Build Date: Wed Sep 11 10:10:06 2024 UTC
Oh right, like your opinions are any better then anybody else's.
-- Johnnie Royale
Hallmark's Demented Tax Postcards
2000-04-12 12:45:47
As civilization atrophies, insanity grips even the bastion of saccharine consumer greeting cards. The fear and paranoia that greets tax day shifts the zeitgeist into a dark, destructive funk. And instinctively, on some deep, primal level, Hallmark begins reflecting the mounting despair with a series of web postcards catering to the cathartic release that can only come from seeing shit fucked up.
Rebellion slices through the Hallmark animation department, where a popular mandate for tax revolt allows the animators to shuck off their former restraints. Death appears over a blood-red sky in an eerie goth cartoon with strange homosexual overtones. In "The Adventures of IRS Man," Hallmark's animators deconstruct the fascist overtones in Superman through a sardonic warning parable that concludes "Happy Tax Day, Citizen."
Foreshadowing the pagan roots of Easter, naked IRS workers cavort and prance lasciviously in "Filing Can Be Fun," and a kinky submissive offering appears to pander to some kind of toilet fetish. The unmistakeable urban funk behind "Need some deductions" belies its innocent surface veneer as it careens recklessly to a hostile and shocking conclusion. And the MIDI hip-hop continues with "File the Easy Way" -- one of two reactionary stories which nihlistically counter the cozy technocentric wisdom of online tax returns. This theme is amplified in a scary -- yet bad -- cartoon with a cat illustrating "The perils of filing your taxes electronically."
Hallmark's subversive artwork apparently raised the hackles of "The Man." Unseen forces at the site have buried the web pages beneath a maze of un-linkable sub-directories, and all visitors to Hallmark.com now get tagged with a "Session ID," presumably to allow government investigators to track their motions through the site for later investigation. But don't let that scare you off! Locate the "Tax Day E-Cards" section in the pull-down menu -- and prepare for a mind-expanding experience. Hallmark's slogan was once derided as "When you care enough to send the very stupidest." Now they're breaking out of the mold, reaching out to a hip alternative generation. Pump it up, Hallmark. And keep on keepin' it real....
T O P S T O R I E S
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
'Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch'
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
SF Hippies Can't Get Their Act Together
The annual 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park, where large crowds of hippies, wannabe hippies, and hippie poseurs drape themselves in tie dye t-shirts and gather on a hill on 4/20 to smoke weed, was cancelled this year because the organizers couldn't get their act together. (More...)
Mozart to be inducted into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame
Joining such hard-rocking inductees as Abba, Chet Atkins, Nat King Cole, and Neil Diamond, the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame is proud to induct Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
NASA's Mars missions keep blowing up and crashing, but dammit, when you reach for the stars you have to expect a few minor setbacks. Drink a toast to the men and women of NASA! Toast them with a Lost Probe mixed up with your own two (or three) hands! (More...)
The Deep Dark Underbelly of the Star Wars Myth, or Ramayana Remembered
It's a fact: Star Wars is a blatant plagiarism of an ancient Asian legend, and the long lines of devout Star Wars freaks are really unscrupulous Asian copyright busters. From Indonesia to Thailand to Nepal, videos are available for sale or rent before they're even released in the US and UK due to this nerdy camcorder-clutching bunch. (More...)
This was an old standby back in my poor college days. Back then the goal was to get butt fucking wasted for as little money as possible. The problem was we hated dirt cheap beer - and some weekends, even Henry's was far more lucre then we could scratch together. So we invented Red. (More...)
The end of summer is near and sirens call of Black Rock City are beginning to summons Pigdoggers from all of the world to Burning Man. Spock Mountain Research Labs (SMRL), the world leader in beverage science and leisure technology will be at our second home for a week at 5:00 and Infant (how fitting) as we enjoy the liberated lifestyle of a temporary community 200 miles from nowhere... (More...)
Three Days and 25 Spocktails: A Cautionary Tale
Johnnie Royale picked me up from the dental surgery. I felt warm, safe, cradled in the anathesia's loving embrace. The pharmacy downstairs gave me a bottle of Vicodin and a few instructions: take it with food, don't mix with alcohol, don't operate heavy machinery. I put it in my pocket and we left. "Do you want to go home, or do you want to go to a bar?" asked Johnnie. (More...)
Report from Spiritual Machines
Arkuat gives you the inside scoop on the "Spiritual Machines" panel and conclave. Wacky excitement ensues! (More...)
