Atom Blog

If there was one thing the ’90s were all about it was, inexplicably, anthropomorphized animals that were in some way “radical.” It all started with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but it quickly and rapidly devolved from there, until most children’s television was naught but horrifically mutated animals skateboarding on pizza. Here are the worst offenders:

Street Sharks

Street Sharks was a show about four idiots who went to meet their dad in an abandoned sewer because a man with an eyepatch who refers to people as “creatures” asked them to. Then he turned them into sharks, which came as a huge surprise to absolutely nobody. What was surprising, however, were the kickin’ abs he decided to mutate into them. But…why? Are sharks notorious for their washboard gut-muscles? Or better yet, how? My god, did he…did he isolate the gene for kickin’ abs?

I guess four idiots is a small price to pay for progress…

The intro to Street Sharks is notable for several reasons: First, its liberal use of the term “Jawsome!” which is either the best catchphrase ever, or the tragic result of a massively mutated shark face trying and tragically failing to speak like people. And second, please note the liberal use of the “exploding through walls” shot. Apparently contractors in the ‘90s were so extraordinarily shitty that drywall exploded like an old pinto everytime you bumped into a wall. Here’s how the marketing meeting for Street Sharks probably went:

Kirk: “We need a show to compete with Ninja Turtles.”

Alan: “Well, what’s scarier than ninjas and turtles?”

Bill: “Black dudes and sharks.”

Kirk: “…”

Bill: “No, seriously guys. It’ll work! Like, sharks combined with rough and tumble gang members!”

Alan: “Actually I think he’s got something there, but what will we call it?”

Kirk: “Ghetto Sharks?”

Alan: “Gang Sharks?”

Kirk: “Uh…Urban Sharks?”

Bill: “N*GGER SHARKS!”

Kirk: “Bill, honestly – do you need to see somebody? You’ve got some issues.”

Bill: “JAWSOME!”

Cowboys of Moo Mesa

The Cowboys of Moo Mesa dared to ask the question: What if cowboys were like…actual cows?

And the answer was: It’d be pretty much the same.

There was also a villainous bull, a “sexy” cow-damsel that the cowboys tussled over, and an adorable calf-boy sidekick for comic relief. So basically, it was Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom only…everybody was cows… and they were in the wild west and…okay, it’s not “basically” anything: It’s just a screwed up conglomeration of stolen ideas, laced with confused concepts, and swirled with a nauseating smidge of bestiality. But hey, if you learn anything from Cowboys of Moo Mesa, let it be this: The bad guy was a cow too. That means that some cows are sons of bitches, and it’s okay to eat them no matter what hippies say.

The Mighty Ducks

Do you remember America’s brief fascination with Emilio Estevez, skating based sports, and the virtues of a can-do attitude in the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulty? That all culminated in the feel-good hockey film, The Mighty Ducks, which was basically just a palette swap of The Bad News Bears starring the best Young Gun. The movie revolved around a jaded Emilio taking a team of misfit kids to the hockey championship, and it did so well they made a cartoon out of it!

Wait….what the fuck was that clip? What did that have to do with literally anything? The children are now genetically engineered duck-warriors… with cybersuits and laserswords? But…they still play hockey in between fighting aliens? This is what happens when you hand over script development to an insane foreigner whose only English words are “ducks” and “hockey,” then retranslate it back into English, and then shoehorn some aliens into there too for no particular reason.

But hey, as long as kids buy some thirty dollar Ducktrucks, it all works out, right?

Samurai Pizza Cats

Samurai Pizza Cats almost doesn’t belong here; the show was more of a parody of the ‘90s surge in television shows about surfing furries than a genuine effort. But still, there they are: Cybernetic Samurai cats who like pizza as much as they like wacky shenanigans. Much like the Power Rangers, this was originally a Japanese show that was given English voiceovers so terrible it was almost racist. However, unlike the Power Rangers, there is something very, very wrong with you if you find yourself wanting to fuck the pink one.

