Super Happy Fun Slander Corner

[00:00:03] I'm trying to create a virtual reality tool to help people have butt sex with my sister Brittany. Take a look.

[00:01:15] Corner is 48 Minutes of Dogs Barking. My name's Jason, that's Bryan. We are eating cream cheese Rangoon in the Chinese buffet from hell. We are not gooning. Oh boy, welcome to the show. What a week, Bryan. What a time to be alive, folks. Holy shit. High of 95 to 97 all week. I fucking get up and go to gym, 5-6am. What does Jim's wife have to say about that?

[00:01:44] He says, hey man, how long did you keep her from complaining? Yeah. Happy, he's like, listen, happy wife, happy life. Yeah. He's like, it ain't your wife. Well, yeah, to each his own. But anyways, I go to the gym GYM and the place in which you do personal fitness and evaluate yourself negatively in comparison to others. Also Jim's wife. Also Jim's wife. Jesus.

[00:02:12] It's like already like 80 degrees out. Oh yeah. Like 7am. I'm like this sucks. Full on just fucking, it's swamp weather. Fucking booby cheeks. It's a swamp ass alert, folks. Well, you know what else is just bothering me lately? That's right. The What's Hot classic. I mentioned at the top of the show, the fart corner. It is very real. It's real and it's beautiful. If you're not familiar, we'll let the folks at NBC San Diego tell you all about it.

[00:02:41] The headline, a gas station for farts. This Georgia teacher says it's a classroom win-win. More like wind-wind. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Got him. First thing to know about this gas station is that it's not a gas station. See, I wish we had Matt on for this one because he would have read the shit out of this. There are no pumps, no convenience store, no windshield squeegees. And despite what one might reasonably expect, there is no requirement that anyone actually purchase gas.

[00:03:08] It's a designated corner of an Atlanta elementary school classroom where students can go when they need to pass gas. Its creator, Candy Sydney Browning, a 36-year-old second grade teacher calls it the gas station. The specific spot where students go is the gusty winds area. There are air freshener sprays nearby. Now, how did they get a hold of this? But of course, tick tock.

[00:03:34] Here's a brief clip of that from her classroom gas station. And they come right here to the gusty winds area. They have sprays. Now, do I require them to spray? I don't. I just put it there in case they just want to go ahead and use it because I spray my classroom every day anyway. So, yeah, that's that's it. That's the station. Not much else to say. Yeah. My my girlfriend is a teacher and she showed me this the other day.

[00:04:04] Oh, that's fantastic. So I was like, that's great. But that's unfair to the kid that wants to shit his pants. That is true. Yeah. People responded as you would expect. Oh, and the rest of the class stays focused while somebody's farting in the corner. Oh, and so I'd be so embarrassed. But, you know, I think I would have been less embarrassed. Frankly, I had an unfortunate farting incident. We were doing a school field trip. It was for I remember what it was, but there was some performance going on. Hard rubber chairs. Tried to sneak one out. Nope. Big loud boy.

[00:04:33] Boy, was it embarrassing. If I had a fart corner or some sort of thing where I was able to, like, leave the room, go past that particular gas. I think I would have saved myself some embarrassment. So I feel for these kids. Kudos to Miss Sydney Browning and her class doing doing big things farting in the corner. This, according to one of my favorite newsletters that I do actually subscribe to, this is Cartoons Hate Her. I don't know if you're familiar with her. I'm not. But she does this thing called Many Such Takes.

[00:05:03] And it is just a collection of weird shit they saw on Twitter. So this one I loved. The headline, Probiotic Pussy Eating. A viral funny tweet showed up on our timelines this week, which spawned, say, not drama at all. Just a lot of other tweets on the same topic. That topic. Cunnilingus. See above. At Reich never dies. Oof. Not a fan.

[00:05:25] Eating pussy not for her pleasure, but for an ample serving of lactobacilli bacteria to improve my gut health. Brian Johnson, vampire billionaire who has meticulously measured his girlfriend's top 1% vagina in terms of healthy bacteria and pH, of course. We have no idea if she got the gorilla grip. No, not at all. Chimed in because, of course, responding, when late night snacking becomes a longevity therapy.

[00:05:54] Then one of the responses, not that I care about oral that much, but I do notice blacks often say they dislike eating pussy. And this table may explain why. This is at VitaWizard.talk. They then quote tweet themselves, desire to eat pussy is rooted in the subconscious need to compensate for poor gut flora. The healthiest just want vanilla. No, no cunnilingus.

[00:06:21] Those with average gut health can eat low odor pussy. So pussy low with bacterial diversity. The least healthy wants stinky. The least healthy wants stinky, Brian. I mean. You ain't wrong. I mean, look, hey. Listen, your leg comes back in the yoga pants from the gym. Smell them. Yeah, you know, let me get a little bit of flavor in here. I don't know.

[00:06:48] I think it's perfectly normal to eat pussy and to eat pussy and either love it or hate it or because your gut flora. Whatever reason you want to do it, just do it. Just do it. Yeah. You know, you want to get a fucking ride home or what? You want this Xbox or not? Yeah. Damn. God, this is such a weird story. I got no other time to tell it. So I might as well just lay it out here.

[00:07:15] So many, many years ago, I got hornswoggled to drive the leftist but vaguely Hopetepian rap group Dead Prez around St. Louis. Oh, yeah. Before they're set. You've probably heard bits and pieces of stories. But I also just love Dead Prez. Fuck them. Oh, yeah. Revolutionary but Gangster is such an amazing, amazing record. I'm driving them around. We go to this Ethiopian place. Hell yeah.

