Willy Wanker and the Great Glasgow Grift - Part I
Oompa, Loompa, Doompity Doo, I've got a dire warning for you.
When it comes to apologies, I tend to err on the side of giving the benefit of the doubt. Call me a softie, call me a bleeding heart, call me whatever you’d like, but, for whatever reason, it’s usually how I approach most matters. We all, at some time or another, have unwittingly bumbled our way into a knee-deep puddle of shit. It happens. It’s part of the human condition. And, when it does happen, I think we all hope to be spared a modicum of grace by those we unintentionally wronged, and often, an apology and a conscious attempt at altering our behavior going forward will likely mend bridges under which the water can flow, and bygones can be settled definitively as bygones.
There’s also something to be said for the old adage of, Do not ascribe malice to that which can be attributed to stupidity. There’s a lot of wisdom in that. Often times, when you are on the receiving end of a sleight, it stemmed from ineptitude rather than a true and dedicated attempt to cause pain. Not always, obviously - just often. Most people are not scheming to pull one over on you. You should be aware that most people does not include everyone. Bad actors are out there. But, perhaps naively, I tend to believe that they’re in the extreme minority.
As a previous partner of mine once told me - People don’t think about you as much as you think they do. Again, pretty solid advice (and, in classic human fashion, advice she desperately needed to heed herself and was completely unable to). We like to think that we’re more important that we are, but we’re behoove to remember that the lives of others do not come to a stop once their interactions with us end. In our current media-saturated, if not media-poisoned landscape, it’s easy for us to fall into a mode of thinking in which we are the main characters of our own little sitcom series, and everything everyone else does, in some way, pertains to us. I used to have a roommate in my college years who thought this way. Every time I was upset, or dejected, or just generally in a visibly bad state of mind (which was quite often, at the time), he was always, always, always convinced that it was due to something he did. Which, I mean, yeah, sometimes it was, because that fucker never washed his dishes and would be up all hours of the night, howling with laughter like an invalid while he watched the worst YouTube videos you’d ever watch in your life as I was trying to sleep on the other side of a wall with only slightly more structural integrity than rice paper. However, his questionable quality as someone to share a living space with amounted to little more than a fraction of a fraction of the other compounding issues I was facing at the time. Yet, he seemed to be wholly incapable of grasping the fact that, again, his presence in my life constituted a minute portion of my greater lived experience, and attributed all of my ills to himself. He was, to the core, a raging narcissist. Somehow, something he did was always at the root of my troubles, and he always wanted me to know how sorry he was about that.
This person in particular was someone who I learned to not give the benefit of the doubt. While I don’t think he acted out of malice when he left his dishes to molder in the sink or his soaking wet clothes in the laundry machine for days on end, he certainly never took my requests for him to change his inconvenient behavior into account, and continued to do as he always did in spite of repeated promises to stop being a shit roommate. That’s not malice - just apathy. But, that being said, when he would apologize, or swear up and down that he’d start doing basic apartment maintenance to keep the place presentable, I’d learned that they were all hollow words and baseless platitudes that would never come to fruition.
It may sound trivial, and, in the grand scheme of things, it was, but these actions of his still came with consequences. Because he lived like an animal, once our lease was up, I was quick to move elsewhere, which left him rushing to find a new roommate - which, naturally, he put off until the last minute - which resulted in him moving into a rather sketchy apartment complex with long-time friend of his in an arrangement that I heard a lot of whinging about afterwards. He was still a tertiary member of my social circle, so I got to hear him complain about his new digs in various group chats in the following months, up to and including instances where his neighbors were handling a loaded gun and fired a bullet through their wall, a bed bug infestation that came from the unit beneath theirs, and, the bane of all low-rent apartment complexes, the perpetual stench of marijuana lingering across the ground in a malignant haze of stank, dead dreams, and crippled ambition.
Needless to say, very few tears were shed on my end.
This is all to say that the benefit of the doubt is something that should only be given to someone who has a solid track record of making up for previous transgressions. Similarly, the bit about mistaking incompetence for malice should only be reserved for those you either know well, or don’t know at all. It is not an assumption you should make lightly when it comes to someone who’s a repeat offender. I see that adage applied often to the government. Lots of boomercons I’m familiar with will often say that the government is full of idiots, and the reason we’re facing the panoply of issues tearing our country apart at the seams stem from stupidity rather than ill intentions. They’re half-right - the American government is staffed from top to bottom by half-wits that should never even be allowed to look an elected official, let alone be one. But said half-wits also demonstrably loathe the lay people that are, ostensibly, their charges and constituents. They routinely say as much. Even when they don’t, their actions speak volumes above what their mealy-mouthed, double-speak teleprompter gum-flapping ever could.
