LiarTown USA (or just LiarTown, for short) has been, since 2013, a consistent source of Internet comedy gold, all springing forth from the warped mind of graphic design humorist Sean Tejaratchi. If you are unfamiliar with the site (actually a Tumblr page located at liartownusa.tumblr.com), you have undoubtedly seen Tejaratchi’s work popping up in your social media feeds. Those Apple Cabin Foods circulars advertising “Peanut Mud”? LiarTown. The Hardy Boys Lose Their Shit paperback? That’s LiarTown. The Difficult To Strip To Hits CD compilation? Also LiarTown.

Tejaratchi first flew onto my radar in the 1990s with his brilliant clip art zine Crap Hound, but LiarTown’s “things that look like real things, but aren’t real things” humor is just completely next level.

Tejaratchi has a knack for taking the most mundane, everyday packaging and advertising design elements and twisting them just slightly to the point of hilarious absurdity. What truly sells Tejaratchi’s humor though, is his ability to flawlessly ape the fine details of the design work he is mocking (homaging?). His paperbacks look like real paperbacks. His 45 rpm record labels look like real 45 rpm record labels. Over the past four years, the LiarTown style has been widely imitated, but—as they say—never duplicated. Tejaratchi’s particular brand of subtle absurdity doesn’t have much pre-Internet precedent. It’s as “Internet Humor” as it gets, and I say that without meaning it as an insult. Tejaratchi describes LiarTown as a “duplicate world maintained by a moderately benevolent but not necessarily detail-oriented God.”

Feral House has just issued a hefty compendium of the first four years of LiarTown, cleverly titled LiarTown: The First Four Years. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is The Internet in book form. Honest to God, this is the funniest book I own and if I didn’t already have a copy, I’d have it on my Christmas list. (I do still have Tejaratchi’s Social Justice Kittens calendar on my list!)

Here’s a gallery of some of my personal favorite LiarTown images, but take my word for it, the hundreds of images in LiarTown: The First Four Years are ALL gold.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Ray Nelson’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” on which John Carpenter based They Live, was first published in the November 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. But Carpenter first encountered the story 23 years later, in its comic book adaptation, “Nada.”

The seven-page story illustrated by Bill Wray ran in Alien Encounters #6. The comic follows Nelson’s story pretty closely, and there are strong resemblances between the stories of They Live and “Nada,” especially the “storming the reality studio” climax (of which Nelson’s acquaintance William S. Burroughs would surely have approved) common to all versions of the story. But there are differences. Only Wray’s includes a Circle Jerks poster.
 

The opening panels of ‘Nada’ (available in its entirety here)
 
More significantly, the famous Hofmann (i.e., LSD) sunglasses do not appear in Nelson’s story or in Wray’s comic. Nelson’s hero, George Nada, goes to the theater to watch a live hypnosis act, and when he hears the command to awake at the show’s end, he suddenly realizes that he’s surrounded by outer-space aliens. The Fascinators, “the rulers of Earth,” are reptilian beings with too many eyes who control human beings through suggestion. In Nelson’s story, Nada doesn’t just see their awful stomach-turning alien monstrosity after waking up from his trance, he hears the terrible croaking alien language they speak to one another, and a constant stream of subliminal commands delivered in “bird-like” voices. The aliens tell him to “obey,” “work,” and—now that he’s on to them—die:

Suddenly the phone rang.

George picked it up. It was one of the Fascinators.

“Hello,” it squawked. “This is your control, Chief of Police Robinson. You are an old man, George Nada. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, your heart will stop. Please repeat.”

“I am an old man,” said George. “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, my heart will stop.”

 

 
George Nada’s cruelty to his girlfriend (fiancee, in the comic), Lil, makes him an unsympathetic character and suggests that he might be seeing space reptiles everywhere because he is a delusional nutcase, not a possibility Carpenter’s movie entertains. When he sets out to “awaken” others, Nada first tries beating up the woman in his life. After violence doesn’t work, he steals her car, leaving her bound and gagged on the bed, alone in her apartment with a dead body, terrified. There is none of the comradely spirit or cheerful good-fellowship of the fight scene in They Live.