[00:07:41] And like, they're kind of like looking at me like they're kind of trying to white boy me a little bit, very politely. Mm hmm. But I'm like, I actually just had like a big dinner. I'm like, I'm not at all like afraid to like try and diverse foods. It's really more because I just got like samosas or something. Sure. They're hanging out. They got a couple like local buddies are in town and shit like that. I'm taking them back to the venue. And it's like their buddy, their DJ and the two dudes in Dead Prez stick man and the other guy's name. I can't remember.

[00:08:10] But so in my bus ass fucking grandma, red fucking Corolla driving back. They start talking about alkaline machines. Okay. They're talking about some like very surface level fringe conspiracy theory, like food shit throughout the evening. And their buddy was talking about how he was hooking up with this girl. How it started was he was talking about hooking up with this girl. It was fine shit, all that. But he's like, man, I'd stay over there in the morning, man.

[00:08:38] We got pull back them covers and I'd be like, ooh wee. And they'd be like, and then the other dudes were like, what you mean, man? Like, you know, was she like, you know, she was like, yeah, dude, she was like vegan and shit. Like she worked out all the time. It's just stanky as pussy. The one dude's like, she got the water machine. He's like, yeah, man, she got the water machine. I'm just like, but I don't mean to eavesdrop on this conversation that's happening in my car. But what's the water machine?

[00:09:05] They're like, man, alkaline machine to get the right pH level for the water. So it's good for you. And I'm like, huh, that didn't help with the stinky pussy, huh? The conversation went on without me. And I'm back at the venue and I'm looking on my phone like, what's it? You know, alkaline water machine on like Amazon. And like, yeah, like they're like five, $600. I'm sure they're much more expensive now. Yeah. But I remember why I worked at Whole Foods, which was after this. We sold alkaline water machines.

[00:09:34] And those are those things that if someone bought it and they returned it, it was, well, it's either someone, you know, belongs to an employee now or it gets thrown away. Right. Because of the implications. Someone bought a fucking water machine, returned it. And one of my coworkers got it. And I told him that story. He's like, yeah, my dick's been smelling weird. Fuck. Yeah. I have been having smelly dick. I don't know what's going on.

[00:10:02] My dick's been smelling like, my dick's been smelling like dried rubber. Oh. And fucking liquid smoke. Oh boy. I don't know what that's from. The gas station dick pills, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. The ones where Ryu is getting fucked by a rhino. Yes. Well, there's, there's really no way to prepare you from what I'm about to show you. A Twitter user by the name reasonable man at good American man posting this. Now, I don't know where he found this, but I got to play this.

[00:10:31] So tick tock realtors. And then in parentheses, perhaps bots are using an AI generated song for their listings where the lyrics are, and I'm quoting here. My corgi hates the N word over and over. Cry laughing emoji. I'm going to play you a clip with the offending word bleeped out, but just understand it is the N word with the hard R. It is a AI generated version as well. So here we go.

[00:11:07] Now in this video, he does what I would have done, which is, okay, what is this sound? So he hits the sound and shows all the videos where the sound is used and they're all real estate listings. Okay. Okay. And he's like, okay. So he goes to the next one. There it is again. And he's flipping through them all. And it's that same section of the song too. It's the chorus. My corgi hates N words. My corgi hates N words.

[00:11:35] For a minute and a half, this video goes on. I had to know what the fuck was going on. I'm so, so good. You try explaining this to me the other night. Right. I'm texting. And I'm just like, I don't know. I'm trying to fix my brain, man. So I've been able to find this is a at inward tower. Use the user. N word as an in I N W A R D not in word. I know, but that's what it sounds like.

[00:12:04] And that's what they're going for. Come on. I know. Because their username is Lord Dem Rangs. But they did find the original song. My corgi hates N.

[00:12:34] My corgi hates N. My corgi hates N. My corgi hates N. I wake up at the 9. A poor N. Try to enter on my home. My corgi rips out his throat. The N. will die on my phone. I don't remember a sleep at the wheel sound like this. Yeah. Jason and the Scorchers really had a weird change of young. Is this Johnny Reb?

[00:13:03] A guest in on this? Jesus. What I found after looking for the full name of the song, by the way, is the corgi song and then in parentheses country remix. This is one of but maybe one or two English language songs performed by La Tribute de Thor, a collective of beat makers write almost exclusively in French. The French producer of Magic Trek. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:13:33] He just made that up. Yeah. But yeah, the Tribute de Thor, their records are incredibly weird. These are Norwegians, it says. The number of members is large and grows and grows. That corgi song is not found anywhere on Genius.com, by the way, which of course, why would they? I want to translate some of their French lyrics to some of their other songs for you, because it is incredibly stupid. They have a song, by the way, called Charlie Kirk.

[00:14:02] This is from their Charlie Kirk song. Max set on my dick, no more paycheck. My whole family is racist. The United States in my briefs. My racist homie is there, representing with my boys, my guns. Screw the circumstances. I'm a F slur and I'm racist. The whole government is corrupted by Obama and you, September 13th, was orchestrated by Putin and Russia, right? Yeah, Russia and Putin. I'm gay. I'm an F slur.

[00:14:32] I get high on odd numbered days. Stop it. Ball, ball, ball. He was only 28, but all alone. He was taken out by a young communist with little ambition. He had no class. He took a bullet from a young fucking rock. Ooh, young fucking rock. Put yourself in his shoes, his shoes. Alsace is losing its place in class. He was that kid at the very back who kept getting replaced by everyone else. Those fucking shit. Free Bashar al-Assad, but not Charlie Kirk.

[00:15:01] That's right, the Lion of Damascus. Where is this world going? Yeah. And then he starts listing, creep, Radiohead, Bobby, Phoebe Bridgers, Charlie Kirk, the Rangers actor. God damn. They yawn like a mail order catalog. Ooh, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk. Very strange fellas. They do a whole song where like one of the lines is just like, oh, I'm racist and I killed a dog. Oh.