If someone bumps into you and knocks you down once, it’s reasonable to assume that they didn’t intend to do it. However, if someone continually knocks against you when you brush shoulders, and every time they pass by you end up with your ass on the ground… how many times are they going to lay you out before you cue into the fact that they’re doing it on purpose? Even if they say they’re sorry, yet it keeps happening, again and again - are they really?
I’m sure you heard about what’s now been dubbed The Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience. The last weekend of February, it seemed to be all the internet wanted to talk about. And with good reason; it was hilarious. It was certainly the topic du jour of most group chats I’m still in. I must admit, I, being something of a fan of internet trash fires, was enraptured.
Officially, the event was called Willy’s Chocolate Experience. Notice the name Wonka is not to be seen. You see, it claimed to be inspired by the Roald Dahl’s seminal children’s nightmare fuel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But that whole inspired bit was conveniently contained to the subtext. It was an unlicensed event, completely divorced from anything officially related to Dahl’s Wonka books, the movies, or any other piece of media related to the estate in anyway. In effect - it was a bootleg. And while this should have been obvious with even a quick second glance to anyone taking a look at the promotional material… well, let’s just say the organizers - or organizer, more appropriately - didn’t not say that it was technically not exactly official Wonka material. But they certainly didn’t go out of their way to make that apparent, either. Y’see, they just said Willy and Chocolate and, given that pretty much everyone in the Anglosphere has been conditioned to associate the word Wonka with those two words, a lot of people just assumed that it did, indeed, have something to do with the infamous fictional chocolatier and child abuser in some capacity.
Which… I guess it didn’t not have to do with Willy Wonka? But - well, we’ll get to it.
Really, for anyone who might have been sincerely interested in the event, that alone should have been a dead give-away that the event was… well, not entirely what it was being billed as. And, make no mistake - it was being billed as something. Through the sinister sorcery of targeted advertisement, the event was heavily marketed across social media to locals of the Glasgow area, depicting lavish, dream-like fantasy-scapes made of colorful candies and confections. For example, here’s a screencap taken from the event’s now defunct website1.
It’s beautiful, in the worst way. The plain, generic font. Poorly aligned text. The random TM and exclamation point just… hanging out there in the middle. The cheap, half-assed logo, with enough space between the apostrophe and the letter S to sail a Gerald Ford-class carrier in between with room to spare. Though the art is clearly, unmistakably AI Generated, this is a level of incompetence that is obliquely and uniquely human.
For the record, AI Generated is a term I’m hesitant to use, since it’s a misnomer in and of itself and there’s not much intelligent to it and I feel like perpetuating the phrase only buys more into the AI-Grift currently saturating the media landscape, but, for the sake of brevity, we’ll just go with it for now. Just keep in mind that much of what you hear and see being touted as Artificial Intelligence is just a marketing buzzword for Machine Learning that snake oil salesmen are using to make the technology sound a lot more impressive than it really is. We’ll touch on that a bit later, though.
Here’s another example of AI “Art” being used to advertise the event.
Again, I’m not sure how you’d mistake this for being anything but the mad confabulations of a fundamentally inhuman mind. Perhaps at fifty feet, it looks impressive, but the closer one looks, the more jarringly alien and unnerving it all becomes. Just take a second. Really study the finer details. Pretty much everything is wrong. Details meld into one another. Nothing really looks finished. Dream-like and surreal come to mind, but, more than anything, it looks like a nightmare. Just look at the, er… well, it kinda looks like a rabbit. From Hell.
Ain’t it cute? Don’t you just wanna reduce it to a fine, scarlet mist with an automatic shotgun? Everything about this looks less whimsical and magical and more demonic, to me.
Again, I really can’t fathom how anyone thought this event was going to be anything other than a sham. I doubt even a collection of the best and brightest Imagineers that Disney ever had in their employ could have concocted an attraction that could come even remotely close to resembling a fraction of what was depicted in these images. The only way you’d ever see any of that is if you consumed a few too many goofy shrooms, or took Dante’s tour of Hell.
