly sold burgers and you needed other edible objects to complement them, wouldn't hot dogs be the first thing that came to mind? I mean, the question "Hot dogs or hamburgers?" has historically done a better job of explaining someone's personality than any horoscope ever could. Hot dogs are an institution, and yet they're nowhere to be found at McDonald's, or most places like it. Hot dogs came and went at Burger King not long ago, and have popped up at foreign McDonald's locations here and there, but the chain hasn't sold them throughout the U.S. since the '90s -- which was coincidentally when they first attempted to do so.

If you were to have asked McDonald's former owner Ray Kroc about it, he'd have told you there was a "damned good reason" for their absence: "There's no telling what's inside a hot dog's skin, and our standard of quality just wouldn't permit that kind of menu item." But even outside of burger places, there's a strange lack of hot dogs in the fast food world. Nathan's has fewer than 300 stores in the U.S., compared to upwards of 14,000 McDonald's locations. Surely some wiener experts have an explanation for this. One suggestion is that since hot dogs are a huge choking hazard for young children, the big chains are worried that they will kill their customer base much faster than their products are normally intended to.

Supposedly there are also a whole lot of differences as far as hot dog preferences go in certain regions, ranging from toppings to buns to how the dogs are cooked. The offerings of a hot dog cart in Chicago might disgust the residents of San Antonio, but a Big Mac is a Big Mac wherever you go. Also, I realize that by the time this article goes up, Taco Bells nationwide will probably have released a taco with a shell made of wieners.

Related: 6 Everyday Products That Almost Nobody Realizes Are A Scam

4 Why Can't Doctors Just Come To Your Place?

In an era when you can have just about whatever you want delivered to your door, from groceries to prostate massagers, it stands to reason that if you need that rash checked out by a medical professional, you shouldn't have to travel to find out that it's really herpes. After all, why wait 45 minutes to get uncomfortably groped at a doctor's office when you can do it in the privacy of your own home? It's not like this is a pipe dream. House calls used to be common. Go watch any old movie wherein a kindly doctor with a little black bag swings by to examine a patient without even making them get out of bed.

Somewhere around 40% of the time doctors saw patients in 1930, it was with a house call. Come 1980, that number dropped down to just 1%. Nonetheless, some say the practice might be making a comeback, but primarily for patients with severe conditions. Good news for the deathly ill: Your so-called loved ones won't be able to pull that "visiting hours are over" shit on you anymore!

As for why this became a fantasy for the rest of us, you can guess the reason: They don't make as much money going house to house. Travel means fewer patients seen, and if they try to charge more to make up for it, the insurance company demands to know why this patient couldn't drive their own ass downtown to sit in a waiting room for an hour with a dozen crying and coughing children.

On the plus side, the market might slowly be coming around. We could at least see more nurses and doctor's assistants offering in-home services soon. There are also services like Teladoc, which let you get an examination via a video call. Then if they need a look at your genitals, you can presumably grab one of the thousands of pics you've already got stored on your phone.

Related: 19 Products You Use Every Day (That Are Basically Placebos)

3 Where Are All The B Batteries?

Comedian Deon Cole recently brought up something that he claimed people don't know: There aren't any B batteries. Of course, he meant people other than Demetri Martin, who suggested that the reason might be so that it doesn't sound like people are stuttering when they ask for them. Or George Carlin, who also acknowledged the mystery without bothering to solve it. Now that we've established that plenty of people have indeed observed this glaring omission but didn't find it interesting enough to research, let's go ahead and see if the answer is out there.

According to Mental Floss, back in the 1920s, a battery naming system was established that incorporated the ABCs -- or at least four of them. The bigger the battery was, the higher the letter assigned to it, which worked out fine until smaller batteries became more desirable to manufacturers and fucked the whole thing up.

AA and AAA batteries were the perfect size for newer electronics, and C and D batteries remained optimal choices for consumers who preferred that their larger devices not immediately drain the shit out of their batteries. It appears that our old friend the B battery suffered the same fate as many other middle children the world over, except they got ignored by everyone else's family too.

Single-A batteries haven't done too well over the years either, by the way. While they found a place in some older laptop models, searching for them in stores will prove as rewarding as trying to accomplish anything with an old laptop. These A and B batteries also shouldn't be confused with the now-obsolete A, B, and C batteries used in old vacuum tubes, which were inexplicably given the same exact names as existing battery types.