Extreme Dinosaurs

The Extreme Dinosaurs were both extreme and dinosaurs. There. You are now filled in on their epic backstory. Oh wait, they also fight the Reckless Raptors. You should probably know that too I suppose. Now, aside from beating up on Velociraptors with poor impulse control, the Extreme Dinosaurs also happened to have the best theme song in existence:

In The Royal Tenenbaums, the patriarch of the family, Royal, wanting to be perceived as a better man in death than he was in life, had his tombstone inscribed: “Died saving his family from the wreckage of a destroyed, sinking battleship.” Royal Tenenbaum, in actuality, died of a heart attack. This is perfectly illustrative of a common human need: We all want to be remembered as something special. But some people don’t have to make up elaborate deaths to get there, the real world kills perfectly fantastically on its own, thank you. Here are five bizarre deaths just this year that prove it:

The Exploding Weather Rocket

Wang Diange was attending a wake in his own home, when suddenly the roof exploded. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, Wang was dead. There was no clear indication of what, exactly, had struck Wang dead, (aside from the somewhat dickish desire to one up a man at his own wake,) and since it was a stormy day outside, relatives and police just figured it must have been lightning.

But when they went to cremate Wang, the body itself exploded with such force that it blew the doors clean off the cremation furnace! While one could be forgiven for interpreting this fantastic event as the unique ability of some Chinese people to self destruct like the Predator, witnesses dug a bit further for a slightly less retardedly racist explanation, and surprisingly they found one: Wang had actually been struck by an unexploded weather rocket, which hit his body with so high a velocity that it embedded itself inside him without leaving an obvious entry wound. When exposed to heat, the rocket, filled with silver iodide used to break up hail, naturally exploded, taking most of Wang’s body and all of his dignity in death with it; because no matter how great he was in life, he will always be remembered best as the setup to an “exploding wang” joke.

Years later, the Chinese Weather Bureau would settle with Wang’s family for a sum of about twelve thousand dollars. So, next time you catch yourself wondering how much, exactly, a human being’s life is worth? Yeah, it’s about the price of a used ’02 Nissan Sentra.

The Exploding Cell Phone

A Chinese man recently exploded for no discernible reason, as they are wont to do (see above) and, upon further investigation a cause was eventually found: His cell phone. It seems the man, a computer clerk in his early twenties, had just finished charging his cell phone and slipped it into his pocket when, as a coworker puts it, she “heard a loud bang and turned to find the victim lying a pool of blood.”

While a lesser people may have spoken with more confusion and fear upon seeing a close friend randomly self destruct, apparently it just ain’t even a thing anymore in China: There’s been ten reported in the last five years alone! Even though we’re talking about the most populous country on earth here, that’s still a surprisingly high number of people taking personal calls from explosions.

The Lice Murders

In what is surely the plot of the worst Kung-fu film in history, a 26 year old Russian karate expert recently took his direst revenge upon a rival family for dishonoring his lady love…by infecting her with lice. Though neighbors do agree that the lice-ridden family responsible for this intense dishonor were rude and often drank too much, I’m sure we can all agree that beating them to death with your bare hands for giving your girlfriend an itchy scalp is just a tad bit much. It gets even worse when you realize that the villainous, drunken bastard family responsible for defiling such a pristine, virginal scalp were: A 61 year old woman, her 58 year old husband, and their 25 year-old son.

See, this is what happens when you don’t get any decent villainy in your life; if somebody’s kung-fu school doesn’t get razed to the ground once in a while, all that revenge builds up and really, what’s a karate master supposed to do? Go to counseling? Scream into a throw pillow? Hell no, he fucking sets out on an epic quest for revenge, that’s what he does. That’s just how karate works.

Sadly, two people are now dead and a family (of admittedly somewhat gross people) has been totally destroyed for three basic reasons: Russians are a passionate people, karate is a deadly skill, and vodka is a son of a bitch.

The Samurai vs. Grandma

A 77 year old woman died in Indianapolis earlier this year, stricken down by tragic violence when she attempted to…wait, what? Hold on, let me read this again and make sure.

Nope, that’s correct.

The 77 year old woman died trying to break up a sword fight involving her grandson and his brother-in-law. That’s right! This year, in Indianapolis, a grandmother died breaking up a domestic swordfight. What fucking year do we live in?! I’ve never been to Indianapolis, but I was given to believe it was a bit more Dazed and Confused than The Seven Samurai.