Yet, whether it be thoughtless error or plain stupidity, people fell for it. Perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising - we still have people out there falling for the tried-and-true Nigerian Prince financial racket, and there’s a new YouTube series called Catfished picking up the concept of the original MTV series to validate the saying that a sucker is born every minute. Seriously, I used to fucking binge the original Catfish with Nev Schulman and Max Joseph. I even went out of my way to meet Schulman at a book signing. It’s an extremely guilty pleasure. I’ve watched every episode, some multiple times. And I can say with the utmost confidence that there are individuals being scammed on this new Catfished series that make the victims from the original series look like paragons of wisdom. Veritable enlightened beings, if you will. I just watched an episode where there was a woman who was catfished not once… not twice… not three times… not even four! But five. Fucking. Times. By people pretending to be celebrities.
How these people are able to walk and talk at the same time without overclocking their walnut-sized brains and stroking out is beyond me. Truly, the human capacity for stupidity is as boundless as the stars.
The point is - there’s a lot of gullible people out there. And we should all be glad the fair folk dialed back their antics, because, my God, they would be doing absolute gangbusters tricking idiots into eternal servitude in Fairy-Hell. They’d be raking in people hand over fist at this point. There’d be so many morons being whisked away for a lifetime of grinding servitude in the fair folks courts they’d probably have to start shipping some of them back.
Now, all that being said, the impossible-to-recreate AI imagery, the lack of any pictures of what the event would actually look like, and a dearth of concrete details of anything aside from a fantastic candy journey really should have raised some red flags.
Here’s another ad that popped up in the Facebook feeds of those in Scotland’s second largest city.
Yes - this was an actual advertisement for the event. Yes - people really, apparently, fucking fell for it. And, if you don’t see anything wrong with it… give it another look. A good look. Try to read the text. See anything… amiss?
And, if you did miss it… well, we all make mistakes.
Some of us more than others.
Also, that might be a sign that it’s time for you to get your eyes checked.
Tickets continued to sell, and, at thirty-one pounds per head - roughly $40 something dollars and some change, in Biden Bucks - they weren’t exactly what I’d call cheap. Especially if you were taking a family, which, naturally, the event was supposedly tailored to meet.
Fortunately, some people who saw these ads knew them for what they were. If the scads of people who fell for this scam at first blush are proof of natural selection, than these would be the specimens that survive to adulthood and, hopefully, breed a population more resilient to the siren song of colorful AI-generated candy hell-scapes. These people, I think, would be able to spot the tells of a fairy’s glamour, and avoid being whisked away to serve as some demented fae monarch’s personal torture-slave/chew toy. And, much like those that once told cautionary tales of the fair folk, warning others to not play games with them, nor attempt to curry their favor, or acknowledge them in any way, keen-eyed individuals were discussing what an open and obvious scam the entire thing was and warning them to stay away.
Yet, alas - these wise words went unheeded.
On February 24th, 2024, Willy’s Chocolate Experience was opened to the public. And the results… well, they need to be seen to be believed… so… hold your breath.
Make a wish.
Count to three.
In a world of bitter disappointment.
Take a look, and you’ll see,
Into pure human desperation…
If you want to view negligence,
Simply look around and view it…
If you think of trying, screw it…
Want to run a grift?
There’s nothing…
To it…
So, uh… yeah. A candy-colored fantasy world, this was very much not. The closest anyone was going to get to what was promised was from these sheets hung on the wall, which were printed with the AI-Generated imagery from the marketing material and haphazardly hung at random intervals on bare sheetrock.
I don’t know about you, but I can practically feel the joy and whimsy simply radiating off the screen.
Oh, but don’t you worry, any. If this doesn’t just scream Wonka-esque Fun to you, rest assured, there were plenty of sweet treats available on offer for the young ones. You see, with purchase of admission, every child was entitled to two (2) jelly beans and a paper dixie cup’s worth of lemonade. Which they ran out of. But! These generous refreshments were served by only the most jolly and amiable of magical humanoids of diminutive size.
Oh, no, not Oompa Loompas - those are copyrighted. No, at Willy’s Chocolate Experience, you had the chance to meet the rare, elusive, and ever-so-friendly… Wonkidoodles.
Why, I feel so excited, my feet are leaving the floor, as if I just downed a bottle of fizzy lifting soda with my racist grandpa!
Now, before I want to go any further, I want to make it explicitly clear that the poor woman in that photo above, who became an overnight sensation known as the Meth Lab Oompa Loompa, is absolutely in no way anything other than a victim of this sham, just like everyone who attended. Even though she’s become the de facto face of what she’s since rightly described as a trash fire, there were, indeed, other Wonkidoodles.
