“THE BIRD, THE BLAZER, AND THE BEASTS BELOW: A Thanksgiving Transmission from the Static Circuit”
(Filed from the kitchen at 325 MHz, where the oven timer and the broadcast tower share a heartbeat.)
I. PROLOGUE: THE BIRD IS THE ANTENNA
Every culture has a ritual.
Every ritual has a signal.
Every signal has a noise threshold.
And every so often, on late November afternoons when the temperature drops and the air smells like warm poultry and cold nostalgia, the noise wins.
Which is how we arrive at this year’s Thanksgiving quadruple-feature:
The Daemons (Doctor Who, 1971)
Profit (1996)
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956)
The MST3K Turkey Day Marathon
This is not a lineup.
This is a systems test.
A diagnostic for the American mind and the human machine operating within it.
Four pieces of media from four different eras telling the same secret story:
We are haunted by the structures we build.
We live among systems older and darker than we admit.
And the only escape is honesty—either comedic, corporate, emotional, or cosmic.
So carve the bird, tighten your tie, whisper the incantation, and switch on the experiment.
This is Buzz Drainpipe, reporting live from the faultline.
II. THE DAEMONS: THE UNDERGROUND SERVER ROOM OF THE UNIVERSE
1971, BBC. A vicar who is not a vicar.
A village that is not a village.
A dig that opens something that should never be opened.
The Daemons is about a cozy English surface over a seething, ancient infrastructure—a literal daemon process running under the OS of reality.
It says:
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The universe has subroutines.
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Authority is cosplay.
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The rational world is a thin wallpaper over a mainframe full of pagan code.
Watching it while basting a turkey is a reminder:
Every tradition is built on something older, weirder, and more dangerous.
III. PROFIT (1996): THE SMILING LIE OF THE CORPORATE BIOS
If The Daemons is the occult beneath the pastoral,
Profit is the psychopathy beneath the professional.
Jim Profit is not a villain.
He’s a feature, not a bug.
The living avatar of corporate logic.
He exposes the truth:
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The office is a cult.
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Branding is sorcery.
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HR is a confessional booth without forgiveness.
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Performance reviews are ritual sacrifices in business-casual attire.
Profit is the daemon of capitalism wearing a suit and talking like a guidance counselor.
He shows you the system’s hidden kernel permissions.
He would thrive in 2025.
He knew where we were heading.
IV. THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT: THE GHOST OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
If Profit is the monster born from capitalism,
Tom Rath is the man crushed beneath it.
1956 was not ready for a film about:
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PTSD
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corporate conformity
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the lie of the suburban miracle
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what a man loses when he tries to “fit” the postwar template
Yet this film told it anyway.
It’s the most Sirkian film made by someone not named Douglas Sirk—all the melodrama stripped to muscle and bone.
Instead of dissolves and color palettes, you get:
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a man’s unspoken guilt
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truth as a slow leak
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the cost of small lies accumulating like interest
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the quiet war between duty and sanity
Gray Flannel is not a movie.
It’s an x-ray of the American psyche.
And when paired with Profit, you get the full spectrum of the corporate system:
the man it crushes and the predator it produces.
V. MST3K: THE ONLY HONEST CHURCH IN AMERICA
And then, to keep from sinking…
we arrive at MST3K Turkey Day.
A tradition built on:
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community
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catharsis
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mockery as survival
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finding joy in the mediocre
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ritual watch-parties
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commentary as coping mechanism
MST3K says:
The world is absurd.
We might as well laugh together.
It’s no coincidence the show was forged in the Midwest—
the spiritual home of “I’m fine” culture,
where humor is a pressure valve for unspoken dread.
In the context of this quartet, MST3K is the antidote.
The human patch.
The only sane response to a reality that won’t stop glitching.
VI. THE UNIFIED FIELD THEORY OF THIS THANKSGIVING
What do these four works have in common?
A. They expose hidden systems
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Daemons → occult infrastructure
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Profit → corporate circuitry
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Gray Flannel → emotional bureaucracy
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MST3K → cultural detritus and survival-through-laughter
B. They reveal the cost of pretending everything is fine
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Tom Rath’s silence
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The Master’s disguise
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Profit’s mask
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MST3K’s wry commentary
C. They show that rituals (Thanksgiving included) are coping mechanisms
The turkey is just the interface.
The feast is the firewall.
D. They show that modern life runs on suppressed horror and suppressed humor
And how both are forms of truth.
E. They tell the same myth:
Humanity lives inside machines—cosmic, corporate, emotional, cultural—and must negotiate its autonomy within them.
Together, these four create a Thanksgiving Battery, a circuit of interpretation:
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The Daemons → What lies beneath
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Profit → What lies behind
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Gray Flannel → What lies within
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MST3K → What lies ahead (and how to laugh at it)
You didn’t just pick these at random.
You built a ritual.
A Buzz Drainpipe Thanksgiving Liturgy.
A system audit disguised as entertainment.
VII. EPILOGUE: PASS THE GRAVY, CHECK THE LOGS
So carve the bird.
Hit play on the marathon.
Let Profit smirk, let Tom Rath confess, let the Doctor shout “Jenkins!” and let Crow T. Robot roast the entire century.
Just remember:
**Thanksgiving is the one American holiday that knows it’s a performance,
so the best thing you can do is perform it consciously.**
This has been Buzz Drainpipe,
coming to you live from the liminal space between
the kitchen counter and the cosmos.
End of Transmission.
Begin digestion.
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