Though it is indeed tragic that a woman as apparently badass as this grandmother could be felled by a mere blade forged of the hands of man, the real tragedy here is her grandsons’ fate: Damned to eternally suffer the wounds of their own conscience for sucking so hard at swordfighting that the only person they managed to kill was their own grandmother. So a moment of silence, please, for a woman so noble that she would literally jump headlong into a swordfight just to save two retards.

A Drive-by Corpsing

A 16-year old Chinese student named Wu Dan was taken to the hospital recently, after being knocked off his bicycle when he was hit by something thrown from a speeding car. In a statement given to police, his uncle stated that “a car passed, and a package came flying out the door.” Then, because China is apparently a seriously fucked up place to be, the uncle elaborated: “It had a dead woman inside.”

That’s right! It was a drive-by corpsing!

Finally, somebody has combined the random terror of a drive-by with the unsettling imagery of a desecrated corpse. Unless it was an angry necromancer out to settle a gangland beef with his plucky but irritating young rival, there is absolutely no valid reason for a 16 year old boy to be hit by corpse-litter hurled from a speeding automobile. The uncle, in what is quite possibly the single most understated comment ever issued in the history of tragedy, went on to describe Wu Dan’s reaction to being shot by a ghoul-bullet: “He was very upset.”

End. Fucking. Statement.

Think what you will about China after reading this article – that they are apparently a tragic fantasy land of random death – but you have to give them one thing: They are a god damn unshakeable people. And apparently they have to be, because everybody just up and fucking explodes there.

Follow Robert on Twitter, on Facebook, or his own site, I Fight Robots. In case you haven’t already gotten your fill of absurdist racism.

At one point or another, everybody dreams of being an inventor. The combination of a brilliantly simple idea coupled with a get rich quick scheme makes the life of an inventor seem so promising. After all, to quote Office Space: “the guy that invented the pet rock had a great idea… he made a million dollars!” Unfortunately, “inventor” doesn’t always equal “not an idiot.” Here are five inventions that are clearly nowhere near as awesome as their inventors had hoped:

Fundies

“Now you can get into somebody’s pants…literally!”

I’m sure that’s the wacky tagline that the creator of Fundies based this invention on. Unfortunately, what he didn’t take into account was the natural geometry of human sex. The angles required for any kind of normal penetration while wearing these things just plain does not work with your conventional penises and standard issue vaginas. Perhaps in the inventor’s native country severe deformities or bizarre mating rituals make these a practical boning accessory, but nowhere in the civlized world. But then, I guess I’m assuming most people would prefer not to fuck each other in an awkwardly balanced squat while bound together so tightly that all movement is rendered impossible, and perhaps that is narrow-minded of me.

Buy hey, on the up side, according to reviews from that site, some lesbians think it’s rad:

“I bought these for me and my lesbian girlfriend because our double headed dildo was always slipping out. They work great!”

While on the downside, they sometimes destroy lives:

“to hell with fundies. my husband got them for me on our fifth anniversary and i was soooo angry i refused to let him sleep with me for a week and my damn husband filed for a divorce!!!!!!!!!! I would give them a 0 on the rating chart if i could.DONT BUY FUNDIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

So somewhere right now there is a child growing up in a broken home, bitter and lonely, vowing revenge on the inventor of the thing that destroyed his family, the Fundies. And one day, that is going to result in the weirdest god damn supervillain imaginable.

Nunchuck Lighter

Now, listen: I am a man. As such, I am predetermined to be in favor of literally everything involving nunchucks. However, though I am required to think that this nunchuck/ligher/flashlight combination is, indeed, totally awesome, I must also temper that statement by adding that they are the lowest possible order of Awesome in the Awesome Nunchuck Heirarchy.

It all seems like a good idea, until you realize that nunchucks are only cool when they’re wielded in masterful hands. Most people just end up alternately smacking themselves in the head or crotch with them. Adding a flashlight and a lighter to this equation just means that now there’s a handy spotlight highlighting all the embarrassing ways you’re hurting yourself, and your crotch is quite probably on fire.