The woman in question’s name is Kirsty Paterson, a 29 year old local Glasgow actress and part-time yoga instructor, who was one of the actresses given the once-in-a-lifetime privilege to portray a Wonkidoodle. Being promised a per diem pay of five hundred pounds ($636.19 in Hamburger money), I don’t blame her or anyone else involved for taking the job. A cool $1,000 dollars for twodays of standing there dressed like an idiot and handing out candy to kids? Shit, I’d do it, too.
Unfortunately for Paterson and her Wonkidoodle compatriots, not only were they not provided with a script with which to help facilitate guest interaction, but they weren’t even given their costumes until the morning of, and were made to change in the bathrooms. Despite the chaos, attendees have said that she was nothing if not cordial and exceptionally friendly, doing her best to keep the peace as the entire thing went down in shambles around her, and, ultimately, being the one to personally confront the organizer.
We’ll get to him.
Even though the infamous meth lab photo is just about the only one of her you’ll find, rest assured, buried in a dozen different Glasgow stay-at-home mom’s Facebook feeds, there are others in which she can be seen trying to maintain an air of professionalism despite the disaster going on around her and throngs of angry guests demanding refunds, and for that, she should be commended.
When this whole thing went down, this woman was getting a lot of shit, and a lot of people were clowning on her, so, I just want to make it crystal clear that she was doing the best with the very limited resources she had on hand.
Another one of the depressed Oompa Loompa-knock offs was played by Jenny Fogarty. Her photo didn’t go quite as viral as Patersons, but, well… she caught the eye of the internet public.
One can only speculate why.
She claims that, after the disastrous forty-five minute quote-unquote performances, she and the other staff were instructed to abandon the script and simply let the guests visit the wondrous, dream-like vistas and attractions of the candy laboratory (not factory) that were presented to them. All in all, she guessed that walking from one end of the warehouse to the other took a grand total of two minutes.
However, for all their troubles, the women seem to be taking the aftermath in stride.
They’ve both done a number of interviews since and seems to be parlaying their fifteen minutes of viral fame into a rounds on the media circuit, which, for aspiring actresses, is more of a boon than a quick thousand bucks could ever be. And, hey. Good for them. Get that bag, girls. After what they went through, you deserve it.
Another victim of circumstance was one Paul Connell, a thirty-one year stand-up comedian and occasional actor from Glasgow.
Again, you can see the event center (read: warehouse) bathroom they made him change into his Dollar Store cosplay, here. Connell was tapped to play the illustrious Willy Wonka himself.
Wait. No. Sorry - not Willy Wonka. He’s copyrighted. No, Connell was to play Willy McDuff, of, er… well, his company was never given a proper name. We’ll just say it was McDuff’s Miserable Mockery. How about that?
Also, I love what Connell had to say about his casting.
Well, Connell was supposed to the true entertainment of the event, and lead guests through the whimsical wonderland of McDuff’s Miserable Mockery. How? Well, that question was as much a mystery to Connell as it was to the onlookers. When Connell arrived for the supposed dress rehearsal, which, like any fine production, was only scheduled for the night before, he and the other actors arrived to find the venue sparsely decorated with cheap props. The organizer assured him that the ‘team’ would be working through the night to finish the set, which Connell rightly had his doubts about. Sure enough, when he arrived the next day, the venue - which, I should add, was a grungy warehouse that had been converted to an event space - was in the exact same state it had been in the night before.
Like the Oomp- shit. Sorry. Wonkidoodles, Connell was only given his costume the day of, and, unlike his poor contemporaries all slathered in orange grease paint and shitty green wigs, he was given a script. But, um… well, let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a script he could follow.
The Daily Mail managed to get a copy and published the entire thing, which I’d highly recommend you peruse if you’re in need of a good laugh. The script even included directions for the audience, which I can only assume was added because no one ever uploaded a copy of Screenwriting 101 to ChatGPT’s data bank. A number of colorful sets and exorbitant props are described throughout, but, as you can see from the pictures above, basically nothing that Connell was supposed to interact with actually there. He quotes a specific part where he was supposed to suck up a baddie with a vacuum a la Luigi’s Mansion. When he asked how, exactly, such a thing would work, he was told to improvise. When he asked how, exactly, he was even supposed to improvise without a vacuum prop, he was given the classic, tried and true refrain of infamous YouTube degenerate, OnlyUseMeBlade - Figure it out, dude.
Connell was promised fifteen minute breaks in between each forty-five minute performance, but ended up working for three hours straight, with the responsibility of keeping the increasingly irate guests in order - an unenviable task, to be certain.