Ray Nelson’s bio is recommended reading. He claims to be the inventor of the propeller beanie and says that, as a young man, “he worked with Michael Moorcock smuggling Henry Miller books out of France.”

And John Carpenter still has some They Live sunglasses left over from his bubblegum-lacking, ass-withering Anthology tour. He forcefully repudiated anti-Semitic interpretations of They Live on Twitter earlier this year:

THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie.

— John Carpenter (@TheHorrorMaster) January 4, 2017

 
Read all of “Nada” at SAP Comics.
 

 
At long last, the surviving members of Hüsker Dü are asserting control over their work. In addition to the ongoing series of excellent Numero Group releases, there is the official Hüsker Dü online store, which is increasingly full of things to want, buy and have.

The design of the Hüsker Dü “festive holiday sweatshirt” is based on the artwork for “We Wish You A Merry Christmas,” a 1986 promo cassette the Hüskers made for Warner Bros. At first, the image on the j-card appears to be the Star of Bethlehem, but on closer inspection it looks like it must be a shattered windowpane.

The 60-second track is embedded below. If you worry that Hüsker Dü‘s Christmas carol is “not punk,” you’re going to love what Discharge was playing in 1986. Ho, ho, ho!

The festive holiday sweatshirt is $29.99 at Hüsker Dü‘s official merch store. Festive holidays, everyone.
 

 
The Volkswagen Bug is one of the most familiar cars ever designed. More than 20 million have been produced, making it the most-manufactured car of a single platform ever made. The model managed to overcome its roots as an artifact of Nazi Germany (first year of production: 1938) to become a scruffy, sporty symbol of the Boomer generation.

The Beetle (as it was also called) lasted until the early 2000s—the New Beetle lasted from 1997 to 2011. In a sense, Volkswagen was to 1970 as Apple is to, say, 2010…. a very big corporation that was mass-producing machinery that, largely through the miracle of design and advertising, was admired and even loved by enormous numbers of people. It’s one of the few car models that has a bunch of books dedicated to it, such as Edwin Baaske’s Volkswagen Beetle: Portrait of a Legend.

The Beetle was so well-loved and popular with students in the 1970s that special business opportunities arose around it that were not true of any other car. In our own era, marked by stagnant wages, the prospect of earning money by using your car as a billboard has come to seem a sign of the times, but the idea is not new. There was a company dedicated to that exact thing in the 1970s. The only car you could do it with was the Volkswagen Bug, and the company was called Beetleboard.
 

Charlie Bird with two of his Beetleboards
 
Beetleboard was the brainchild of a youthful marketing executive named Charlie Bird, who was not, in fact, Charlie Parker and also not Charlie Byrd. The company existed from 1971 to 1984 and was far from a flash in the pan. Bird himself is still around and actually has a Facebook page up about the Beetleboards; apparently he intends to release a book about the phenomenon soon.

The primary target audience for the Beetleboards was college students. Anyone willing to turn his or her VW jalopy into a platform for hawking Dr. Pepper or KOOL cigarettes or Dom Emilio Tequila would receive about $50 a month with the additional possibility of participating in promotional events. As a choice bit of R.J. Reynolds ad copy stated at the time, “Most importantly, KOOL Beetleboard drivers enjoy the constant excitement of becoming the instant center of attention whenever and wherever they drive their KOOL Beetleboard!”