Flameboy

Wielding a multitude of barbeque tools is a pain in the ass, it’s true, so a swiss army barbeque device seems like a great idea! And it is…if it’s executed right. Just a few aspects of the Flameboy that are not executed right:

1. Bladed spatula

2. Proximity of wickedly sharp fork to, well, everything else

3. Presence of knives exactly where you put your hands.

Sure, you could argue that any sober, reasonable man could operate this thing with little to no injury, but I ask you: Are barbecues notorious for their sober, reasonable men?

No, if your barbecues are anything like mine, they are little more than drunken meat-and-fire-orgies where the blood/alcohol levels are only rivaled by the lighter fluid/burnt eyebrow levels. Giving your average barbecue cook a device with a dozen complicated secret knives is like giving a handgun to a monkey: Sure, it’s all hilarious – until he’s pointing it at you.

Belt Buckle MP3 Player

MP3 players are the new digital clocks: If you don’t have a good idea of your own, just slap one into an existing product and wait for money to explode out of your pockets. And putting an MP3 Player into a belt is, all things considered, not the worst idea possible, (MP3 Toilet Paper takes that spot.) But it’s the controls of this particular belt buckle MP3 player that put the stupid brakes on: You can only change tracks by thrusting your pelvis, and if you do it hard enough, it will start flashing tri-color LEDS.

Two serious problems with this design: First, if you are just using it to dance, every thrust changes tracks – thus interrupting your groove and making every potential dance session more confusing than a remix of a Girl Talk mash-up. Second, if your furious gyrating accidentally does win you a mate, the ensuing dry-humping will likely cause your tri-color lights to begin flashing, essentially calling the Cock Block Police on your own crotch.

Restless Leg Monitor

I’m sure you’ve heard of Restless Leg Syndrome by now: The latest made up disease that, providing you have some sort of personal grudge against disposable income, you can spend money treating. But now, instead of treating RLS like a fake medical condition, you can buy the Restless Leg Monitor and treat it like a fake sport… because the RLM does nothing but count how many times you shake your legs.

One of the other supposed benefits of the RLM is to “sync your creative behavior” with your “creative leg shake beat.” And if reading that baffling sentence made you realize that something this pointlessly insane just has to come from Japan, then congratulations, you win a trophy! Unfortunately, that trophy is a crying schoolgirl doll being raped my a wind-up octopus. It, uh…it loses a little something in translation.

Posture Monitor

Hey, remember when your strict, overbearing mother beat you mercilessly everytime you slouched? If the answer is yes – and you’re not crying right now from the repressed memories surging up – then you can finally relive those glory days with the iPosture!

It’s a device that clips onto your suspenders or brassiere (because nothing says sexy like a posture-aid on your underwear,) and shocks you if you slouch for more than a minute. Apart from the general public’s lack of desire to be electrocuted everytime they relax, the inventors also didn’t take into account the human reflex upon receiving an electrical shock (sudden uncontrollable jerks, and temporary muscle paralysis.) Because they’re marketing it toward cubicle jockeys with poor work posture. Jockeys who would most likely be working on computers, where a sudden, unexpected shock would, at the very least, ruin their typing skills or, at most, cause serious, unexpected computer crashes.

So if the iPosture really catches on, the best case scenario is that you will be constantly reading sentences like:

“this morning I just can’t seem to wake upWJ powOIrtLKA OW FUCK”

And your worst case scenario is the accidental launch of America’s entire nuclear arsenal because the guy manning the button that day happens to have a particularly comfy chair and a tendency to slouch.

Okay, I’m sorry. That last joke was so overblown that it was bordering on retardation. I truly apologize, it’s just that I’ve had such a rough time sleeping lately and IOK LSRUDT9 [[[a

OW, FUCK!

Follow Robert on Twitter, on Facebook, or his own site, I Fight Robots.Or buckle down and get to work on your own brilliant idea, so that some jackass blogger can make fun of it in the future.

I’m not quite comedically inept enough to make Polack jokes, but if I was, I would apologize for every single one right now. Recently, the Polish have rallied around a cause: To have a memorial built in Great Britain that honors one of their most beloved war heroes, a soldier simply known as “Voytek.” He was a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-fighting son-of-a-bitch who won his valor in the battle of Monte Cassino, one of the bloodiest conflicts of WWII. Voytek stood about 6’5 tall, and weighed in around 600lbs, which wo-wait, 600 pounds?!  Either this Polish war-hero was also undisputed King of the Fatties, or he’s some sort of fucking bear.