[00:15:29] Like, it's very weird. I'm still trying to find. It's such a really weird power violence record. Like, oh, I think I saw these guys open up for Municipal Waste or something. Yeah, but they don't. Or Asshole Parade. But they don't sound like that. The Tribute to Thor. Extremely racist and very weird. And the last thing to leave you with in our What's High Classic this week, the auto translation on some of Twitter's latest is really fucking with people.

[00:15:55] This is Duolingo Indonesia, translated from Indonesian. It is the Duolingo owl with his cheeks out, double cheeked up on a Tuesday afternoon. And it just says, I am ready to fuck your chicken. It is supposed to say, I am ready to smash your chicken. Someone responded with the whoa face. Duolingo Indonesia responding. I can explain. Nothing. Nothing about the Duolingo owl wanting to fuck a chicken. I'm just thinking of the McChicken.

[00:16:25] Yeah. Shocked out JPEG through the boxer hole. Through the boxer hole. Duolingo fucking your chicken through the boxer hole. Yeah. Unimaginable. I'm loving it, frankly. Do you remember Sonic the Hedgehog flash video where he's like, mmm, McChicken. Yeah. I'd fuck it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that was kind of based on there was that McDouble banner ad and where it looked like the guy wanted to fuck the burger. You're familiar with this? You've seen this? It sounds familiar, but pull it up. Oh, yes. Double cheeseburger. I'd hit it.

[00:16:55] I'm a dollar menu guy. God. There's something about the lace and pipe. I'm going to say I'm a dollar menu guy. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I'm a double menu guy. I'm a dollar menu guy. I'm a dollar menu guy. Whatever. Does a dollar menu even exist anymore? No. It's the value menu. Which the cheapest item is $3. I remember one point I was really broke.

[00:17:22] I'm kind of like really back that place in my life, which is cool. But I was like Googling and reading like what's the best like nutritional and caloric value for your bucket like Burger King. Okay. How do you scam? Like how you scan the rewards program. And there was a really, it was a really great loophole. Was it Burger King? Because I seem to remember this one, but go on. It was Burger King where it was like, but he had the points to get a free burger. Burger King.

[00:17:50] God, it was like, it was like something where like the threshold for a free large fry was incredibly low. Okay. You had to spend at least like a dollar. Okay. So a large fry is like three or $4. Right. So if you spend, I think what it was, was it was like the cheapest burger on the menu. And then you, if you added like cheese to it, it got you right over where the threshold was. Okay. So you could eat pretty decently as far as fast food goes when you're broke as fuck. Like two, three bucks.

[00:18:20] For like, yeah. And they're three or $4. Yeah. Nowadays you can't get out of there under like seven or eight. Yeah. There was someone that had a theory online not too long ago that was like, I don't think it's possible to actually get fed a fast food restaurant without spending like seven to 10 bucks. I think like their menu is engineered towards that. Well, even Burger King specifically, they have a thing called a trio right now. And that is three menu items just from this small selection for $7. And that's like the, it's not a bad setup.

[00:18:50] It isn't because it includes the original chicken sandwich, which is the one that's the long chicken sandwich, the wrong chicken sandwich. It's the one that, you know, is on a big bun and it's very, it's like a sub. It's big. Yeah. And so you get a lot of meat for the money and there's a two item version of that for five bucks. So you can get the big chicken sandwich and a fry five bucks. Now you want to drink down to be seven, but ultimately you can, you can get all right.

[00:19:18] A decent lunch, perhaps not a full, you know, evening meal. Right. But if you're trying to make your, your dollars stretch until a payday, you know, there's many such cases, many such cases. Listen, the world isn't getting easier. If you're listening, you're going through a hard time financially. Well, no one's coming to save you. Sadly. Yes. As saying is someone that works for a nonprofit that deals with eradicating hunger. No one's coming to fucking save you. Right.

[00:19:48] Start your garden in your backyard or in the vacant lot next door. Sadly, the time to have started that garden would have been five years ago. It's okay. Tomatoes can grow pretty quick and you can barter, get a couple chickens. Frankly, if you can keep them penned up, do it because the eggs I can vouch for that part. Now I don't have them anymore because one of my hens turned out to be a rooster and it was a whole nightmare. Midnight, the rooster that was supposed to be a hen. We did not know it was a rooster until five o'clock one morning.

[00:20:18] What the fuck? What the hell? Whole fucking neighborhood heard it. I mean, Jesus Christ. Did you have to like, did a couple of neighbors were like, you know, what the fuck was that? Yeah. Like I didn't know. Yeah. I was like, I backyard chickens. I got three chickens. I thought they were hens. I don't know about chickens and whatnot. That doesn't. I'm a computer toucher. Exactly. What am I? I just want to be a cool dude on the south side. Make my own kabocha. Right. Have some chickens.

[00:20:46] My wife doesn't shave her legs. What do I know from chickens? My kids have pronouns. Like, yeah. What? What? My car hearts are starched. Oh, wow. And ironed. Come on. What am I? A farmer? Never going to get broken in. Never. It'll be stiff like a fucking cummed in fucking piece of dry cleaning. Oh, okay. Like a cummed in piece of dry cleaning. Just starch and nut. Just starch and. Starch and. Why does this smell like.

[00:21:15] Why does this smell like weird shrimp? Smells fishy. Speaking of fishy. It's crypto scam of the week time. You're listening to 48 minutes of dogs barking the podcast. And now it's time for the crypto scam of the week. Oh, baby. That was good. We were harmonizing pretty good on that one. Yeah, was it like a fourth? I don't know from music.

[00:21:44] What do you know? But this year, according to TradingView, their subhead Coinpedia, more markets exploit 9.3 million drained from the W flow token. Hey, you know who else is on the W flow token? Fucking Hillary Clinton. So anyway. Pokemon flowed to the polls. Hey, all right. I'm just free bleeding out here in Grand Rapids. Cedar Rapids, yeah. God damn.