Aside from Bird’s Facebook presence, there’s very little about the Beetleboards online. One of the main resources is a website called Kevmania, which ran a post about it in 2010. The comments section of that post brought a few former Beetleboard drivers and employees out of the woodwork. Such as this:
 

I represented Beetleboards of America in Hawaii back in the mid-70s. Recruited, got cars painted, put on the decals, and promoted the advertisers in Waikiki parades, gatherings, special events, etc. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was fun. We had Jack-in-the-Box cars, Kool cigs, El Charro Tequila, and Bank of Hawaii. It was great to see the cars on the highways and byways of Oahu and be a part of something special. The guy sitting on the bug is Charlie Bird, president and founder of the company–one of the most creative advertising men I’ve ever come across. I do have a bunch of pictures. Even one of a Time Magazine bug, Levi’s Jeans and a whole bunch of others.

 
An article from The Palm Beach Post dated December 1976 states that Bird was in his mid-twenties when he came up with the idea in 1971 while touring colleges giving lectures. In the article Bird is quoted saying, “It’s the greatest ice breaker with the kids because it’s kind of wacko.”
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…

 
Recently I had the extreme pleasure of attending a festival screening of one of the most over-the-top campy trashfests ever to skeet itself across the silver screen, the Australian-produced Fags in the Fast Lane.

Fags in the Fast Lane is violent, sexy, and an utterly absurd epic of completely anarchic cinema produced with spirit and passion by individuals devoted to off-the-wall storytelling and lysergic imagery.
 

 
Producer/Designer/Writer/Director Josh Sinbad Collins is a trash-auteur par excellence who has built a world of gay superheroes, cock-worshippers, elderly hookers, and mutant burlesque queens that defies comparison, though one could certainly start with John Waters, Ted V Mikels, the Kuchar brothers, and certainly Russ Meyer. In fact, after first viewing the film, I described it to a friend as “what you might get if Russ Meyer were gay and tried to make a film on ten hits of acid.”

The film is the whacked out tale of Sir Beauregard, the “Cockslinger,” and his companion, Lump, a sort of 19th Century Dandy prizefighter. The dynamic-duo of gay-basher-bashers fight the homophobes of Dullsville and kidnap the police chief’s son, Squirt, who eventually allows his repressed sexuality to blossom. When The Cockslinger’s mother, played by aging Russ Meyer vixen Kitten Natividad, has all of her jewelry and the magical “Golden Cock” stolen from her GILF bordello, it is up to the pair, with Squirt in tow, to track down the culprits. This leads them on a journey where they pick up Salome and Hijra (an ass-kicking drag queen and a eunuch assassin), the latter played by King Khan. El Vez and The Mummies also make appearances. The odyssey ends with an epic battle against mutated gogo dancers in Freakytown with some hilariously cheap special effects. The costumes, set designs, and art direction are jaw-droppingly fantastic.
 

Kitten Natividad stars as “Kitten.”
 
Fags in the Fast Lane is currently playing the festival circuit, but I suspect it won’t take long for this film to get distribution for an eventual DVD/BD release.
 

The Cockslinger and Squirt are on the case.
 
When it seems that certain factions in this country have made it their culture war mission to roll back the advancements of LGBT+ folks at every turn, Fags in the Fast Lane couldn’t have come along at a better time. The Cockslinger is the gay superhero we need.
 

King Khan as Hijra.
 

 

 
(Probably NSFW) Trailer for ‘Fags in the Fast Lane’:
 

Japanese VHS art.

I’ve seen a lot of crazy movies, but Mystics In Bali about takes the cake. Released in 1981, this low-budget Indonesian flick is one-of-a-kind, guaranteed to thrill horror movie fans the world over.

Based on the novel Leak Ngakak, the film follows Cathy Kean, a young American anthropologist, who comes to Bali to learn more about the Leyak. Part of Balinese folklore, Leyaks are demonic witches that can make themselves turn into animals, and detach their own heads, which then fly through the air. Leyaks feed on human flesh and blood. In Bali, Cathy meets a local who introduces her to one of these witches. Cathy grows interested in becoming a Leyak herself, and by way of black magic, she is transformed. Though the effects aren’t all that special, bizarre, grotesque sights like Cathy’s flying head—with some internal organs still attached—are unforgettable.
 

