Madness Madness!

The eternal dilemma: Get groped by a creepy Australian, or get terrorist-tastic with a creepy Japanese guy? Today we're rocketing to the bottom with Universal Medicine ("UniMed"), a cult literally dreamed up by a guy on the toilet to get to second base with the ladies, and Aum Shinrikyo, a cult dreamed up by a weird bully with a thing for constant terrorist attacks. Spoilers: There's "medical" groping. And homemade weapons. And cops who aren't great at their jobs because there is seriously very little crime in their entire country. G'day!

This week's matchup gives you a choice of cultures to appropriate: You can hang out with the Rainbow Family and immerse yourself in some muddled, deeply unsurprising theft of Native American ideas, or you can tie a string on with the Kabbalah and take a moment to consider if it's possible to improperly appropriate your own culture! Seems like a yes to me. 

Sometimes talkin' real fast is the same as enlightenment, especially when you're extremely sleep-deprived and possibly living in a fallout shelter because the cult you're in is definitely sure there's gonna be a nuclear war any day now. This was certainly the case with the Church Universal and Triumphant, a bunch of weirdos in Montana. Today they go up against J.Z. Knight and Ramtha, a power duo consisting of a drunk person who "channels" a "35,000-year-old" "Lemurian warrior" who lives in rural Washington and is "definitely not a con artist and a huge fucking fraud." In local news, Brian is on steroids.

Y'ever meet a college roommate's dad and think, "Now THERE'S a guy I want to move into the common area of our dorm room!" Man, have we got the Dad for you. In today's episode we meet Larry Ray, an insane creep who took advantage of his daughter's suitemates at Sarah Lawrence College and conned them into nearly a decade of deeply bizarre servitude and exploitation. The cult doesn't have a proper name so I'm gonna call it Electric Larryland. 

Pitted! Against! A little ethos called Beta Dominion Xenophila, invented by petty criminal, constant liar, serial bigamist, and adult prom date extraordinaire "Scott" Caruthers. Ole Scott realized at some point that he could Just Start Saying Things and enough people would believe them that he could stop doing work and start having a cult/long con/weirdly actually successful fitness invention. There's a lot here, friends. Jump in!

We've had a good time with clubs and organizations, but there's also a limit to how much right-wing white guy bullshit a person can study before they have to switch back to studying not-necessarily right-wing bullshit. That's right folks, cults are back! The season 3 premiere pits a couple of obscure dipshits against each other, which is clearly shocking: Educo, a health cult from the shores of fair Ireland, and Zendik Farms, a badly structured attempt to arrange some Strange for a never-was beatnik. 

There's a point in every person's life when they must ask themselves whether 'tis nobler to indulge in forensic sniffing and tasting of milk, or to join a group of dead and dying white male comedians founded on an obsession with Milton Berle's dingus. For us, that day has come. The FFA (Future Farmers of America) was founded to promote pride and develop skills in farming, during a time when more Americans lived rurally than didn't. The Friars Club was founded to cut down on the number of fraudulent free tickets scammed off of New York's theaters, during a time when basically everyone was a fucking asshole because it was New York in the early 1900s. Fortunately nothing has changed, except they've taken to hiring literal felons to manage their charity work. Great stuff, don't miss it.

Also, holy shit! It's the season two finale!

At a glance, one could be forgiven for assuming there's no way we'd join a group where the world's richest and most powerful men (only men) go to piss everywhere in a way that wild animals find unwise.  One could also be correct in assuming this, but that'd make for a short and boring episode. Fortunately we've got the Shriners in the opposite corner, and let me tell you, this is a far more legit group than perhaps any of us realized. Let's learn about tiny cars and the seemingly pretty great men who drive them!

Hop on, loser! We're going to postwar England! Join us for one of the mildest gang fights since the episode of "Newhart" where the Hooligals rumbled with the Puffians. As thoughtfully chronicled in The Who's rock-opera-cumentary "Quadrophenia," this week we'll have a look at the Rockers, a group heavily inspired by U.S. biker culture of the 1950s, and the Mods, who were primarily about dressing real slick and ended up riding Vespas everywhere, for reasons we will get into. Brrrm Brmmmm!!!

This week we take a look at two groups of people utterly fucked over — by England and by the people so awful they got kicked out of England, respectively — and the groups they formed to express their well-thought-out grievances. Props to the American Indian Movement (AIM) for making their point while killing a whole whole whole lot fewer people; slight demerits for Marlon Brando's involvement, though seriously NOBODY EVEN INVITED HIM. Props to the Irish Republican* Army (IRA) for coming painfully close to killing Margaret Thatcher; fairly serious demerits for killing, uh, a whole lot of civilians, wrongly suspected informants, and even rightly suspected informants. Plus Gerry Adams is involved, the base lying shitheel. Anyway! Come learn with us!

*not that kind of Republican

Erin’s review of Gaywyck
https://matsentertainment.com/librarian-wanted-no-librarians-need-apply/

There's something for everyone in this match: Grave robbery, astonishing-yet-unsurprising disrespect for Native Americans, Paul Walker, Pacey, baffling tests designed to screw marginalized people into dying in Vietnam, "wars" consisting of bombing unoccupied buildings, decades of hiding, and a whole lot of Bad Ideas From White Guys in Their Early 20s. And when the dust settles, we get to join one of these clubs ... oh ... oh god no. It's Yale's own non-frat frat Skull and Bones vs. the homegrown, kinda half-assed '60s domestic terror frat The Weather Underground! Boom!