[00:22:14] God, I wish she was a nasty freak bitch like that. Man, you know. God, white girl with dreads. Something, something. Rose even. Just, you know. Hillary showing up. Hillary showing up. At the second debate. Fucking full cornrows and beads. Like she just got off the beach in Jamaica. She just came back from sandals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would have been baller shit. Like what? This is me now. What do you want? What do you want? This is a new me. Yeah. What you want?

[00:22:43] She comes out the fucking Pantera. Hell yeah. Crushing a fucking golden tea. Or even doing the stone coal with two Miller lights. It's just, argh. What y'all want now? I would love for you not to lose an election. Hmm. Even though I think you're a terrible candidate. Sorry, no. Too much. More tokens. More markets, this says. Folks, do you like to see your internet funny money?

[00:23:10] See those markets get relentlessly exploited like a child in the Congo mining PS5 chemicals or whatever? More. Well then, this is for you. Yes. More markets, a lending protocol developed by more labs on the flow EVM network, suffered an exploit that drained 15.5 million W flow from its lending reserves. Blockade, which sounds like a thing we would have come up with in the eighties to be like. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:23:40] Blockade identified 15.5 million W flow, leaving the reserve with the tokens valued at about 9.3 million. More markets has not confirmed the amount lost. They say the investigation is ongoing. Their official Twitter account. We're all officially getting our affairs in order and moving to a country with no extradition. Head of the project died in an air crash. Sorry. Just like Tashar Jones's father. Blime. Just got to walk right past that one. So, yeah.

[00:24:11] I got nothing. A little bit of St. Louis politics there. Yeah. The idea here is that Emode allows users to borrow more against assets considered closely related in value. So, the attacker reportedly combined an anchor bonded LST with Emode and exploited how the more markets calculated the borrowing limits.

[00:24:34] They then took out loans against the collateral and repeatedly withdrew this token from the reserve. Based on the market price of said coin W flow, blockade estimated the financial impact about 9.3 mil. On-chain activity showed the attacker began moving the assets shortly after the exploit. Duh. Some funds were transferred towards external wallets, bridged out of the system, etc.

[00:24:59] The team at Moore said, quote, our team is currently investigating a claim that Moore markets was exploited. Okay. Not really a lot of helpful there. Token dropped 9% to, let's see, .0262 cents. The decline came as traders reacted to the exploit rather than a broad crypto market sell-off. Yeah. Not great. Here's the thing about this, and I'm just going to put this out here.

[00:25:27] We're at episode 199 of this show. So, you're saying episode 200 is going to be the Kirk-versary? We might have to do the Kirk-versary for episode 200. Just a big, a blowout, as it were. Point being is that I think after 200 crypto scams of the week, we might have to retire. Yeah, it's just maybe come back on a situation for situation basis. Yeah, if we see something really big, really nasty. Really weird.

[00:25:57] Yeah. Yeah, this might be the second to last crypto scam of the week. So, hold on to your hats, dear listeners. We will let you know. Which brings us to our main topic tonight. Now, our main topic tonight, I picked this because I have a distinct and fun little memory of it. From being a very interesting site to read during a time when e-commerce and Web 1.0 was nearing its end.

[00:26:26] Things were going down. Things were very bad. This was a website called FuckedCompany.com. Jeez, man. You ever FuckedCompany.com? I can't say I was a person that was browsing it a lot, but I will say that I was someone who knew of it. Mm-hmm. Oh, HostGator. Okay, yeah, we're talking. Yeah. FuckedCompany.

[00:26:51] What's interesting about FuckedCompany is not the actual website because it didn't really have much of a life, right? It didn't really have a very long life. But the main draw was the creator, Philip J. Pud Kaplan. His nickname is Pud. And yes, his official website right now is still Pud.com. As in, are you pulling your Pud? Mm-hmm. So he started the website in May of 2000. What was it about?

[00:27:19] Well, it was essentially what they called a dot-com deadpool. Now, not the character deadpool. Oh, it's not, where's my fucking taquitos? It's more like, where's my fucking pension? Yeah, exactly. If you've ever seen the Clint Eastwood film The Dead Pool, it's more like that. The show Archer has referred to it as a tauntive, but the idea is the same. A game in which you predict who is going to die and when. Usually there's money involved.

[00:27:49] Hence the pool, part of the dead pool. In this case, it was a website where anonymous users could post about the companies that they worked for that they felt were doomed. Hence, fuckedcompany.com. It was also, notably, a parody of the magazine Fast Company that is no longer in print but is still on the web and still doing numbers. Now, fuckedcompany.com is a pretty simple website.

[00:28:18] Black background, red fields, white text. Classico. Very common, yeah. Very common in the 2000s. It was formatted almost like Portal of Evil, a site that we're all familiar with. We talked with one of the authorities. Mr. K. Thorgenson. Mr. K. Thorgenson. But what set fuckedcompany apart was just the fact that it felt like people who worked for these companies, for example, you know, Enron, talking about how fucked these companies are. Downsizing.

[00:28:45] The parent company of AmeriQuest Mortgage and Town & Country Credit announces layoffs. This was May of 2006. I'm out of here. Sun, Sun Microsystems, reports a first quarter loss of $217 million and McNeely steps down as CEO, it says. This was like pro-glass door in a way. Kind of, but a little bit more... Abrasive. Abrasive. Way more abrasive. I don't know.

[00:29:12] I've left some pretty fucking abrasive and mean glass door and indeed reviews of places I've worked and was really surprised to be like, wow, I have like the highest rated review. Jesus. Well, I mean... I mean, I worked a job during the pandemic that was so shitty. I was there. The day I quit was the day my health insurance kicked in. Hell yeah. Yeah, let's go. So like exactly a month of being there, I was like, nah, this ain't me. Damn. But it was one of those places that...