 
In addition to its cheap-looking special effects, the dubbing is poor, the acting ain’t the greatest, and the dialogue is often unintentionally hilarious (example: “Mmmm delicious, this blood is good!”)—all just part of what makes Mystics in Bali such a wild ride. The main draw for horror fans is its graphic depictions of gore and other outlandish imagery, but it’s also genuinely eerie.
 

 
In his book, Mondo Macabro : Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around the World, author Pete Tombs writes about how the film transcends its limitations. 

The film was cheaply and quickly made, yet its awkwardness and shooting style give it a kind of strange authenticity. The camera hardly ever moves; most scenes are filmed in one take, using medium or close shots. In the many night sequences there are no foregrounds. The characters are isolated against the vast, empty backdrop of black space. There’s a constant feeling of mystery, of tension, as though almost anything might emerge from the blackness.

 

 
Mystics in Bali is one of those movies that I don’t want to write too much about, for fear of spoiling it for those that haven’t seen it before. Trust me, if it at all seems like something you’d dig, you will not be disappointed.
 

 
Just one more thing that’s weird about the picture: The purpose of nearly all of the dialogue in the film—and this is no exaggeration—is to explain to the audience what is happening on screen. It’s odd, but not such a bad thing, considering all of the craziness thrown at the viewer.

Continues after the jump…

Bob Eggleton, “Hell-Kaiju”

Dangerous Minds has previously and previouslier told you about an ongoing series of Satanic art exhibits and books, all under the umbrella title “The Devil’s Reign.” The exhibits are put on and the books are published by Andy Howl, a tattoo artist with galleries in Fort Myers, FL, and they’re curated by no less an authority on LaVeyan Satanism than the Church of Satan’s High Priest, Peter H. Gilmore. Howl has told me that he intends the series to continue until it reaches ten exhibits and books—an ambitious goal, and the newest, Daikaiju, is the third, after “The Devil’s Reign” and “The Devils Reign II: Psychedelic Blasphemy.”

The valid question of what giant movie monsters have to do with Satanism inevitably arises, and naturally, the book addresses this matter, with essays by Gilmore and by Hugo Award winning fantasy illustrator Bob Eggleton (Greetings From Earth). Eggleton first:

Kaiju as a word actually means “mythical beast” in Japanese. The mystique of this kind of creature is the fact we don’t know from where it came, the forces that created it, or how, only that it exists. The Japanese have a long, rich history of creatures from the multi-headed Orochi to Yokai—ghosts which take on the form of strange, sometimes playful, sometimes terrifying creatures. All of them very colorful and bizarre, contrary to Western ideas of similar entities. Monsters of this size are not new, they permeate history of human kind. Even “Leviathan” from the Book of Revelations in the Bible is a giant, flame spewing monster, possibly part whale, and part deep sea life form. There has also been The Kraken, and The Mid-gard Serpent which Thor battled in Norse mythology, among many others. Kaiju have been with us from the very beginnings of human history, appearing even as cave paintings in the prehistoric record. In the early part of the 20th Century, writer H.P. Lovecraft concocted a plethora of weird and giant creatures. Foremost among them are Cthulhu, Dagon and his mythos of At The Mountains of Madness, and an abandoned prehistoric Antarctic city created by a race of aliens called “The Old Ones”. He had a gifted penchant for the appearance of demons and monsters to be, in fact, alien in origin from the dark places in the universe. Indeed, the Devils Reign.

And Gilmore:

Since the dawn of our species, humans have been awed by the power and mystery of the grand forces of nature under whose dominion we attempt to survive. Before science was able to explain the mechanisms behind storms, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, human beings personifed these vast and indifferent phenomena as best they could. The most mighty and terrifying aspects of the cosmos were deemed to arise from monstrous creatures. In Japanese, “daikaiju” specifically means giant monsters—ones with strange and fantastic characteristics—so the terrors of these ancient legends are embodied by this word.