The OG B batteries somehow stubbornly lingered in the U.S. until 2001, when they were officially discontinued. European countries, on the other hand, kept them around for bike lamps and lanterns, things of that nature. But until the hot new accessory of the season becomes, um, lanterns, I doubt that business will be booming any time soon.

Related: 5 New Products That Seem Amazing Til You Apply Basic Science

2 Why Aren't People Eating Turkey Eggs?

You're not likely to find too many supermarkets that don't sell chicken eggs. It's debatable whether you should even be allowed to call a place a "supermarket" if you don't. This is entry-level supermarket shit. And alongside the eggs and most of the corpse of the chicken, you're likely to find bits of its cousin, the turkey, lying around as well. But don't turkeys lay eggs too? How come you never see a carton of those suckers? Are they poisonous or explosive or something?

Well, the reasons for their absence are a bit more logical and way less awesome. For one, turkeys can't lay eggs until they're over seven months old, and seven months is basically a decade in factory farm time. Chickens, in comparison, start at around five months and let 'em rip at a rate of roughly one a day. You can expect to get maybe two eggs out of a turkey a week, and that's if you have the balls to steal them from a creature that looks like it should be chasing after Jeff Goldblum in a lab somewhere.

Yeah, it turns out turkeys can be a little protective of their unborn omelettes. That's in addition to them taking up significantly more space than chickens and needing more food. This all adds up to a single turkey egg costing more than a dozen chicken eggs. Plus, turkey eggs reportedly don't taste much different from those of chickens. So catering to people who are tired of the same old shit by selling them something that tastes like the same old shit but costs way more isn't the smartest business decision.

Related: 6 Insane 'As Seen On TV' Products That Are Worse In Person

1 Why Not Build Cars That Simply Can't Exceed The Speed Limit?

You'd think that a good way to cut down on speeding tickets and speeding accidents and speeding in general would be to just not make cars that have the ability to break the law. It would put a few traffic cops out of work and the cast of the Fast & Furious series would have to find a new hobby, but it would probably save some lives and a lot of gas if you couldn't get your Hyundai Elantra up to 130 miles an hour, right?

Not necessarily, and it wouldn't exactly be doing the cars themselves any favors either. Let's start with the second one. If you accomplish this by just giving the car a less powerful engine that caps the vehicle's speed at some reasonable amount over the highest highway speed limit, that means the engine is going to spend a lot of its life operating near that max speed. Machines that are constantly operating at the high end of their capacity aren't destined to last long.

OK, so maybe you give it a normal engine, but just use built-in software to automatically stop acceleration at some point. That brings up another problem. Making cars incapable of speeding might actually be dangerous. Studies have shown that cars traveling at a lower speed than surrounding cars are more likely to cause an accident, regardless of the speed limit. In other words, take a car that tops out at 80 miles per hour, throw it in traffic with a bunch of cars that don't have that limitation, and the "safe" car is now fucking with everyone's safety. (And most definitely their patience.)

Not that there haven't been attempts to do this kind of thing. In 1979, the National Highway Safety Administration successfully prevented speedometers from reading above 85 miles per hour. It lasted a whopping two years. The UK wants to make speed limiting technology mandatory in the near future, but it can be overridden and turned off. Another thing to consider is that in the U.S., there are states where you're actually permitted by law to go as high as 15 mph over the speed limit if you're passing another car. So the answer it that you probably won't see ticket-proof cars become common until we get those fully self-driving vehicles they keep promising us.

Tony Alpsen does a webcomic at Yingandyan.com, for whatever reason.

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5 Putin Gassed Hundreds To Death ... To Save Them From Terrorists

When Chechen rebels took over a Moscow theater in 2002, authorities didn't have a whole lot of rescue options. Negotiations didn't progress far, because the terrorists weren't asking for something as simple as suitcases of gold and empty promises of amnesty -- they demanded an end to the Second Chechen War. Storming the theater would lead to mass death, because they had over 800 hostages and had riddled the place with bombs. The rebels described themselves as some kind of suicide squad, willing to kill themselves and everyone else, should the need arise.

