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
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
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...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
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...)
Pigdog dispatched special correspondent Ratsnatcher for a holiday reconnaissance of America's frozen hell. After ten days of silence, our shortwave radio cackled with Ratsnatcher's static-filled transmission. (More...)
This week: another fine spocktail from the beverage researchers at SMRL! Drink it in peace, because WE DID THE RESEARCH! (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...)
For all you Sensitive New Age Guys (SNAG) out there who complain about not getting laid, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret: Women only like to have sex with jerks. (More...)
It was early in May last year when I first heard about Spock Mountain Research Labs. I was working on a story about a Hungarian scientist's new approach to nucleopeptide synthesis when I got a call from my friend Albert. (More...)