Looking back through the myths of past cultures, we find the Babylonian Tiamat, a chaos dragon, who was transmuted into Leviathan in the Hebrew sacred texts. Behemoth, a vast elephantine monstrosity, and Ziz, a gigantic winged gryphon, were also mentioned in these scriptures, making a trio of biblical daikaiju. The northern peoples imagined Jormungandr as the world serpent, and the ancient Greeks were terrified by Typhon and Echidna, almost incomprehensibly gargantuan monstrosities who spawned a host of lesser hideous beasts. Fantastic giant monsters have thus been a primal aspect of the human imagination for millennia.

 

 

Richard “Tentacles and Teeth” Luong, “The Coming of Azathoth”
 

Peter Santa-Maria, “Giant Turtle”
 
More satanic mayhem after the jump…

 
The four-song EP Barnes & Barnes released in 1982 goes by the name of its best-known track, “I Had Sex with E.T.,” and is distinguished in Steven Spielberg’s biography as “perhaps the most egregious unauthorized product” related to the sci-fi blockbuster. Adding insult to injury, one half of the group that wrote and recorded the song was Bill Mumy, who had played Will Robinson on Lost in Space as a child actor. Had he no respect for the sacred fraternity of showfolk?

Barnes & Barnes’ erotic outer-space adventure in intellectual property rights was over almost as soon as it began. It is alleged that, when the duo had sold just 73 copies of the EP’s limited run of 200, they received a stern warning from Spielberg’s or Universal’s lawyers that compelled them to delete the release. (This Barnes & Barnes discography quotes Mumy’s allusion to “serious bigtime showbiz legal problems.”)

If Barnes & Barnes don’t sound familiar, their novelty hit “Fish Heads” will. As Art and Artie Barnes, Mumy and his partner Robert Haimer recorded a string of albums and singles for Rhino and their own Lumania label, and they collaborated on LPs with Wild Man Fischer and Crispin Glover. This number was just one in their series of kiss-and-tell songs, all of them set to the same one-minute-and-twenty-second backing track: “I Had Sex with Pac-Man” (on the same EP as “I Had Sex with E.T.”), “I Had Sex on TV,” “I Had Sex with Santa,” and the still-unreleased “I Had Sex with Madonna” and “I Had Sex with Your Mother.”

Speaking of the sacred fraternity of showbiz, Mumy and Haimer have a bunch of writing credits on records by the band America, and Mumy used to play with the late Miguel Ferrer of Twin Peaks fame in a blues band called the Jenerators. On the sole release by their previous band, Seduction of the Innocent, you can hear Ferrer sing “Sunshine Superman.”
 

 
The esteemed film critic Roger Ebert was reputed to have owned a copy of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s movie Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom on laserdisc, but knowing of its graphic and “obscene” content never had the courage to watch it.

Salò is one of those movies like Deep Throat or 101 Dalmatians where an audience will usually know much about it without ever having actually seen it. Indeed, Pasolini expected his audience to have swotted up on a whole semester’s worth of books before they viewed Salò so they would fully appreciate his clever subtext and his artful allusions to politics and culture and art, et cetera. Hence, the acknowledgment to the film’s “essential bibliography” of texts by Barthes, Blanchot, De Beauvoir, Klossowski, and Sollers during the opening titles.

The one book not mentioned is the film’s original source, the Marquis de Sade’s doorstop of a novel 120 Days of Sodom or the School of Libertinage.

De Sade wrote 120 Days of Sodom when he was banged up in the Bastille prison in Paris for his villainous libertine ways in 1785. Outside, the city was in a flux of brutal revolutionary fervor which provided de Sade with some ideas for his nasty erotic tale—carnage and slaughter, on one hand, excess and terror on the other. He wrote the story on a long roll of paper which he secreted in his cell. When the Bastille was raided by the revolutionary mob and the prisoners released, de Sade wept tears of grief over the thought he had lost his manuscript to looters. Fortunately for him, it was still hidden in the wall his cell.