Russian Special Forces came up with an idea: Put everyone to sleep with knockout gas. Only problem was, knockout gas doesn't exist. Most gases that induce unconsciousness do so merely as a preamble to killing you. After all, even carefully crafted anesthesia stands a good chance of shutting down your body if the dosage isn't just right. But by Day 4, the terrorists had started executions, so President Vladmir Putin gave the order to unleash the gas. Reports at the time called it a secret chemical agent, but people today might recognize the name: It was a variant of fentanyl.

The gas entered the auditorium through the air conditioning system, put a fair percentage of those inside out of commission, and allowed Special Forces to successfully take control. The official story at first called the mission a total success. Ten hostages died in the crossfire, but everyone else made it, and authorities even managed to take the terrorists in alive. That story soon fell apart. The truth was that 50 terrorists had died (not too many tears were shed over them), and reporters saw hostages vomiting and choking as they entered the evacuation buses.

Authorities refused to identify the gas for doctors, so no one knew how to treat the patients. In the days after the siege, 120 hostages died from the effects of the gas. If you count everyone who died in the next year, the number rises to over twice that. Some of the survivors put together a lawsuit, so the closest thing this ordeal has to a conclusion is the European Court of Human Rights telling Russia to pay a couple million dollars to 64 plaintiffs. And as for Putin, his presidency ended in 2008, and of course no one ever heard from him again.

Related: I Survived 996 Days As A Hostage (They Killed Everyone Else)

4 Kidnappers Buried A Group Of Children Alive

California, 1976: Three men kidnapped the entire contents of a school bus, containing one driver and 26 schoolchildren. This sounds so cartoonishly evil that in a movie, this would probably flip and turn into a comedy. You know, the kidnappers discover they're totally unequipped to babysit a whole classroom's worth of rambunctious youngsters, shenanigans ensue. In reality, babysitting did not figure into their plan. They just herded all their hostages into a trailer buried in a quarry, then sealed it and piled dirt on top to prevent escape. Problem solved.

Now they only needed to get in touch with the cops and demand $5 million in exchange for the trailer's location. They reasoned that the state would pay thanks to a recent budget surplus, and because everyone cares about kids. "Children are precious," explained one kidnapper later. "They're vulnerable. They will mind." But the kidnappers couldn't reach the police. The phone lines were so jammed with parents and media asking for updates on the missing kids that they couldn't get through. This was bad for the men and worse for everyone else, since in the absence of other leads, contact with the kidnappers is the main way you solve a kidnapping.

The three men weren't sure of their next move. They napped and put off more planning for later. And during one of these naps, the hostages got away. Wait, didn't I say the hostages were trapped in an inescapable bunker? It's true, but their trailer wasn't designed to support a bunch of weight on top. Over time, it buckled, convincing everyone inside that they were about to be crushed to death. The ventilator quit after a while, and they quickly ran out of food. Dirt trickled in from a leaky opening on top.

But if dirt could get in, there was a chance people could get out. The oldest child, Michael Marshall (14 years old; most of the kids were under 10), and bus driver Ed Ray stacked mattresses to reach the ceiling, then pushed up until it gave way. Their captors weren't around when the kids popped out, so they followed the sounds of machinery until they found quarry workers who helped them.

All three kidnappers were caught and received life sentences. One is still in prison today. His last parole request was denied after police discovered he ran both a Christmas tree farm and a gold mine from behind bars. If the guy wasn't such an asshole, we'd kind of like to see a movie about him.

Related: 5 Insane True Stories Of Hostages Outsmarting Their Captors

3 Muhammad Ali Went To Iraq To Free American Hostages

The U.S. did some bombing in Iraq in 1991 (after it being on our to-do list for a while), but before that was a confusing time in which Saddam Hussein, fearing reprisal for his invasion of Kuwait, took hundreds of Westerners stationed there hostage. The U.S. ambassador, upon being told that anyone who saved Americans faced death, gave a press briefing with a noose around his neck. "If the choice is to allow American citizens to be taken hostage or to be executed," he said, "I will bring my own fucking rope."

Luckily, America was far stronger than Iraq -- not just in firepower, but also in star power. After a bunch of ex-politicians entreated Saddam in an unofficial capacity, the big guns came out: Muhammad Ali went to Iraq personally to bring some Americans home. Ali had previously traveled to Lebanon in 1985 to free American hostages, and to Israel to free Shi'ites, failing both times. And the U.S. government didn't approve of this mission. They said that Saddam would use the presence of any celebrity to make propaganda, and they were absolutely right. Plus, 1990 Muhammad Ali was considerably less equipped to negotiate compared with 1985 Muhammad Ali. Six years of Parkinson's often made it difficult to speak clearly.

