Reflecting Day: Ghana Traxx Reduxx

Everyone should’ve received their Hot Dog Appreciator packages by now, so it’s time to reflect on that! The Hot Dog Appreciator is our newest tier, and most comically understated. It’s like calling Kanye West a Booty Appreciator. Dude would chase booty right off a cliff, Bugs Bunny-style, much like our Hot Dog Appreciators foolishly chase the Hot Dog every day. They have a special chatroom just to privately discuss each column over snifters of brandy, away from the rabble. They have another exclusive channel just for behind the scenes content - private conversations between the people who run the site, jokes cut from articles, the secret 102nd thing in every Mario Corelli book, you get it.

Twice a year, they get a limited run T-shirt and a tasteful baggie of miscellaneous cursed artifacts. Don’t tell the post office! Those sons of bitches are so tight-assed about shipping cursed goods. So a mailman or ten can’t stop growing mustaches all over their body - this is America, that’s the price of freedom!

Hey, remember my last Reflecting Day when we talked about the outsized role Traxx has played on the site, and then I took a fun, unrelated trip into Ghanaian Movie Posters? Like this one, featuring Peter Weller mitten-golfing a lollipopasaurus?

Well, turns out it wasn’t ‘unrelated’ at all. You can’t trust the Hot Dog. Nothing here is what it seems! Just like the warning the post office wants me to put on all my outgoing packages!

Meet Ghana Traxx:

Somewhere walking this earth, there are 60 human beings who own a Ghana poster T-shirt of Traxx, and if they ask you for a night with your spouse, you have to give it to them. That’s the law!

If you can tear your eyes away from Ghana Traxx’s Frankenstein boots, Sloth face, and flaccid revolver, you may notice an assortment of cursed artifacts strewn about.

-There’s a SCARDY CAT pog, because the Yugoslavian slave laborers that hand-drew pogs didn’t get extra goulash for spellchecking.

-There’s a Monster Trio pog, of non-specific monsters, for fans of non-specific monsters!

-There’s a large photo card of the least enjoyed Backstreet Boy!

-A trading card from the movie Bingo! - a film entirely about murdering dogs - where a man and a woman both enjoy a foot.

-There’s a Big Air Club BMX card, and even a trading card for a cool dinosaur! Wait, look closer: I’m sorry, that’s a trading card for an animatronic dinosaur.

WAIT, look closer! I’m sorry, that’s a trading card commemorating the truck that moves the animatronic dinosaur around. Kids love that! Collect them all!

Listen, I went…

I went a little insane putting these packages together. This devoured a huge chunk of my life that I will never get back, so that’s what this Reflecting Day is about. It helps me, to pretend like it was just for work.

Here are all the trading cards I bought for these packages.

This officially constitutes a problem. When this many unopened trading card packages get together, the group is referred to as a problem. This is a problem of trading cards.

Let’s go through some of the highlights!

Holy shit, very first card from the very first pack and it’s a mint Bryan Adams!

Somewhere in this pile is a Kevin Costner card waiting to be found, and I’m going to make them kiss.

Next I found a George H.W. Bush card. The president whom the term ‘Wimp Factor’ was coined for, commemorated by card forever!

You won’t believe me, why would you fucking believe me when I tell you this? The very next card was a handsome photo of smiling Saddam Hussein. You don’t believe that! You’re right not to!

One of the packs was just for equestrians! No no, not pretty horsies - the people who ride horses. No, not professional jockeys! It was a full pack of trading cards featuring amateur horse enthusiasts!

WHY WOULD YOU BELIEVE ME.

You know what? I’m going to have to earn your trust. I see that now. Let’s actually open a pack. I did this a few times a day, every day for a week in Untubed Sausage -- the Hot Dog Appreciator private channel.

Once again, you’re not going to believe me when I tell you the next pack was...

The official trading cards of long distance dogsled racing! Like children loved! In 1992!

Feast your eyes on the 1992 Iditarod Rookie of the Year, whose name did not warrant front-of-card space.

The cards weren’t just for alcoholic hermits and their only family (dogs, Molson’s). They were mostly that, sure, but every once in a while you’d get something loosely Iditarod related, like “the sled” or “snow.”

You know I’m going to hit you with those Iditarod pros though. You’ve always known that, right?

We lucked out opening this pack - a two-fer! Two men! One pair of glasses!

Holy shit, I know I keep saying you won’t believe me, but you really won’t believe me.

I opened one pack of Iditarod racing cards and it fucking included Raymie Redington!

I’m going straight down to the comic book shop to exchange this for a “what?” and some disbelieving laughter.

There were also pogs in these packages. Haha, I bought bulk loose pogs!

That’s actually what I searched for to find them.

“Bulk loose pogs” somehow netted me exactly what I wanted: gallon ziploc bags full of the ‘90s mistakes.

Hey look it’s Andre Agassi, a guy whose height of popularity I definitely lived through and still barely remember! He had something to do with cameras? Here he is grimacing at something, not pictured. There is no text, not on the front or back of this pog. It’s as if to say, “this is enough. You have no further questions.”

Here’s...

Some pogs do have print on the back, and most at least have print on the front explaining what the fuck you’re looking at. Not Andre Agassi and his best friend, Poorly Rendered Skeleton Doing Finger-Guns At Loose Skulls. Your imagination will fill in the blanks, children. What adventures could Tennis’ bad boy and a fun-loving skeleton have? Erotic ones? I can’t not picture erotic ones!

I took back every single negative thing I ever said about pogs after I found...

A pog for a specific hot air balloon as though you, a child, remember hot air balloons by their personalities. Like it’s your favorite character in an ensemble cartoon! Ocean Fantasy Pilot Howard Steele is almost certainly dead by now, from age if not from sexual ballooning accident. He loved that balloontang. That’s his term, not mine!

He was a man of many faults, and one god damn hell of a virtue: He could balloon like a majestic, fat eagle. May he live on forever. In pog form.

If you want one of these packages… eat shit! They’re not available!

But if you want one of those sweet Ghana Traxx shirts you can actually eat shit!

Hahaha!

You can’t have one. Only the Hot Dog Appreciators could get them, and only this one time. They’ll never be reissued, they’ll never be sold. You can sign up for the Hot dog Appreciator tier to get the next one, but you’ll still live with this regret forever.

Just like Ocean Fantasy Pilot Howard Steele, who wishes he’d painted clothes on that diver before the pog artists granted him immortality.