Connell constantly refers to the script as gibberish. Perhaps his copy of the script was more incoherent, but reading what the Daily Mail leaked, I can’t say it is completely incomprehensible. It might as well be gibberish, sure, but it’s legible. That doesn’t mean it’s good. It reads like thoughtless pablum about wonder and imagination that’s so bereft of either that it comes off as miserably, bitterly cynical in the way that only something generated by a machine could be. And, yes - the script was confirmed to be AI-generated.
Also, again - Connell’s response to this is hilarious.
He also had this to say, pertaining to the lack of resources he was given to work with.
When asked what his favorite part of the script, Connell brings us to my, and many other observer’s, favorite part, too.
It brings us to the villain of the piece… the Unknown.
The big part, the part that I really liked because it is actual, nonsensical gibberish was, "There is a man. We do not know his name. We know him only as the Unknown. The Unknown is an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls."
I don’t know about you, but that is just… I dunno. I can’t really articulate why, but something about the idea of an generative text program spitting out a fucking script for a half-assed, bootleg Willy Wonka knock-off and the best it can come up with for an antagonist is a fucking nameless chocolate maker that lives in the walls. I’m smiling just thinking about it.
And, if you think that’s funny, thankfully, one visitor recorded footage of the unnerving, frightening, and deeply disturbing entrance of this mysterious and ghoulish wall-dwelling chocolatier… and Connell’s admirable but flagging attempt to act as if he doesn’t want to walk off the set and go hit the nearest pub.
The first time I saw this, I almost cried laughing. I can’t find it now, but there’s a second video taken from another angle, which includes the part where some of the children start screaming and crying, because apparently this scared the piss out of them. Which, er - I kinda get.
This would probably freak me out if I was five years old, because this is exactly the kind of shit that five year olds are deathly afraid of. I would not like to see a crackhead impersonating Guns and Roses’s Sting crawling around on the ground at my level.
This character has come close to surpassing Paterson’s Wonkidoodle as the most iconic and meme-worthy figure of the entire ordeal. He has his own article on the Villains Wiki, now, which I absolutely adore.
And, yes - the internet has been having a field day with this one.
I usually don’t like to post so many images in quick succession, but, I mean - I can’t not share this stuff. People have gone absolutely hog wild on this thing. There have been jokes and memes about the event that defy all expectation and logic. Hell, I don’t even watch ASMR videos, and, personally, I think they’re usually silly as Hell, but I sat my white ass down and watched this one.
The internet doing what it does best and making jokes out of this clown-show is half the fun.
That one in particular is a two-fer. The deepness in this photo - that’s something that could only be said about that picture is the same kind of person who’d make this post.
These people wouldn’t know what art is if it came up from behind and beat them over the head with a folded easel. Put a pin in that - it’ll be important later.
Interestingly, about five or six people have made the claim that they were the actor behind the Unknown - probably because the mask makes it so that their identity, unlike the others, is not readily apparent. However, a sixteen year old Glaswegian identifying herself as Felicia Dawkins came forward.
Not only was she the only person among the small crowd of Unknown-wannabe’s that had the right skin-tone and Sting-hair to match, but she also had the receipts. Here’s her on set the morning of the event.
According to an interview she gave with the BBC, this was her first professional acting gig. One could do worse, I suppose. At least she got noticed.
It’s worth noting that despite this technically being a professional job, and all the actors signed contracts that promised them the aforementioned wage of five hundred pounds per day, I doubt you’ll be all that surprised to hear that, so far as I’ve heard, none of them have received all of the promised money. Both Fogarty and Paterson have claimed that they only received half of the day’s wage they are contractually entitled to. If anything’s surprising about that, it’s that they got anything.
Again, I have to reference Connell’s interview. The guy must actually be a pretty decent comedian, because I was smiling as I read the whole thing.
The parents were getting angry. The kids were crying. I mean, you don't know heartbreak until you've seen a small girl dressed as an Oompa Loompa crying and holding one jelly bean. That might be the saddest image I've ever seen in my life. That's what I see when I close my eyes at night.
At some point, Connell was finally able to sneak off and grab a quick bite to eat. After sitting in his car and pondering where exactly his life had gone so wrong, he once again miserably donned his McDuff hat to find the venue in chaos.
The organizer of the event had been cornered by a mob of irate customers demanding refunds. I imagine there were more than a few incensed children probably crying out for blood to flow like sour cherry syrup, too.
