Easter Promises
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 31
HOLIDAY WEEKEND DEP'T.
TODAY IS GOOD Friday for all who believe, or observe, or are simply happy to enjoy a day off! Indignity moved this week's schedule up, so the award-winning MR WRONG column and the latest chapter of the soon-to-be-award-winning THE STAIRS serialized novel are here for you In Case You Don't Know what ICYMI means.
Today, though, we present a little extra regurged Content by Joe from the vast back catalog of the Hmm-Daily-Hmm-Weekly-Populaverse. We hope you all have a Good—no wait, make that Great—holiday weekend!
Easter Means THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
WHEN I WAS a kid in Catholic school (nothing happened) there were four TV channels, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the Public Television channel. I watched teevee from the moment I opened my eyes to Popeye cartoons and the Three Stooges in the morning until "sign-off," when stations would play the national anthem and then end their broadcast Day by cutting to static: "Now, WTEN, Channel 10, ends its Broadcast Day"—PTSHHHHHHHHHH.
If something even remotely interesting to my tiny TV-conditioned brain was going to be on television, I knew about it, because every Saturday I pored over the television listings for the week, which were printed in the Schenectady Gazette's weekly TV Section supplement, along with the Tiny Gazette, featuring the gentle adventures of Tiny Turtle, a proto-ZIGGY for kids.
When I say proto-ZIGGY, I don't just mean the appearance of the character, I mean that the Tiny Gazette was sort of an exercise in lowkey depression for children. Look at this shit:
Fun! Anyway, I didn't spend a lot of time on the downer Tiny Gazette, I was busy every Saturday morning plopped down on the floor in front of the television carefully absorbing the week's viewing information. Any given week, I could tell you the entire primetime schedule, 7-10 p.m., across all three networks.
Holidays were huge for me in terms of novel TV content. Christmas meant the Grinch, Peanuts, and Rudolph; Halloween was Peanuts again, with the Great Pumpkin; and Easter meant The Ten Commandments.
Yes, I know, The Ten Commandments has nothing to do with Jesus the Christ, it's all about Moses and the Israelites fleeing bondage in Egypt, but when you're eight years old and Passover and Easter are around the same time, The Ten Commandments becomes an Easter classic.
It didn't help that my Roman Catholic school education taught me that Judaism was a subset of Catholicism, like a step toward the ultimate religion. We would do a thing around Passover with grape juice and crackers, and it mapped perfectly with Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), which was usually on ABC on a weekend night around Easter.
Why is this night different? Because The Ten Commandments is on! My childhood friend John and I would get on the telephone, the landline, and just leave the connection open all night as we watched the movie, which was like three-plus hours long, and talk about it. Mostly we goofed on Edward G. Robinson, because he was in so many of the old black-and-white gangster flicks that ran on TV. "We will make a golden calf, see? Myeaahh, we will worship a new god of gold, see?"
The only other Easter movie was this boring flick called King of Kings (coincidentally, a remake of a Cecil B. DeMille movie), starring Jeffrey Hunter, who was the original captain in Star Trek, and who died in a car accident in 1969, because you don't go and make a movie being Jesus and not get killed for it, man. The actors in educational Jesus movies we watched in Catholic school never turned their face toward the camera, I'm not kidding. You don't fuck with the Jesus, man.
But King of Kings was a snoozefest compared to The Ten Commandments, man, none of this talk-talk-talk peacenik Jesus dude, it was Old Testament God! Blood on the lintel! A baldheaded Pharaoh! Plagues! Action!
The Ten Commandments airs 7 p.m. ET on Saturday, April 4, 2026 (consult your local listings) on ABC television, the kind you can get for free with an antenna, but also it's on cable, or you can watch it on streaming, but it'll cost you.
Today can also be Food Friday! This was a Halloween candy adventure, but Easter candy is probably already on sale, so anything is possible!
SANDWICH RECIPE DEP’T.
Building Our Discount Halloween Candy Sandwich, 2023 Edition
LAST TIME, AS we explored the frontiers of the seasonal candy experience, we showed you how to craft a sandwich that is 100 percent pure candy. This year, we went a little more traditional and used graham crackers as the substrate or platform or whatever it’s called in the Sandwich Industry.
All candy ingredients were purchased at the grocery store on Nov. 1, at substantial savings. We used chocolate or chocolate-adjacent candy, no Skittles or Dum-Dums or Starbursts.
In a departure from our previous in-between-two-candy-bars method, we assembled graham cracker bases and then melted the mini chocolate candy bars a little in a 325-degree oven for about five minutes so we could implant other pieces of candy without having them fall off.
Ingedients:
Peanut Ghoul’s Mix M&M’s
Peanut Butter Ghoul’s Mix M&M’s
Campfire Smores M&M’s
Charleston Chew
Snack Size Payday
Chocolatey Payday
Hershey’s with Almonds
Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins
KitKat
Not used:
KitKat Birthday Cake, which we bought on accident. Ugh.
We found “chocolatey” PAYDAY, but it’s not as good as PAYDAY. You don’t get that top hit of salt on your way through the peanuts to the sugar-goop inside.
We used one of those chopper things to get the various candies into a form that would allow for smushing onto the graham crackers.
We think these came out pretty nicely, I mean, they’re made out of candy! The graham crackers make ‘em kinda dry, though, so we are going back to the grocery store for vanilla ice cream to slather inside.
If you decide to prepare and enjoy something resembling these sandwiches, kindly send a picture to us at indignity@indignity.net.
PREVIOUSLY in CANDY THAT’S TOO GOOD FOR TRICK-OR-TREATERS SANDWICH:
If you decide to prepare and enjoy something resembling these sandwiches, kindly send a picture to us at indignity@indignity.net.
JOE MACLEOD
Original post from 2023 (moved from the evil S•BST•CK)
MARKETING DEP'T.
A GENTLE REMINDER that Indignity is best buddies with the FLAMING HYDRA cooperative! We urge you to check out these free samples and then go ahead and join for complete access to scores of writers from all over the planet! Also, they have all sorts of books and things on offer at the FLAMING HYDRA SUPERSTORE.
Thanks for reading INDIGNITY, a general-interest publication for a discerning and self-selected audience. We depend on your support!
