Remember circuses? They were fun. You’d sit on a rickety bleacher, assembled hastily by a laborer too unsavory to get a job working at a carnival, under a tent made from fabric that looked nastier than the curtains in a porno, and you’d watch geriatric animals doing tricks in a ring in the middle of the crowd. Bored tigers would lazily swat at chairs if the lion tamer poked them enough, and the elephants would parade around with girls from the Tammy Fae Baker school of wardrobe and makeup on their back. Then some clowns with slightly less makeup would pedal little bicycles around in a circle and hit each other with pies or sticks or buckets of glitter, and you’d go home with a big smile on your face and some sort of stomach virus from eating cotton candy made in a machine that wasn’t even cleaned in the factory after assembly, never mind in the thrity-three years it’s been in service since then. Good times.

Now the world’s upside-down, and the audience is expected to wear spangled spandex jumpsuits and ride elaborate bicycles out in the desert, while gila monsters, snakes, and buzzards watch us.

[Thanks to Joan of Argghh for sending that one along]