[00:29:42] In the month I was there, I knew I was walking into a shit show, but I was just gonna see how it was gonna go. I needed a job. And I was like, I don't need a job that bad. It was like in the month I was there, two people who had been there a very long time, like two or three years, which was a long time at this place, had left or got fired. And it was kind of like, oh, did you see that Glassdoor review? It was totally written by that chick that got fired last week. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. And like, and she was really cool. Like she was a good co-worker.

[00:30:12] Yeah. And she had no qualms about reading the fucking place for filth. Good. And it was like one of those things too, where the Glassdoor reviews were so negative that you could tell that the owner was asking people in management to write positive ones. But those are all getting fucking downvoted because you have pissed off so many people in your meat grinder, fucking pick and pull job. Yep.

[00:30:34] That now you have people there checking, casually checking your Glassdoor page to downvote anything positive because we know it's by, you know, your fucking bullshit son who's charger or fucking sorry, his Dodge Challenger is in when you get your fucking key card and the graphic of the building has like whose car is that? It's always, you know, our sons. Yeah.

[00:30:54] Anyways, I appreciate and respect anything that allows the working man to tell someone who like knows the difference between like red wines to eat shit and die. Damn right. Phil Kaplan definitely took that energy to heart. It ran for at least two years before running up against the big boys.

[00:31:15] Anyways, this is CNET, Paul Festa writing here in August of 2002, .com Deadpool breaks for Ford. Love the headline. Very, very old school. Ford to city, drop dead, you know. Yeah, it's not like, wow, guess which website Ford's upset with. Right. It opens with Phil Kaplan's fucked company.com, a website that has gained fame and some fortune collecting rumors and reports of layoffs, closures and other .com fiascos.

[00:31:44] Found itself shut down for nearly two days after Ford Motor complained to the site's hosting provider about alleged trademark infringements. The concessions came as fucked company is enjoying both growth and profitability, according to its founder, Kaplan.

[00:32:03] The site has risen to number 786 in rankings and website popularity listed by Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, up from a ranking in the thousands just a few months ago. Subscriptions to its unedited rumor feeds are up. By the way, the rumor feed has a really funny name. It is called the Super Happy Fun Slander Corner, which I love. God damn. Spend five bucks a month to subscribe to the blind item. Yeah, pretty much.

[00:32:32] Fucked company is no stranger to cease and desist, according to this CNET article. Early on in its career, which at this point has only been two years old, internet economy magazine Fast Company prevailed on Kaplan to change his logo because of trademark concerns. At issue in the Ford complaint were Kaplan's headlines for items related to Ford layoffs.

[00:32:54] For example, in a letter dated July 12th, Ford lawyers said Kaplan's headline, Ford, where finding a job is job one, was, quote, confusingly similar to Ford's advertising slogan, Ford, where quality is job one. That's the point. Yeah, you fucking asshole. Kaplan. Kaplan, to his credit, did pull down the passages Ford objected to, but inserted links to Ford's letter, along with a crude reference to the automaker in its place.

[00:33:23] In response, according to Kaplan, Ford threatened to sue the hosting company, the internet service provider that hosts the site. The hosting company, Host Centric, was not reached for comment. Host Centric pulled the site altogether. After a few more back and forth maneuvers, the Deadpool is back in business, but only after meeting Ford's demands. Kaplan is quoted in this article as saying,

[00:33:48] The whole problem is, if you do a search on Ford and copyright lawsuit, you'll find a million examples of Ford doing this. If you're a company that size, you can do anything you want. Their lawyer, Greg Phillips, countered, saying the company was protecting its trademark, yada, yada, yada. Ford is probably dealing with a hundred different infringements related to the internet in some way. I think that's probably pretty standard, given you have Ford and all the other brands, including Jaguar.

[00:34:14] In my view, that's in the ballpark of what I would expect from a company with so many famous brands. He also dismissed the notion that Kaplan's headlines were not violations of trademark, but rather easily recognizable parodies of Ford's slogans. Under, and this is very important, the CNET article writer did do his homework, Under the Federal Trademark Dilution Act of 1995, a person can be held to have infringed him on a trademark by tarnishing it, big quotes, by using it in a negative context.

[00:34:44] The famous example is a case in which the slogan, enjoy cocaine, was used in Coca-Cola's script, and was judged an infringement without the more typical trademark litmus test of confusion in the marketplace. He also had, by the way, this article mentions it, the Yahadis, pictures of young female sports and entertainment stars gleaned from Yahoo News websites. Yahadis? Not great. Not a fan of that part. Fucked company, great. This, not so much.

[00:35:13] However, Kaplan did his best and continued on. Early, early, early, fuckedcompany.com got put on eBay as a joke. This was September 11th of 2000. Another CNET article, actually. Troy Wolverton writing, Fuckedcompany.com, the irreverent website that documents the demise of .coms, is itself on the auction block. Phil Kaplan, the owner of the site, put it up for sale on eBay yesterday.

[00:35:41] In an interview, Kaplan, known as PUD, I still, just, you know, I'm pulling my PUD. Yeah. He said he was selling the site to make money. No, I'm jacking on the air of that. I'm jacking off. He said he's selling the site to make money, and because he didn't have enough time to turn it into a legitimate business, he decided to sell it on eBay, because it took him five minutes to set up the auction. Okay. My goal is to do as little work as possible on the site, he said. He said he'll sell the site if someone meets the reserve price on the auction with a legitimate bid. This says here,

[00:36:09] As of 1.10 p.m. today, again, September 11th, 2000, bidding had reached $10 million. Although the person listed as the top bidder said he has no intention of paying that amount. Another high bidder said his bid was also a prank. Contacted by CNETnews.com, Ed Reed said his $10 million bid was a joke. Reed, a sophomore at Renassler Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, said he read about the auction and placed the bid, even though it might cost him his eBay account. Quote,

[00:36:38] I don't mean to screw up anybody's auctions, but this was really too funny. eBay does have my credit card number, but I don't think they can bill me the $10 million. One of the bids, it says, at least one of them, was legitimate, but for far below the $500,000 reserve price. Jack Goodman, publisher of final-exam.com, said he placed a bid in the tens of thousands of dollars this morning. Goodman said he has a number of ideas for the site.