120 Days of Sodom is the story of four weirdo libertines who decide they want to experience the most depraved forms of sexual gratification through torture, rape, and murder. They lock themselves up, along with their victims and accomplices, in a castle the Château de Silling in France, where they carry out their monstrous acts without censure. The book was never fully finished and was not published until the twentieth century when it became a favorite with the Surrealists. 

Pasolini used parts of de Sade’s book, added in a flavoring from Dante’s Inferno from The Divine Comedy, and relocated the whole story to the “puppet Nazi state” of Salò in northern Italy during Mussolini’s final years of power at the end of the Second World War. This time the debauched quartet are a Duke, a Bishop, a Magistrate and a President, who carry out acts of incest, rape, torture, mutilation, castration, and murder on eighteen kidnapped young men and women. Pasolini’s intention was to make a film that attacked the horror of capitalist society, as he explained in a television interview during filming:

There is a lot of sex in it, rather towards sadomasochistic, which has a very specific function—that is to reduce the human body to a saleable commodity. It represents what power does to the human being, to the human body.

All my films start from a formal idea, which I feel I must do. It is an idea I have of the kind of film it must be. It cannot be expressed in words, you either understand it or you don’t.  When I make a film, it because I suddenly have an inspiration about the form of that particular subject must take. That is the essence of the film.

As I shoot this film, I already have it edited in my mind. Therefore, I expect a greater professional ability from my actors. So, this film I’m using four or five professional actors. But even the ones I have collected from the streets, I use them almost as if they were professional actors. The lines have to be said properly, the way they were written, and all in one take. They must have the correct facial expression from the beginning to the end of the shot, etc etc.

My need to make this film also came from the fact I particularly hate the leaders of the day. Each one of us hates with particular vehemence the powers to which he is forced to submit. So, I hate the powers of today.  It is a power that manipulates people just as it did at the time of Himmler or Hitler.

I don’t think the young people of today will understand this film. I have no illusions about my ability to influence young people. It is impossible to create a cultural relationship with them because they are living with totally new values, with which the old values cannot be compared.

I don’t believe we shall ever again have any form of society in which men will be free. One should not hope for it. One should not hope for anything. Hope is invented by politicians to keep the electorate happy.

At the time of its release in 1975, Salò was denounced as “pornographic,” “obscene,” “filth,” “vile,” “sick,” and “depraved.” It was banned in several countries due its graphic sex and violence. None of this content would surprise many today in a world where rape porn and videos of Daesh beheadings are just a keystroke away but at the time, it was like a hand grenade going off in a busy kindergarten.

This said I have to ‘fess up to having one big problem with Salò. I found the whole film boring. Its relentless sequence of atrocities never quite added up to anything constructive or intellectually meaningful. The film could not be entertaining because of its content and it did not develop beyond making the same point over and over and over again. It was like being bludgeoned about the head with a copy of Marxism for Dummies by a surly teenager who has just discovered the brutal injustice of life. You know you’re being attacked but you don’t know why you’re being attacked because you’re not the one responsible for what your attacker is angry about. This is probably why Pasolini included a bibliography at the start, he wanted his audience to stroke their chins and knowingly nod along as another atrocity was depicted.

I believe movies like books and drama work best when they offer the good ole double-edge of entertainment and some kind of intellectual engagement that kicks in long after reading or viewing. For an entertaining assault on capitalism and class, better read something like J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, or Bentley Little’s The Store, or my DM colleague Christopher Bickel’s movie The Theta Girl all which make similar points to Salò but in a far more entertaining, enjoyable, and memorable way.
 