Oh, wait, he was a fucking bear!

Voytek was an Iranian Honey Bear, as well as a credited, ranked, and official member of the Second Polish Transport Company.  He was found in the hills of Iran when the company, upon seeing a malnourished, starving bear cub, not only found the heart to nurse him back to health but then, eventually finding themselves with a full-grown, loyal, trained bear and a shitload of Nazis to fight, did the perfectly logical thing and decided to enlist him. I would normally comment here about the sheer insanity of the era’s military for allowing a bear into the armed forces, but honestly? It makes perfect sense.

The Nazis knew all about the power of image, (their emblems and uniforms stand to this day as the epitome of tyranny and evil,) so when it came time to fight fire with fire, what better way to counter the powerful symbolism of the Axis, than a god damn drunken bear in an Allied uniform? If, upon leaping into the trenches prepared for a brutal hand to hand fight, a Nazi soldier found it filled with bloodthirsty bears slamming whiskey – their immense paws filled with gargantuan artillery shells – you can safely count that soldier out of the rest of war. Even if he survives, he’s not fighting again.

“Sir, I’ve seen the enemy gunners. They’re bears!”

“You mean they fight like mighty bears!? My God!”

“No, sir! They’re literally fucking bears! I just went crazy as hell! I’m going home!”

“Weinerschnitzel!”

On duty, Voytek was trained to carry cases of ammunition and mortar shells down the line to waiting artillery, each one weighing hundreds of pounds. On one occasion, he wandered into an empty shower stall and surprised an Arabic spy who had been listening in on top secret information. The spy quickly surrendered and immediately confessed to all of his crimes, probably because he was smart enough to realize that any military unit possessing Anti-Espionage Bears are likely going to be on the winning side of the war.

When off duty, Voytek enjoyed the same luxuries as any other WWII era soldier. He drank cases of beer, smoked cases of cigarettes, and loved to wrestle with his fellow troops – a fact which leaves me in somewhat of a quandary: Who was more badass, the Nazi-fighting bear who wrestled full platoons of trained soldiers, or the men who routinely got body-slammed by him for shits ‘n giggles?

Voytek was so fearless in battle, and so beloved out of it, that the Second Polish Transport Company officially changed their insignia to this:

All military insignia are pretty uniformly badass. Their imagery is rife with skulls, guns, bombs, and lightning bolts; but all that shit’s got nothing on this simple, modest, and entirely accurate depiction of what appears to be a grizzly bear with bullets for fists.

After the war, Voytek retired to the Edinburgh zoo, and the rest of his company settled in the area around him. They visited him frequently, tossing him cigarettes and beer over the fence, and occasionally jumping the barricades to wrestle with him again. He lived to a relatively old age, eventually dying of natural causes, and I’m sure that he’s up there somewhere right now, drinking a case of whiskey, smoking a cigar, and eating Nazis in heaven.

Read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots, which is still markedly better than fighting bears. Poor lil’ Nazis.

History was made today, as America inaugurated her very first non-Morgan-Freeman black president, and the sense of optimism in the air is palpable. But it is that same optimistic air that could well poison this presidency before it even gets off the ground. It’s a classic pitfall: In order to win the race, Obama had to create a hype machine so powerful that it could overcome not only political bias, but inherent prejudice as well, (his advertising team literally had to out-market racism, and racism was an already established household brand, like the Sara Lee of hating minorities.)

First, don’t shy away from repeating campaign promises in your speeches, but do repeat them in a sarcastic tone. This will let you be in on the joke that is the ridiculously high bar set for you. Try saying something like:

“I have promised that we will end the war in Iraq post-haste, and we will… we’ll just bring those troops right home on the magical rainbow puppy bridge!”

Second, always offer up a high five to your introducer, making absolutely sure that he or she does not reciprocate. Nobody will hold the attempted five against you, but the mixture of pity and awkwardness that pervades being ‘left hanging,’ will work strongly in your favor when you fail to turn the national deficit into a flock of beautiful doves that fly away into the pollution-free sunset.

