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Daily Bafflements

Columns

Fresh Hell
January 20, 2023
Junior Flints America has a long history of following up national tragedies with the marketing of questionable products, since grief and outrage are mere market demographics in the eyes of the corporate bounder: KFC’s pink buckets for cancer, O.J. Simpson pogs, the LEGO ...

Fresh Hell
January 13, 2023
Sex and Con-dy It is a new year and, with Valentine’s Day approaching, love is in the air—along with its attendant archangels of confusion, deception, and betrayal. To wit, Susan Meachen, the author of independently published romance novels like Smoky Mtn. Love and a ...

A Season in Hell
December 30, 2022
This year brought such a dizzying surplus of depravity—a truly incalculable preponderance of cruelty and braggadocio, vanity and idiocy—that no ledger would suffice. Each week, though, we plumbed the depths of mass media in hopes of surfacing the blackest pearls and the ...

Fresh Hell
December 16, 2022
The Tide Is High In what is no doubt a flamboyant cross-promotion for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, enthusiasm for the substance that covers 75 percent of the globe reached an all-time high this week, as humans seemed to rediscover the properties of wetness and ...

Fresh Hell
December 09, 2022
Irritable Vowel Syndrome It is a truth universally acknowledged that a spangle moop in Pasadena . . . wait, wait, let me start again. In a vole in the gerund, there lorved an omelet . . . no, still not right. Call me Fish Mail! Well, if you’ve been mangling lines you were ...

Fresh Hell
December 02, 2022
Ghost in the Shell While we sleep, the people rise and the pasta simmers. A Florida woman has embarked upon an upwards-of-five-million-dollar lawsuit against Velveeta for their fraudulent claim that their signature Shells & Cheese macaroni can be prepared in 3.5 minutes. ...

Fresh Hell
November 18, 2022
Aguirre, the Wrath of Gab “There is no space for symbolic structure,” sputters the Slovenian philosopher, “and this is really the paradox of psychoanalysis.” “In a way,” demurs the Bavarian filmmaker, “Freud also had something to do with literature.” The duo ...

Fresh Hell
November 11, 2022
The Fever Has Broken On Tuesday, millions of the nation’s weary voters made their way to the polls to submit their ballots as the raw material for overcompensated pundits, televised and otherwise, to weave into spurious narratives about the state of the “nation,” the ...

Fresh Hell
November 04, 2022
The Gimple Life In an eerie example of a private fantasy going public, a man in a gimp suit has been terrorizing villages in the southwest of England. The bodysuit-clad bogeyman has been the target of a manhunt over the last few years, typically flopping to the ground and ...

Fresh Hell
October 28, 2022
He Knows When You Are Sleeping Christmas seems to come earlier every year, with pharmacies and front stoops jumping the gun and defiling the sacred pagan rite of Halloween with reindeer and facsimiles of the ghoulish holiday elf Santa Claus. But in a crossover with the ...

Fresh Hell
October 21, 2022
Lettuce Now Praise Famous Men It’s not easy being green, but it beats leading a constitutional monarchy. UK prime minister Liz Truss’s forty-four-day reign of terror came to an end this week, with her resignation signaling more turmoil for Britain’s beleaguered ...

Fresh Hell
October 14, 2022
Vitruvian Manchild In a week in which evildoers like Alex Jones were punished and the prospect of consequence was meekly floated by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, our true enemy has yet to reveal himself. An Arkansas school board banned ...