[00:37:02] Jeez, what a website that was in the top thousand could possibly be sold for half a mil. Half a mil, yeah, you're right. The money was funny. The money was indeed funny. A week later, failure has its price. For Philip Kaplan, this is The Guardian. What's with The Fucking Guardian? The price hovered last week between tens of thousands and ten million. Kaplan discovered how to capitalize on the latest new economy trend, chronicling the terminal-aunt decline of other websites.

[00:37:30] Visitors to the site placed bets on which companies they believe will be the next to fire staff, restructure, and ultimately close down, and points are awarded every time the bad news is confirmed. As the rules state, a company is officially fucked when they do something that signals or attempts to correct impending doom. One point for minor layoffs, 100 for an all-out corporate slaying. Beyond the game, however, it's the three to four hundred daily news tips from readers that have attracted almost six million page views each week

[00:37:57] for more than 124,000 unique users seeking news and rumors of the latest failed startups. But, since it costs a lot of money, he put it on eBay. The sister site, .comfailures.com, whose dead list claims to be definitive and whose rumor boards last week alleged that oxygen to urban fetch may ultimately be joining them. Coincidentally, .comfailures.com was proud last week to lead its front page with news of its own closure.

[00:38:26] Three weeks and $2.6 million later. Ryan Nitz, the man behind .comfailures.com and a friend of Kaplan, had a simple reason for closing the site. Quote, I'm not having fun anymore. There's also .comdoom.com, so a lot of imitators. Yeah, imitators, but it's not the same Italian sandwich sauce. It is not, no. Kaplan says he's not worried about that.

[00:38:53] We're seeing the shakeout of day late, dollar short, fuckedcompany.com copycats, he notes bullishly. Ironically, fuckedcompany.com proves the point that there's only room for one period. Original, well-thought-out ideas will be rewarded, and imposters will not last. Sadly, fuckedcompany.com also did not last. Fuckedcompany.com folded after being purchased in 2007 by TechCrunch. Ah.

[00:39:22] No, actually, that was an April Fool's joke. Yeah. That was March 31st when they announced it. Of course, it was a very early April Fool's joke. It was kind of funny to see that in the news. TechCrunch has a company at fuckedcompany.com. Tomorrow, we will announce we have acquired, this is TechCrunch writing here, fill up Pud Kaplan's fuckedcompany.com in a stock for assets transaction. We've been working on this deal for months. It's good we're finally able to close it and announce it. Since FC focuses on the negative news coming out of startups, and TechCrunch tends to focus on the positive,

[00:39:52] this combination may seem odd. But yeah, so a very well-written April Fool's Day joke, and very believable, sadly. What to expect? The fuckedcompany site has a notice on it about the announcement, and it will soon be upgraded to more of a TechCrunch look and feel. For now, we're keeping the site separate and will continue to operate normally. And then please give us your feedback, according to the later ad on the top of the page. Updated April 2nd, 2007. For those of you still sending in emails pleading with me not to stop writing about startups,

[00:40:21] this was an April Fool's joke. Thank you. However, by August of that year, the site stopped posting content. The simple message on his website was, fuckedcompanyis...fucked. RIP 2000-2007. If you're just now seeing this website for the first time, ask someone who was in the internet business during round one to tell you all about it. But Phil Kaplan's career did not stop there. No, no.

[00:40:50] He's still moving and grooving. He's fucking that chicken. He managed, after all that, so 2007, right, that site ended. He created other websites, including online advertising site Adbright, which he founded in 2004 during fuckedcompany.com's tenure. You have to understand how destructive Adbright actually was. Adbright was a blight upon the internet as a whole, the effects of which we're still feeling today, frankly. I don't really remember Adbright.

[00:41:19] Adbright was an online ad exchange. Behind the scenes, completely insane, Adbright ads and all that online marketplace stuff was the reason the SEO exploded. Then he founded something called ADHD Labs, which was an incubator for web and iPhone apps. He started something called Vandalism. Vandalism was supposed to be a social network for musicians.

[00:41:46] They expanded with something called Vandalism Distro, which allowed musicians, this according to TechCrunch again, to put their songs and albums on iTunes and elsewhere. Vandalism Distro spun out and became Distro Kid. Distro Kid is how I put out the last four albums that I had anything to do with. Yeah, it's how a lot of people do it. It is the easiest way to get your music digitally distributed. It's an annual-

[00:42:13] All $5 I have weighing the claim for the one song I- Yeah. So keep listening to music for horses. There you go. Yeah, and that one record on Bandcamp. Kaplan also, one of the ADHD Labs companies, Tiny Letter, which was made for doing email newsletters, was picked up and absorbed by MailChimp. Hell yeah. So Distro Kid, MailChimp, Adbright, more power to him.