Third, be sure to pepper all speeches with blame-shifting reminders. Refresh everybody’s memory about how all of the trials currently facing your presidency were set up by the previous administration. This shouldn’t be too hard, seeing as how the last administration stopped just shy of accidentally killing a unicorn and bringing on eternal night in their progressively epic fuck-ups.

Finally, always wear sunglasses. You know you look damn good in sunglasses, Mr. President. You look like Black Neo from the Political Matrix – use it. People will forgive virtually any mistake made by a good-lookin’ man in power. Just look at the last guy: If Bush didn’t have that “aw, shucks,” smile and those Clint-Eastwood-haggard good looks, well, you wouldn’t be so fucked coming into your own presidency, would you? I mean, look at Nixon – that guy looked like a cross between The Penguin and some buttcheeks, and he got called out on everything.

You?

You’re like the black Don Draper. You keep lookin’ good, and when some of your promises fall short despite your best efforts, the American public will shrug and say “Universal Health what now? I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention; I was too busy watching President Dimples woo the Press Corps by shredding the rad.”

Read more from Robert at his own website, I Fight Robots, where you can puzzle over more hopeleslly outdated slang like “gleaming the cube,” and “bodacious.”

It would have been in poor taste to attack a former war-hero when he was in the midst of standing up to the toughest trials of his life… but now he’s down! And we all know that the best time to kick a man is when he’s down. After all, if God didn’t want us to kick people when they were down, he wouldn’t have put them so close to foot level (where the kicking is.)

John McCain, in the last days of his campaign, tried desperately to exploit the questionable past of his rival, Barack Obama. But John McCain had his own nefarious ties, and where it seems Obama had a penchant for ‘60s era criminals, McCain himself seems inextricably tied to the great villains of the 1980s. Ties to the Iran-Contra scandal of the early 1980s were uncovered, when it was found out he’d served on an advisory board to an agency supporting the right-wing death squads of Central America and, of course, there was the embarrassing fund-raising letter he sent to the Russian Embassy. In the interest of full disclosure, I think it’s about time we explored some of the less public, but equally nefarious connections of John McCain in the ‘80s.

The Brief Stint in Cobra

We all know about the harrowing time John McCain spent as a POW in Vietnam, but far less known is the massive disillusionment he suffered upon his return that caused him to briefly team up with this famous group of international terrorists. Sure, he fell in with a rough crowd, and yes, maybe he was guilty of a few crimes – but come on, the man is clearly just a sucker for hot, bespectacled booty.

The Ivan Drago Luncheon

In 1985, Sen. McCain was caught by local paparazzi sharing a tender moment with the misunderstood Soviet Superman. Though many see fit to question his patriotism based entirely on this long forgotten and incidental association, McCain still insists that the meeting was harmless. A statement which is mostly verified by local bystanders, who report that the only remotely scandalous comment made during the meeting was Drago’s quiet and repeated insistence to his ice cream cone that “I must lick you.”

Suspect Campagin Contributions from Cobra Kai

Drastically outmatched by the skyrocketing donations of his superstar rival, McCain had little hope of matching Obama’s funds through conventional means. Desperate for capital, the senator turned to every possible source of support – former political associates, old friends, war buddies – all options were on the table. It’s no wonder, then, that McCain would choose this time to redeem a favor from his old war buddy, Terry Silver. Though ostensibly an incredibly busy and successful entrepreneur, Mr. Silver was suspiciously eager to drop all of his so-called pressing business concerns and place his own life on hold indefinitely just to devote his every waking moment to helping a bitter ex-soldier try to beat the ever-living shit out of a starry-eyed young upstart.

Former Decepticon?

Pleading innocence, McCain to this day insists that his infamous audition for the Decepticons was simply a crime of ignorance. Citing his unfamiliarity with modern technology, McCain is adamant that he was unaware of the Decepticons reputation at the time of his tryout. McCain explained his thinking at the time, stating that “Autobots, Decepticons, Dinobots, Constructicons – all I knew was that they were new-fangled gizmos that the kids seemed to really respond to. Besides,” he continued “it’s not like I even made it in.” Independent sources confirm this last statement, citing the reason for McCain’s dismissal as obsolescence; reportedly with much strain, McCain eventually managed to transform himself into a lime green 1973 Ford Maverick, at which he point he suffered from severe engine failure and was towed to a local mechanic.