 

 

 
More lobby cards from ‘Salò,” after the jump…
 

 
I guess you could say that I was one of those imperturbable optimists, thinking that America was still worth saving. Then I woke up and read the news today (oh boy) and now I’m not so sure about that anymore, or if it would even be desirable. Matt Lauer? No, no one was surprised by that, but Garrison freaking Keillor? JFC, yo. And did you hear about this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? How’s about this?

What about THIS??? (Say what you will about the Russians, they have PANTSED and humiliated the US intelligence agencies. Who can blame them from wanting to do a drunken victory lap right out in the open around Red Square and have a good laugh about how dumb the Americans are?)

ANYWHO… there’s nothing quite like a good “dumb idea”—the sort of thing that’s “ironic” to smarter folk (who will “ironically” purchase or support whatever “it” is, often for a “joke” gift) and that only idiots think is cool and they don’t even know that it’s something that only a seriously uncool fucknut would want.
 

 
The “Trumpy Bear” is one such item. The manufacturer—evil geniuses—can sell the item to your Fox News-watching dumbshit uncle AND your liberal friends who think it would be “edgy” to purchase such an item for laffs for a Trump-loathing pal! (I’ll just bet Keith Olbermann was given several of these hideous things yesterday alone.)

The goofy “Trumpy Bear” TV commercial is a surgical precision masterclass in not appearing to be insincere to idiots, but also in creating “content” that “smart people” will think is oh-so-funny and tongue-in-cheek and even share on your behalf (like right now as you read this). You might suspect that this is an elaborate prank devised by John Oliver and co., but THIS IS EXACTLY THE LOOK THEY’RE GOING FOR. Whoever wrote and produced this supreme masterpiece of marketing ambiguity (the biker/vet guy and the old codger “patriot” were pitch perfect, no?) deserves whatever monetary compensation comes their way, whether from a proper idiot-idiot or a “smart person”-idiot. Their money spends the same. Virtually every American with a low IQ or absolutely no imagination whatsoever is a potential customer! THAT is one hell of a Venn diagram and if this is not a recipe for untold riches, I don’t know what would be. I’m not planning to buy one, and yet I too have been ensnared by their insidious black magic media virus and I am now passing it on to you. Good times!

And THAT is what you call a good—nay GREAT—dumb idea. A magical formula for separating a fool from his money and depositing it directly into your own bank account.
 

 
Apparently the close-to-the-vest Trumpy Bear TV commercial is airing in some very carefully selected places: according to Ad Age magazine, the 2-minute infomercial is being seen on at least ten nationally carried cable television networks including Animal Planet, Discovery, Grit TV, Outdoor Channel, some inspirational channels and the American Heroes Channel. Of course it’s been also spotted on MeTV and Fox News. The sort of show you might see the ad airing on would include reruns of vintage programs appealing to older, less-complex Americans such as Cops, Walker, Texas Ranger and Bonanza. The target audience of such fair would probably not sense that this is a joke (and perhaps it’s not) or that they were being fleeced for two LOW LOW PAYMENTS OF JUST $19.95 by godless big city-dwelling cynics who might not even be Trump fans themselves. [To be clear, the folks behind this could be huge Trump supporters, I have no idea. I would prefer to think they aren’t, but that’s my bias showing.]
 

Saw this Trumpy Bear commercial during a Hitler documentary. Still processing. pic.twitter.com/WnXbCZFNqI

— Michael Urie (@michaelurie) November 29, 2017

 
Nevertheless, the fact that actor Michael Urie (Ugly Betty; Torch Song on Broadway) was confronted with the Trumpy Bear spot whilst watching a goddamn Hitler documentary sort of indicates strongly what a high level of sophistication has gone into the tightly targeted marketing of this ridiculous item, don’t cha think?

To be clear, I’m not ragging on them: I just wish I’d have come up with this infernal thing m’self…
 

 
PS: And then there is this. I don’t know what to think anymore.
 

 
Thank you Chris Campion!
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