[00:42:41] You know, he saw what was coming. He did co-found a social shopping startup called Blippi. That one definitely did not hit. Blippi was a social media site, but it only showed you what your friends were buying with their credit card. This is from that period of time on the internet where it was just everyone was trying to find out what was going to be like the next thing. There was a lot of stuff. It was like crowd-generated or user-generated information

[00:43:10] that wasn't necessarily ad-friendly. It was just like, well, okay, I want to do- What's the one? So the one where you're traveling, you're like, okay, what's the best Mexican food in Lawrence, Kansas? And you know because it's a fucking white person town, you got to pick like number four or five. Is it Yelp? Yelp, there we go. Sorry. It was like pro Yelp stuff that wasn't super. It was more like, hey, this is like if you wanted to get like a really good recommendation on like things to go check out

[00:43:40] when you're in this town, you know, like if you're traveling or something. And this was like before Atlas Obscura and stuff like that. Travelocity. Travelocity. What if we just like gave sincere information to each other? Yeah. And without the profit motive? Yeah. Necessarily? Like maybe we run a couple Google ads? Mm-hmm. Just trying to make the world less shitty. Yeah. And you're like, oh, that's a really interesting business model. Guess what? It doesn't make any money. Mm-hmm.

[00:44:10] That's how it works, baby. Yeah. Now Yelp is the number one place for white people without taste buds to tell you where to go eat really good authentic Mexican food. It's authentic Mexican food. Their carnitas are real good. You know what, man? The best Mexican food like as far as just like random like fucking roll the dice always been like driving through Oklahoma. Anywhere in the Southwest-ish area? I remember one time traveling through Oklahoma. It's a proximity effect.

[00:44:37] It was also, it was like Mexican, but also Native American. Okay. So it was like definitely Tex-Mex, but there was also like maize. Yeah. Some real Blackfoot shit in there. Yeah. No, it was fucking delicious. It was like, it was basically like, there was this one, I can't remember what the fuck it was called. It was basically like, this is like a regional approximation of like a Mexican pizza, but it's like how someone's Nuna would have made it. Okay.

[00:45:06] And like, I got it. And I was like, this is absolutely amazing. I should have taken a photo of the menu. I just remember it was a part of a truck stop and we didn't have high hopes. Right. And we left going, holy shit, that was amazing. Oh, God the hell. Yeah. He kind of dropped off the map for a while. From about 2014 to 2024. I didn't hear much about Mr. Kaplan until he started showing up making weird headphones. God, so fucking monkey she's right out of him.

[00:45:34] So this, in fast company, by the way, the website he started out lampooning. I do like the idea of having your drivers in front of your eyes so you can just fucking just blow that shit out. Oh, yeah. Jellify your eyes. It says,

[00:46:31] Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Wow. Nice fucking Bayer Dynamics DT770s. How about these pair of headphones? I mean, two fucking pocket pussies and some coat hangers. Wow. If you look at the frequency chart here, they're better than the HD280s that most people get. And one of them I did find really amusing. This was written pcgamer.com. It does. It does.

[00:46:58] This is like shit that you would do to traumatize your neighbor's dog. Yeah. This is totally like, oh, that dog had to get put down after that. Jacob Fox writing in 2024 for PC Gamer. PUDS Dolbus gets you 5.1 surround sound from headphones with a side of deadly saw trap nightmares. PC Gamer's favorite headphone inventor, Philip of PUDS Small Batch Headphones, has been at it yet again,

[00:47:27] this time crafting a veritable jigsaw trap-looking headphones that pump out full 5.1 surround sound audio. And there's the photo. It looks like a red cap with a bunch of extrusions on it, little knobs. It's fitting because he looks like an adult baby. Right. And it looks like one of those helmets that babies wear. To shape their skulls. Yeah. So you don't have Russian orphan noggin.

[00:47:52] It says the actual name for them is Dolbus, which, as Philip explains on his website, refers to the surround sound headphones with five speaker drivers plus subwoofer. This real deal means having five actual speakers surrounding you, though, which is exactly what this pair, pentuplet of headphones, does. You seat your cranium in the center of five tiny speakers. Needless to say, unless you have some two feet out of the socket curvy eyeballs,

[00:48:22] you won't be using these for gaming or for much that requires, well, seeing anything. Because there will be a speaker right in front of your eyes. Practical? Maybe not. But what I want to say anyway, well, still maybe not. Lest I get trapped in the mind prison. The picture alone is just fucking ridiculous. And that is the Reddit r slash headphones subreddit, by the way. They're putting this guy on. And the photos from above, it's even super.

[00:48:50] I feel like this $800 headphone amplifier gives a much more natural response at zero decibel rating or zero gain than this other $800 one that has tubes in it. Yeah. Anyways. So the headphone obsession. My wife left me. So the headphone obsession apparently goes long, long back. It says, As far as his keen interest in headphones is concerned, his origin story begins with a summer job at an electronics store. 15-year-old Kaplan used his employee discount

[00:49:19] to buy his first pair of serious high-quality headphones, the Koss Porta Pro Junior, which then went for a whopping $25. It was the first time he experienced true bass so vividly. It was like getting a deep tissue brain massage, Kaplan recalls. Since then, he has been chasing similar highs forever in search of the next sound experience that could rattle his bones and rewire his circuitry. And then in 2024, he started doing it himself.

[00:49:46] These headphones were made out of a PVC mold of Geronimo's skull. Yeah, it's all monster cable wiring. Hell yeah. Basically, it's like if you had two Yamaha NS-10s put on your head, and then you ask God to skullfuck you stupid. Something like that, yeah. Monkey fuck. Can I get some Reddit gold? Thanks for the gold, kind stranger. Thanks for the gold.

[00:50:12] Apparently, the other lasting legacy of Mr. Kaplan was, as DistroKid, the author, he did write a book for kids called The Music Production ABCs. Yeah. It's a board book for two years and older, 26 pages long. You can still get it on Amazon for $12.98. Yeah. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive. It is the exact same price as a combo meal from Burger King.