When Connell approached the other actors, they told him that the event had been cancelled. No one was entirely sure what to do, so, they all agreed to do the logical thing, given the situation - head down to the pub and slam back a couple pints. I like where these people’s heads were at. Also, please, take a moment to imagine a guy in a cheap Willy Wonka cosplay and two miserable looking minxy Oompa Loompas sauntering into a pub, sitting in a dark corner, and trying to find answers to the question of how did it come to this at the bottom of a glass of something stiff. Now that is a scene I wish we had pictures of.
Connell and the others did return to the venue, after a bit. Despite the event being cancelled, I suppose they wanted to see if they, too, could find the organizer, and shake him down for the money he owed them. Apparently, they returned to a warzone. Several police cars were parked outside the warehouse. As the motley troupe of actors drowned their sorrows in ale, customers who had booked tickets for later in the day had continued to pour in at pace to find the event that most of them had parted with a decent chunk of money was unexpectedly and inexplicably canceled, with no one but the organizer and one other lackey to manage them. Not only did the guests want refunds - many of them had driven hours for the event, or taken the train into town from other cities, and demanded that their travel expenses be reimbursed on top of the ticket to the event. Needless to say, no one liked what they saw. Connell describes the scene thusly:
I think the threat of violence had become quite high. How no one was hurt is unbelievable.
All in all, what was supposed to be a weekend-long event only managed to limp along for two, maybe three hours before the whole thing necessitated police intervention. This is Scotland, after all. The Scots are not known to be patient people. Someone was probably five seconds away from whipping out a claymore.
I will say, though - the event should get credit where credit is due. It really, truly did capture the essence of the timeless story of Willy Wonka. Think about it; that story is also about a bunch of kids who are promised a once-in-a-lifetime event of spectacular proportions with a strange and eccentric man who all end up having a very bad time and leave very disappointed. So, points for thematic accuracy, there.
Even though both the actors and guests left the steaming train-wreck of an immersive experience dejected and upset the day of, I think a bit of time and internet infamy has lifted their spirits some. As you can see, Connell, Paterson, Dawkins, and others involved with the event are having a laugh about it and reveling in the exposure. They all seem to be having fun with it. The guests, too, can look back and proudly say that they were among an elite and exclusive few who actually got to see Willy’s Chocolate Experience first hand.
There’s even been a spot of good to come out of the ordeal. Mistakes into miracles, and all that. Felecia Dawkins now iconic turn as The Unknown has landed her an actual job with a reputable company, where she will apparently reprise her breath-taking performance in The London Dungeon attraction. Connell and the other actors involved with the fiasco have said that they’re working on a follow-up show of their own, personally reaching out to customers to organize it for the children who came and wept bitter tears of despair over their single jellybean. Most of the props were auctioned off, and the proceeds donated to local charities. The hastily scrawled sign announcing the cancellation of the event alone fetched a handsome sum of eight hundred and fifty pounds that went to a children’s hospital. Here’s Paterson, posing with the souvenir.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, a year from now, Paterson, Connell, and Dawkins team up to do a reunion of sorts. McDuff’s Revisited, if you will. If I were them, I’d certainly be cooking up t-shirts that read, I WENT TO THE GLASGOW WILLY WONKA EXPERIENCE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT. Hell, I’d buy one.
You know who isn’t having fun in the aftermath of McDuff’s Magical Mishap?
Billy Coull.
When I spoke of the organizer in the above passages, this is who I was talking about. Above is the face of the mad genius behind Willy’s Chocolate Experience. He’s recently gone on tour, breaking down into tears as he explains how his life has been ruined in the aftermath, and how truly, genuinely sorry he is for all the trouble he caused.
And, yeah. You know what? I think Billy Coull is sorry.
I think he’s sorry that he got caught.
As it turns out, Coull has a very long and very questionable business endeavors and behavior that, if you study, reveals a very telling pattern. Remember I said that the benefit of the doubt should only be reserved for those who are not repeat offenders? Well, if you follow that credo, you’ll find that Coull is in a position to collect exceedingly limited sympathy.
But, we’ll have to talk about the story behind the enigmatic wordsmith - the Willy Wanker of the Great Glasgow Grift - next time.
An archived copy can be found here, if you’re curious.
Man, I just hope those poor kids will one day recover from the trauma of missing out on such vital childhood experiences as catgacating and listening to cartchy tuns.
On the Rainfurrest scale of event disasters, I'd rate this a solid 5. Right below 2014 Dashcon, which swindled several thousand dollars from people 'after' it was an obvious failure.
A momentous occasion, but no lives endangered, bank accounts emptied, or property damaged. It does get points for scaring the bejeebies out of the kids.