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Baby (Ass) Wipes

20 Jun

June 20, 2011

Regular readers of this blog (you know who you are, don’t try to deny it) know that I am a frequent reader and aficionado of News  of the Weird and its clone, Weird News. (Oddly, neither has done a cloning story in a while. But I digress.)

A lot of the stories are funny, some make you shake your head in disbelief, and a few are just plain scary. The following story is one that does all three. and even worse, it was reported in a lot of large media outlets. (I don’t say “better” outlets, because, let’s face it, I trust News of the Weird a lot more than the pompous Wolf Blitzer and his CNN cronies. Ever see Jack Cafferty? His sole job on CNN is to read people’s email and act all cranky while insulting Republicans. CNN could save a lot of money by letting Sean Penn read the email. He does the rest for free.)

Do you know about The Adult Baby?


Where to start?

I’ll start with the thought that is uppermost in my mind, paragraph by paragraph.

1- WHAT THE F-?

We’ve got a 350 pound blivet who wears diapers, uses a baby bottle, and sleeps in a giant crib? On the face of it, the guy is clearly disabled. He has to have some mental disorder. No, scratch that, clearly the guy is nuts. He doesn’t deserve SSI benefits, he deserves the rubber room.

2- WHAT THE F-?

That old sack of baleen and ambergris isn’t his mother, she’s his roommate? She treats him like he’s a baby and puts up with that shit? OK, SHE’S the nut.

3- WHAT THE F-?

He knows enough to act normal in public, he builds his own fat adult baby furniture, he drives, and runs an internet support group? This guy is not nuts, he is a freak with a bizarre fetish. Well, he is nuts, but not in any clinical way. He’s nuts in the likes to wear diapers and make poopie way. He’s functional, so he should be working.

Sen. Coburn is absolutely right. This guy needs to get his shit together (and out of his diaper) and get a job and repay all the money we’ve given him. If I lived in Oklahoma I’d vote for the guy. Then I’d move out of Oklahoma.

But wait, there’s more. Let’s hear his side of the story.


Continuing, paragraph by paragraph:

4 and 5- He threatened to kill himself if his benefits were taken away. I say take them away. He’s not killing himself. This turd knows just what he’s doing.

6- He is an able-bodied 30-year old man and she attends his needs? SHE IS THE NUT! If the previous paragraphs with the death threats did nothing else, it showed that the Adult Baby is intelligent and knows what he is doing. He can think logically. And he can’t work from home in his diaper?

7- Legitimately disabled or not, I don’t think I want my tax money to subsidize  his woodworking hobby. And if the furniture can’t support his weight, hey fatty- go on a diet!

8- Lifestyle? Lifestyle? This is what is wrong with the world in a single word: “Lifestyle.” Living like a 30-year-old infant is not a “lifestyle,” it is insane. We are legitimizing it by calling it a lifestyle. This doesn’t need legitimizing, this needs demonizing. Am I intolerant? No. (OK, yes, but this is different.) We are a world of enablers. Why are we enabling this?

9- Again, the Senator is correct.


10-“Trauma from childhood abuse.” I don’t want to seem to be trivializing this. I know that it is a very real problem for a great many people. You know what those people do? THEY GET HELP. They don’t retreat into infancy and find consolation in the flabby arms of a second mother. (You may be wondering if I think that this is any worse than drinking or drugs. I say it is.)

11- His website only requires four hours a month? Get out of here! Mr. Blog’s Tepid Timewaster takes me four hours a day just to come up with a topic. Typing this post took an hour.

So out of a morbid sense of curiosity, and against my much better judgment, I went to he Adult Baby’s website.  (Don’t worry, I browsed in-private, deleted all my cookies, and disinfected my computer. And I am still sure I am on some awful FBI list now.)


UGH. I hope you’re happy now. Seeing how crappy and badly written it is, I can almost believe he only spent four hours on it.

12- He said his craftsman skills were overstated because he only drilled six holes on camera and the chair was pre-made the day before. Um, but wasn’t he guy who did it? So who cares when it was made, he made it.

I would like to end with a personal message to The Adult Baby. I hope that, in some way, perhaps we can find some common ground, that I may help you adjust to life in big boy pants, that someday you can join the rest of the non-diapered world. I leave you with these words: goo goo, ga ga, gurgle gurgle goo.

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The Saturday Comics: Howard the Duck

18 Jun

June 18, 2011

If Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride has an underlying theme or philosophy, it is that “life’s most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view.” I’d love to boldly lie and take credit for that but I can’t, it was said by Steve Gerber, the late creator of Howard the Duck.

The blog actually does have a tagline, “an absurd look at the absurdities of this absurd world” and if you want to know what Howard the Duck would think of that, check out his first appearance from 1973’s Adventure into Fear #19. (Yes, he actually debuted in a melodramatically titled horror comic.)

He then moved to the comic whose title has launched a million lousy jokes, Giant-Size Man-Thing, and then, mercifully, to his own title in 1976.

However, outside of the comics world, and very often inside, Howard the Duck is better known for the atrocious 1986 film starring Lea Thompson. It was a Lucasfilm production and I’d say George Lucas should be ashamed of himself, but he went on to make The Phantom Menace so it is quite clear that the man has no shame.

For those of you who don’t know Howard, here is a brief wiki-duction:

Howard the Duck, as his name suggests, is a three-foot-tall anthropomorphic duck. He generally wears a tie and shirt, and is almost always found smoking a cigar. Originally, like many cartoon ducks, he wore no pants; Disney threatened legal action due to Howard’s resemblance to Donald Duck, and Marvel redesigned that aspect of the character. [They stuck some pants on him. –ye old editor, Mr. Blog]

Howard has an irritable and cynical attitude to the often bizarre events around him; he feels there is nothing special about him except that he is a duck, and though he has no goals other than seeking comfort and to be left alone, he is often dragged into dangerous adventures simply because he is visibly unusual. His series’ tagline, “Trapped in a world he never made”, played off  the genre trappings of 1950s science fiction. A common reaction to meeting Howard the first time is a startled, “You…you’re a DUCK!”

Howard’s adventures are generally social satires, while a few are parodies of genre fiction with a metafictional awareness of the medium. This is diametrically opposed to screenwriter Gloria Katz, who in adapting the comic to the screen declared, “It’s a film about a duck from outer space… It’s not supposed to be an existential experience”.

There is no relation to Pierre D. Duck.

Howard’s adventures tended to favor the more literate fans:

Seemingly an autodidact, Howard at various times references Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Albert Camus (whose novel The Stranger Gerber considers the principal influence on the series), the Brontë sisters, and other figures of philosophical and political significance.

If you’ll pardon my cynicism, that’s probably why today he is mainly a cult character and not more popular or well-known. Even the newspaper strip lasted only about a year, replaced by the much more popular Incredible Hulk, whose movie franchise is only slightly better than Howard the Duck. The strips below were thankfully not based on the lousy movie but came out almost a decade earlier, based on the comic and it was written by Steve Gerber himself before some disputes (which tended to dog him when it came to Howard the Duck) arose between him and Marvel, and comic veteran and legend Marv Wolfman took over scripting duties.

Rarely seen now, these strips were rarely seen even when in production since the series was picked up by only a handful of newspapers. Enjoy!

by Steve Gerber and co-creator Val Mayerik

by Steve Gerber and the legendary Gene Colan

by Marv Wolfman and Alan Kupperberg

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