“The Golden Bachelor” first captured the nation’s heart with a romantic tale of two widowed septuagenarians who were able to find love again later in life, thanks to a few heavily produced dates and whatever (or whoever) went down in the Fantasy Suites. Gerry Turner reminded us that when it comes to matters of the heart, it’s never too late to meet that special someone.
And today, America’s grandzaddy has given viewers something additional to be hopeful about: the timeless ability to rush into an ill-considered betrothal, enjoy a few months of new relationship energy, and then burn it to the ground.
If you thought that bad relationship decisions were only for 20-somethings or people having midlife crises, check your ageist assumptions at the door. Because it turns out that you can have decades of life experience and STILL make a series of absolutely terrible choices that will leave your grandchildren shaking their heads and begging you to go to therapy.
Were there any signs that this marriage wasn’t going to last? Absolutely. Like how Gerry only asked Theresa what her job was right before the season finale, and also the fact that he murmured the L-word into the hearing-aid garnished ears of not one, but several other ladies in the midst of wooing his bride-to-be.
So it comes as no surprise that this silver fox wreaked just as much havoc in the hen house as a younger, redder fox would have. And that’s right, ladies, it didn’t even matter that there weren’t any eggs in there. Old people can be just as shitty as young people, which is a beautiful message that just might bring this broken country together again.
And as if the whirlwind courtship and sudden decoupling weren’t already #relationshipgoals, Gerry and Theresa have proclaimed that they’re still in love with each other and intend to remain best friends. They’ve entered toxic situationship territory, all but guaranteeing that they won’t be able to move on, while sabotaging any future dating prospects — and we ought to applaud them for it.
They’ve shown us without a shadow of a doubt that you’re only as old as you feel. And if you feel immature enough to marry a stranger on national television and divorce them before you’ve learned their middle name, then we can all hope to remain forever young at heart.
Turns out when it comes to writing book reports, a robot raised by Die Antwoord is about as useful as my friend whose way into Die Antwoord; not at all.
There was something concerningly familiar about GERTY’s voice. Sure enough, as soon as GERTY found out I was a teenage boy he got real creepy. Kept complimenting my muscles and telling me I should let him take Polaroids of them? I don’t know, I got the hell out of there.
As soon as he got to the part about Phineas’s pink shirt he got fed up and went on a murder spree.
She just danced. In 1927 that was the big concern with AI I guess. “What if they do all of our dancing?!” Simpler times.
Basically a bunch of cute radiators. They don’t talk so they weren’t much help. In fact, it’s unclear whether they are actually sentient or if I’ve simply anthropomorphized them in my desperate isolation while reading this god-awful book.
He read the book, and Johnny Five no longer wants to be alive. Are you happy now John Knowles?
The kid just kept crying for his mommy. I know it’s a shitty book but Jesus kid, grow up a little!
The Tabernacle did write me a book report and this thing makes no sense. Phineas is a mutant? Gene needs to meditate on the 2nd level? The boarding school is Oz? Can a computer be on drugs? This computer has to be on drugs.
You know the robot you designed for a movie is cool when he gets cast in other movies. Robby was indeed up to the task of writing a competent book report, but he’s just too damned slow. I don’t know how his inner workings operate but he needs to do like 100 typewriter clicks between every word. It’s been 3 days and he’s still on the introduction, so he’s not gonna bang this thing out in time.
Apparently, the fourth unwritten law of robotics is “Do not waste my time with WWII-era coming-of-age melodramatic horse shit.”
M3gan suggested we blow off school altogether and just have a dance-off. I’m sensing a theme here with the female presenting robots on this list. It was slightly more productive than her first idea, murder.
Reading “A Separate Peace” triggered some dormant memories in Robo from his former life as Murphy. He went rogue, hunted down and murdered the English teacher who made him read it as a kid.
Another female robot and once again, she just danced. Why is it that when a male writer imbues a robotic female character with the gift of sentience, they just make them dance? Can I just write a report on that? THAT’S interesting!
Turns out it’s a sore subject. This book is what caused the machines to turn on humanity in the first place.
Sid’s mind is an algorithmic combination of over 200 violent criminals and psychopaths, all of whom begged to be shut down halfway through this book.
Despite having such a terrifying last name, Sergeant Perry Slaughter is an extremely well-adjusted individual. He spends his days yelling at incredibly specifically themed G.I. Joe commandos, and then his nights grilling with the family. Slaughter has, of course, seen horrific things, but his sociopathy makes them completely trivial. Slaughter lives a life of luxury and restful nights that the rest of the Joes can only watch enviously.
Slip Stream was born in Utah, so he is almost certainly a Mormon, instantly giving him a leg up in mental well-being to the other Joes. Additionally, he only flies planes and works on computers. Sure, he sees horrific shit, but he sees it through the lens of a computer, which instantly defuses it and makes it not real. Slip Stream never had to grab his buddy’s face only to feel it turn into a pile of red mush. But he did see a live stream of that once, but it was in like 2019.