At first, the trip wound up even worse than the government had feared. After a week in Baghdad, Ali ran short on medication and became practically bedridden. He couldn't speak at all. But then, on November 29, he and Saddam met for one hour. Ali spoke through a translator using sign language. His status as a Muslim icon held weight, and he said he'd speak honestly about his time there when he returned to America.

Hussein agreed to send him home with 15 hostages. Also, he got a chance to argue against U.S. intervention. "This is the land of the Garden of Eden and the land where Abraham was born," he said. "How could it be bombed?" Huh. Wonder if he was right?

Related: 8 Insane Things I Did After Being Kidnapped By Terrorists

2 Egyptian Special Forces Get Shot By Counterterrorists And Accidentally Blow Up Hostages

In 1978, an Egyptian journalist was assassinated in Cyprus. The assassins demanded a plane to get away, but when no other country let them land, they touched back down in Cyprus to think about what to do next. Authorities negotiated with them, and made some progress in getting them to release their hostages. But Egypt sent its own Special Forces team in, even though Cyprus never gave Egypt permission to storm the airport. So when the Egyptian guys made their move, Cypriot and Egyptian forces wound up fighting each other at the airport for over an hour. This ended with Cyprus killing 18 Egyptians, which was more than the number of hostages. Meanwhile, the hijackers were convinced to lay down their weapons ... by the crew of their plane.

That death toll is handily beaten by the EgyptAir Flight 648 incident in 1985. The plane was traveling from Athens to Cairo when Palestinian militants took control. An Egyptian air marshal onboard shot and killed one hijacker, so the others responded with enough gunfire to puncture the hull and depressurize the plane. This forced a landing in Malta. The hijackers executed some hostages, and then came a 10-hour period of negotiations.

In hindsight, experts say the negotiators could have kept going. But Egypt had their finest commandos on the scene, and they stormed the plane ... by placing explosives outside the cargo hold. This happened to be close to where all the passengers were huddled together. The blast punctured oxygen tanks and ignited airplane insulation, and 60 passengers died, most by asphyxiation. Egypt, as governments tend to do, covered up their role, claiming the hijackers had killed all those hostages with grenades. But then medical examiners got a look at the bodies. Suffocating foam plugged every exposed orifice. Hooray, you got rescued!

Related: 6 Brilliant Ways Hostages Outwitted Their Captors

1 Four Boys Take Over An Electronics Store And Make History

In 1991, four Oriental Boys took 39 hostages in a California outlet. That's not my racist description, they were members of a gang called the "Oriental Boys," refugees from Vietnam. The oldest was 21, and the other three were teenagers. They presented a series of alternating demands which suggested they maybe didn't plan this whole thing out in advance. At one point they asked for $1 million each, which is the sort of request we can all relate to. At another point, they asked for 40 1,000-year-old ginseng roots. They wanted these so they could brew tea. They later asked for a plane to Thailand so they could fight the "Viet Cong" who'd killed their fathers. Most consistently, they demanded bulletproof vests. To deliver this last demand, they got one hostage to agree to be shot in the leg and released.

After a standoff lasting the whole day, and with only their most reasonable demands having been met, the gunmen figured it was time to get serious. So they divided the hostages into groups, narrowing them down to decide victims. The front door was open at this point, and a sniper fired on them. But at this exact split second, the door swung shut, diverting the bullet from its path. The gunmen panicked and fired, so SWAT stormed the place and shot all four of them. One survived because he wore the bulletproof vest they'd sent.

It remains the largest hostage rescue in American history. But the real statistic that makes this crime notable is the penalty the one surviving gunman received: 49 consecutive life sentences. Ringleader Loi Khac Nguyen was convicted of just three murders (plus attempted murder and kidnapping) and actually committed none, as he alone was unarmed during the final clash. Nevertheless, he was held liable for his dead partners' actions. America does not take kindly to people messing with our commerce.

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for bits cut from this article and other stuff no one should see.

For more, check out Cracked Classic: Worst Terrorist Ever:

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