Twilight Zone Students Watch Real 6th Grade English Class
Plus, Iago's Abs and a Cardiologist Calls Bullshit on Tell-Tale Heart
Hello, readers. It’s candy corn season.
I used to be a big fan of candy corn, because I love old American traditions and pissing off the haters.
People who hate candy corn also are “scared of clowns,” “dislike the word moist,” and “think libraries no longer have a role in society.”
These are, of course, the unoriginal numbskulls of basic bandwagon follow-culture.
They don’t like anything that their peers hate, fully handing over their cultural tastes to trends, memes, and majority rule.
My grandfather used to say, “The masses are asses,” a quote he either stole from Alexander Hamilton or the punk band L7.
To prove a point, I would eat candy corn by the bag and even celebrate Brach’s entire line of candy corn forms, including the pumpkins and other seasonal shapes in their “Autumn Mix.”
There’s even a bag of spooky candy corn configurations—skulls, bats, and cats. I would grab a handful, as one scoops a trail mix, and pop the collection into my mouth, savoring each crumbly candy until it became one waxy clump. At which point, I would move it over into one cheek and play “Lenny Dykstra” with a fat tobacco cheek.
Eventually, I would swallow this sugary accumulation and let it sit in my stomach with no redeeming nutritional benefit.
Nowadays, I have to sit on the sidelines on candy corn and most Halloween candy because as a vegan, I am “not allowed to eat anything or have any fun” (another thing the uneducated asses believe).
I was sad to discover that candy corn and other foods, cosmetics, and household products still use confectioners glaze, which sounds innocent enough until you find out that the glaze is made from lac-resin, a shellac that comes from bug secretions.
That’s right…the lac bug “secretes” (use your imagination as to how) a waxy, waterproof coating to protect itself. Workers scrape the secretions, often killing the bugs, to use in everything from candy corn, jelly beans, and even gumballs.
I for one also believe that bugs should live, another radical, free-thinking notion that goes against the grain of common, harebrained thought of most dullards, dunderheads, and dolts.
However, I’m glad to say that Reese’s now makes a plant-based peanut butter cup and SweetTarts, Airheads, and Twizzlers have always been animal and cruelty-free. Yum.
Now, my blood-sugar is through the roof as I pop Smarties like my ADHD medication, but at least I have an actual reason to avoid candy corn other than just because “I heard most people don’t like it.”
Anyways…
Our top story involves a classroom in the Twilight Zone who is shown footage from actual students in a real middle school in America. Scary.
We also anticipate the new Othello where Iago has shredded abs and listen to a geriatric cardiologist call bullshit on Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
You’ve been warned.
"...like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my six pack."
Tony and Academy Award winner Denzel Washington stars as Othello, the noble Moor of Venice and commanding warrior-general. An obvious choice, really.
But opposite him, Tony & Academy Award nominee Jake Gyllenhaal portrays Iago, the ambitious lieutenant and masterful manipulator.
Spurned for promotion, Iago’s relentless quest for vengeance against Othello and his wife, Desdemona, plunges them into a shocking web of deception and betrayal.
Gyllenhaal might seem like a strange pick for Iago until you realize that Jake knows a thing or two about being spurned...the actor went through hell to transform his body for the very terrible (yet very watchworthy) Roadhouse.
"When I didn't get nominated for a Golden Globe for my work as Dalton, I could relate to Iago's famous quote about "the green eyed monster which mocks the meat it feeds on."
"It's medically impossible," commented the cranky cardiologist.
A geriatric cardiologist has taken to his morning report with medical students, residents, and faculty to discuss the "main problem" with Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."
It should be noted his criticism was totally unprompted and took away from serious discussion on several timely clinical cases.
"The part where the heart beats on its own...we all know that can't happen, right? Right?" he yelled. "An electrical impulse must travel to the heart and cause the atria and ventricles to contract."
When he was finally interrupted and someone mentioned that the narrator of that story is probably the killer just imagining the beating heart as he goes insane, the cardiologist quickly changed the subject to actual specific cases of the elderly patients under the hospital's care.
And it's downright frightening!
A teacher in the Twilight Zone is showing episodes of an actual 6th grade class so that her students can see just how scary reality can be.
One episode titled “Too Much Screen Time” shows the depressing reality of a typical day in American education. But one of the most surreal episodes is simply titled, "Lack of Consequences," where students in an overcrowded English class basically just do whatever they want while the teacher lives in total fear of their parents.
"See class," the teacher said. "Notice how the principal in the last scene talked a big game but is now hiding in his office? This total lack of administrative presence is called 'Anti-Kafkaesque.'"