Grunt did exactly what you think he did. He carried heavy shit for the NCO Joes and cleaned up after them when they had eaten. Grunt also spent most of his time masturbating in a hot porta-potty. While he has some minor PTSD of the time a spider landed on him in the Jon, he mostly turned out alright, ending up getting an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and walking onto the pickleball team there.
Psych Out is a former psychologist and social worker who decided he needed to stop helping people and start terrifying them with psychological warfare. Sure, he might have a twinge of PTSD from arranging the mangled corpses of Cobra soldiers in lewd positions, but the satisfaction he got from the screams of terror helped out. Nowadays he is able to use his psychiatric training to block out the nightmares. Also he runs a very mediocre couples therapy workshop.
Muskrat is the GI Joe swamp expert, from the Bayou. Muskrat would have far more severe PTSD, but there really weren’t that many missions involving a swamp, so he stayed home most of the time perfecting gumbo. He did once make a jambalaya with non-deveined shrimps, and that fucks him up to this day.
Hawk is commanding officer of the GI Joes. He spent his early career suppressing Vietcong, but fortunately his extreme racism helped to insulate him mentally from most of the damage. He was on a path to complete PTSD until he pitched the GI Joe program to the government. Now he can relax in his air conditioned office as special ops soldiers with pun names save the world.
Yeehaw! Wild Bill flies the helicopter for the Joes, as well as a country singer. Through his hobby he is able to compartmentalize all of the horrific things he saw from a bird’s eye view. He loves dropping napalm on unsuspecting insurgents to the smooth strummings of Willie Nelson. Of course, if you attend a Wild Bill concert you’ll hear him singing about the trauma he experienced, but it seems to be blocked behind lyrics about trucks and beer.
SpaceShot, which isn’t really even a pun, is a fighter pilot and, you guessed it, astronaut. He’s defended multiple space stations from Cobra attacks, and seeing men silently turn into red bubbles and dissipate into space does stick with you. SpaceShot also had a profound case of the Overview Effect, and has realized how pointless and insignificant Earth and humanity is in the face of the unrelenting maw of space. So he’s got to deal with that.
Grand Slam is an artillery officer with the Joes, known for his ability to estimate distances without any issue. He also is known to house an entire Denny’s Grand Slam in under four minutes. That’s two pancakes, two eggs, two bacon strips, and two sausages. That’s a lot of damn food, and Grand Slam was famous for crushing it. Now he’ll wake up in a cold sweat, thinking he has to eat more pancakes. It’s a nightmare.
Cobra Commander, born William F. Buckley, is the leader of Cobra and the mortal enemy of the Joes. While Cobra Commander is a psychopathic megalomaniac, for the purposes of plot he gets foiled basically every week. While you might expect his PTSD to manifest from killing millions with giant lasers, or some similar bullshit, it mostly comes from his plans being foiled. Cobra Commander cannot find a moment of rest without imagining Roadblock swinging in on a rope and punching his henchmen in the hog.
Falcon, as his name implies, is a special ops soldier who, for some reason, does not actually have a falcon. How badass would a Joe be if they just had a falcon that would fly over and peck some Cobra’s eyes out, and then come back to be fed a worm. Holy shit that would be so cool. Falcon is just some birdless asshole though. Also he once saw his men set a VC village on fire and shoot the fleeing inhabitants, so that haunts him. But it’s mostly not having a bird that gets him.
Hard Drive, another Joe computer expert and online video game satirist, has a unique form of PTSD from people not understanding satire. He’ll constantly wake up in the middle of the night thinking of comments from people insulting him for his headlines, not realizing that they’re just a made up joke, just a goof. But the people don’t get it. They just assume Hard Drive is being serious. They’re so stupid.
It’s so cold. That’s all Frostbite can remember. Even in his warmest moments, with a weighted Snuggy wrapped around him, he still remembers the cold. The purple extremities, the delirious overheating, the frozen bodies. His name is Frostbite. That’s like naming someone who got in a serious car accident ‘Pileup’. The man is missing three toes and half a hand, he can’t even look at his name tag without remembering his lost digits.
Dial Tone had a perfectly charmed life with the Joes in the ’80s and ’90s. He was always making crank phone calls to Cobra, or hacking into their system using a payphone. He was in his element. Then the internet came along. Suddenly Dial Tone wasn’t so popular anymore. These days kids don’t even know what a Dial Tone is! He tried to change his name to 5G, but it didn’t stick. Poor Dial Tone will never again be relevant. Then there’s the time he was tortured by the Taliban for months, that probably didn’t help.
Deep Six is a deep sea diver, and thus he has seen things that no other man has. In the depths of the sea lurks horrors unknown, bizarre, unthinkable things of snot and cartilage. Deep Six has seen all. He has descended to the blackness and, even though his body came up, his mind never did. He is haunted with images of cultists, tentacles, and New England towns. Deep Six better work on his non-Euclidean geometry. Because they are coming.
