#0416 - A Bat Tried To Crawl Into Her Mouth - 08/31/2026

Monday begins with Viktor Wilt staring directly into the abyss of another workweek and discovering that the abyss apparently has a three-day weekend coming up. After spending Saturday at the Idaho Falls Farmers Market collecting donations for the Idaho Food Bank and handing out tickets to the zoo and Museum of Idaho, Viktor somehow makes it through customer appreciation night with the legendary Stiff Richard crew before arriving at the horrifying realization that Sunday evening exists primarily to remind working adults that Monday is coming to kill their happiness. With Peaches out for the week, Viktor briefly entertains the possibility that he might actually accomplish things without someone constantly informing him about every email in existence, but instead immediately starts thinking about video games, bills, chores, cleaning his garage, and the crushing inevitability of adulthood. The morning's first philosophical crisis arrives via the question: if you woke up in the body of the last video game character you played, how screwed would your life be? Viktor was last playing Red Dead Redemption 2 as John Marston, which means his hypothetical new existence involves approximately zero modern plumbing, an aggressively high probability of getting shot, and absolutely no chance of quietly enjoying a three-day weekend. Other people volunteer their doomed gaming incarnations, including characters from Factorio, Stray, Baldur's Gate 3, The Last of Us, and Luigi, proving once again that apparently humanity's preferred Monday morning activity is imagining itself being murdered in fictional universes.

The episode then takes a hard left into UFO territory, because apparently a blurry object in a photograph of the moon is now being presented as “100% proof” of alien life. Viktor examines the alleged evidence and reaches the extremely scientific conclusion of: absolutely not impressed. The photograph contains a mysterious shape in the background, but there is no spacecraft, no little green extraterrestrial waving at the camera, no alien birth certificate, and certainly no glorious 4K footage of the moon being invaded by space people. Viktor wonders why the government's UFO file releases have been so spectacularly boring and suggests that perhaps the truly interesting material will emerge closer to election season, because apparently even extraterrestrials have to compete with political distraction cycles. Before long, the program plunges into an international parade of theft, stupidity, and frozen poultry. Someone steals an entire beer truck containing roughly 50,000 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, prompting PBR to essentially beg the thieves to bring their giant rolling beer vault back and promising not to ask questions. Then things escalate dramatically in Cairo, where an armed gang allegedly performs a highway robbery worthy of the world's most deranged action movie by pulling a pickup truck behind a moving refrigerated truck, climbing onto it, getting into the trailer, and stealing approximately 300 pounds of frozen chicken. The robbery ultimately ends with three alleged gang members dead and three arrested, all apparently because somebody looked at a truck full of chicken and decided this was the hill upon which to build their criminal empire.

Then comes one of the episode's most horrifying wake-up calls: a woman wakes up believing she is having a nightmare involving something fuzzy crawling into her mouth, only to discover that the nightmare is actually a bat attempting to do exactly that. She manages to trap the bat and seeks medical advice, where she is told that waking up in a room with a bat can mean potential rabies exposure because bat bites can be so small they go unnoticed. Suddenly Viktor's own achy Monday morning feels significantly less terrible. At least he woke up tired and sore instead of waking up to discover a winged mammal had apparently chosen his oral cavity as an emergency landing zone. The program continues its tour through the bizarre with scientists allegedly developing a process for turning PET plastic and agricultural waste into protein-rich, vanilla-flavored food components. The process reportedly involves 32 steps and microorganisms breaking down the materials before they can be transformed into something edible. Viktor's response is essentially the same as anyone who has watched a dystopian science-fiction movie: sure, maybe humanity has technically solved a problem, but do we really want to eat cookies made from the conceptual corpse of a water bottle? The possibility that this technology might someday help deal with the Pacific Garbage Patch is acknowledged, but there remains a very important unanswered question: at what point did recycling become dessert?

The weird-news conveyor belt then produces a supposed Bigfoot sighting in New York, complete with photographs that initially appear to show a mysterious creature but, after closer examination, seem to show something far less cryptozoological: an elderly, apparently overweight man skinny-dipping in natural water. Viktor is not convinced that Bigfoot has suddenly evolved into a pale, hairless gentleman taking an aquatic afternoon break. The episode then moves to northern Italy, where tourists were apparently duped into visiting a fake ancient Greek-style amphitheater that had been constructed from scratch and presented as an authentic historical site. Even more astonishingly, the fake attraction accumulated glowing five-star reviews from tourists who apparently emerged from the fabricated archaeological experience convinced they had witnessed one of the coolest places on Earth. Viktor cannot quite understand the scale of the outrage surrounding the scheme, particularly compared with the other catastrophes currently happening on Earth, but he does admit that the whole thing sounds weirdly impressive. Somewhere, an Italian man has apparently discovered that if you build a fake ancient monument, add enough fake history, and convince people to walk through a giant metal door, there is a non-zero chance they will give you five stars on TripAdvisor.

The show's descent into human stupidity continues with a Florida pastor who allegedly got into an argument with an elderly man over parenting and responded to the disagreement by launching an elbow directly into the man's face. Viktor points out the obvious theological contradiction between being a pastor and apparently deciding that “turn the other cheek” means “hit the other guy's cheek with your elbow.” The situation is especially troubling because the victim was over 65 and the resulting charge involved battery against an elderly person. Viktor emphasizes that physical fights can have catastrophic consequences, even when they begin as seemingly stupid arguments, and the episode's unofficial safety message becomes increasingly clear: sometimes the smartest thing you can do is simply walk away and let somebody else be wrong. The human body is not a video game health bar, and an argument about parenting is certainly not worth potentially killing someone over.

Then the show reaches the medical portion of the morning, where a man dealing with urinary incontinence apparently decided that professional medical treatment was too mainstream and attempted to solve the problem himself using super glue. This decision goes about as well as you would expect. His homemade “repair” allegedly resulted in a solid, rod-shaped mass of hardened glue that doctors later had to remove, followed by weeks of healing. Viktor is horrified but also baffled by the broader phenomenon of people inserting bizarre objects into their bodies, noting that medical professionals apparently encounter everything from wires and tweezers to pencils and fish hooks. The moral is brutally simple: if something is wrong with your body, perhaps consult someone whose job description include...