[00:50:42] The back of the book. Feed your brain. Mm-hmm. That's all I got. Feed your brain, kids. Kids, feed your brain. Feed your brain. You're not going to get it at school with the collapsing education rates. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That peanut butter and jelly is just basically sawdust and high-fuctose curler and syrup. I'm kind of curious, the Music Production ABCs, because some of the pages are like audio, everything we hear with our ears. Okay. That kind of sucks. B is for bit depth. All right.

[00:51:13] C is for compression. Okay. And so on. Yeah. Curious. I'm kind of curious what he's like. But yeah, Phil Kaplan. What a strange fella. Currently lives in San Francisco. Because of course he does. All the tech weirdos live there too. Strange guy. I like some of the things. I really appreciate how Distro Kid made music releasing easier for a lot of people. Did not care for MailChimp. Did not care for Adbright. So, you know, I'm kind of a two out of three. Not happy with him.

[00:51:43] But, you know. At the same time, he did it. He did the thing. He took a stupid idea, which was allow people to complain and place bets about companies that are dying and turn it into a thing, which then allowed him to do other things. Can't be mad at it. I can't be too mad. I do wish there was more of this type of nihilistic type of internet. You know? I mean, we've got our individual Twitter feeds, sure. But to me, there's no single website that's like, hey.

[00:52:10] Anything I think that's comparable is just like, well, it's like branding over multiple social media accounts like Buddyhead. Yeah. Like Buddyhead doesn't really have shit to do with music anymore. But it's really great if you want to feel like powerless and nihilistic about the current situation of the world through memes. I've always thought of Buddyhead as like the Adam Curtis of music. Did something happen? Kelly Osbourne released a second record. Kelly Osbourne found herself in the back of a cab.

[00:52:37] I would love to laminate her and use her as a bookmark now. She just like looks like. I just I want to get that photo that Travis keeps putting up on the web of her in the backseat of a cab smoking pot or smoking pot or crack. I don't know. Yeah. With like her fake. Yeah. Adopted brother. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a whole other fucking thing. Yeah. Oh, that's a weird story. Yeah. Sharon Osbourne apparently paid for for that kid to go like film school and he graduated

[00:53:06] and the last thing I read about him or most recent things years ago was that he was like living in someone's garage in like New Jersey. OK. Well, I really hope that I that there's going to be enough of a world for me to be a piece of shit like Ric Flair has been God in his 70s. Even just like appearing on a Metro song and be like Ric Flair drip go woo on the trick. Yeah. God.

[00:53:32] Speaking of going woo on the trick, it's time for you to tell us where to find you on the internet. Brian. Ah, geez. If you want to find me in the area, you can go over to Twitter and Blue Sky and find me at iShotGyDBord. I-S-H-O-T-G-U-I-D-B-O-R-D. If you want to find me over on Instagram, I am a music photographer. And if you want to check out my well curated, if not perfectly curated portfolio of people

[00:53:59] with their mouths open, you can go over to assholemusicphotographer.com. And then if you want to check out the last and only good media website left in screwy St. Louis, you can head over to theartsstl.com. They just posted some photos from the Savannah Bananas game a couple weekends ago. Yeah, it looks pretty good. They're getting a little bit into sports. Not necessarily because they're asking for it, because they get offered it. And that's totally fine. I get it.

[00:54:25] It's a little weird sometimes to see like a basketball game amongst like a bunch of indie rock shows. But like, whatever, man. Yeah, someone's got to fill that void. If they're coming to an indie media website, the ad, hey, you want to like photograph like a sold out game or, you know, WWF or WWE pay-per-view and all that shit. Fuck it. Well, no, I mean, yeah, fuck it. Let's fuck it. We ball. But also means that like the post-dispatch and like the actual like legit said no or don't

[00:54:55] have the fucking budget anymore. Anyways, Jason. Yes. Where can they find you and your Ric Flair drip? Ooh, me and my Ric Flair drip. Well, like Brian said, Twitter and Blue Sky. I'm not really on Twitter a lot except to promote the show, but you can find me on Blue Sky. I'm Video Crime. I'm Video Crime pretty much everywhere. Chances are if you've seen me there, you probably also see me on Letterboxd, other places, you know, the Anime 2000 forum, wherever it is. I'm Video Crime. V-I-D-E-O-C-R-I-M-E.

[00:55:24] You can also find me as part of a podcast. It's not this one. It's called Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals. Therein, I play the fictionalized version of horror icon Stephen King. It's a lot of fun. Two seasons await you at midnight-pals.simplecast.com or search anywhere podcasts are sold. Just search Midnight Pals. You can contact this show in a myriad of ways. My personal favorite is, of course, the telephone 314-246-9766.

[00:55:52] That's 314-ahoy-poo if you like to spell with your telephone. Be like the folks who have been going to war about the theme song and do that thing. Let us know what you think about the theme song. Yeah, who would you kill on the battlefield? Yeah. Who would you leave to die at Mort Kalen? Yeah, or maybe if you've got an opinion on Matt Basler eating a four-foot hot dog. Either way, let us know. 314-246-9766.

[00:56:20] If you want to shoot us an email instead, you can do that as well. Jason at the number four, the number eight, Minutes of Dogs Barking dot com. Mariah with a Y at the number four, the number eight, Minutes of Dogs Barking dot com. Kick them nasty thoughts. Support the show. Patreon.com slash four, eight minutes of dogs. Keep us in beer money. That is where we're going to do the post-show hangout called. And piss money. Oh, yeah. Post-show hangout called Thanks to Hate It. We got the shock.jpg best of and a few other surprises coming towards the end of the year. We're going to love it. We're going to have fun.

[00:56:49] Get yourself in there. Patreon.com slash four, eight minutes of dogs. As we always say at this time, namaste. Good luck. Give mommy a good gut fucking 25th amendment. Now, who ate all the pussy? And eat the knife. The knife. Indeed. The knife.