Superpowers

The Spiderman, Batman, and other superhero documentaries have gone a long way towards fostering understanding between humans and meta-humans, but we are still worlds apart. “Can I gain superpowers during sexual intercourse?” is still a question I get asked all the time at meta human education seminars (See Figure 1: How Are People Gaining Their Supernatural Powers?). Superpowers are, for better or worse, part of our world now, and it's best that you familiarize yourself with these “gods that walk among us,” and their accompanying powers.

Perhaps you or someone you love are struggling with strange powers you don't want to talk to your doctor or spiritual advisor about, for fear of being sent to a superhuman government detainment facility? The Superpowers chart can help you identify your power and move on from there (See Figure 2: What Should You do After Identifying Your Powers?). Superheroes hate to be “defined” by their superpower. “Oh, just because my power is superspeed, you think I have commitment issues?” Or, “Just because I'm physically invulnerable, you think I don't have feelings?” I can't tell you how many times I've heard these complaints from superpeople I know.

Should you become a hero or a villain? Both have their advantages: superheroes win more often (See Figure 3: How Often do Heroes and Villains Win Their Battles?), but super-villains have more fun. You hardly ever hear super heroes laugh maniacally after a victory, but villains can do so for hours, their manic laughter bouncing off the walls of their underground lairs. Although powers themselves are neither good or bad, there are certain superhuman abilities that seem to lead to villainy, or are difficult to use in a positive manner: Mind control (possession), darkness control, poison generation, necromancy, self-detonation, disease bestowal. Superhuman intelligence especially seems to lead people down the “mad scientist route.” But whichever side of the law you choose to align yourself on, you’ll find the same career perks: flexible hours, excitement, and travel (See Figure 4: Where do Superhumans Fight Their Battles?).

Once you figure out what your particular power is, you’ll need to identify your weakness. Don’t worry, it will be something very rare! Perhaps a relic from your home world, a rare isotope, or the love of a pure woman. (Unless you’re a member of the Green Lantern Corps., in which case your weakness will be something incredibly common and inane.) If you’re unable to discover your weakness on your own, don’t worry, eventually your nemesis will figure it out. No matter what your weakness is, you will probably also be susceptible to magic, the annoying wildcard of the superpowers world. Many superheroes who are supposed to be invulnerable are still susceptible to the effects of magic. Super strength, mental powers, power negation, illusions—a magical being could have any and all of these powers. The chief drawbacks of magic are its unreliability, high prep time, and general cornyness. 

Young meta humans often argue about what power is “the best.” Super strength and invulnerability are top contenders, as is mind control and super intelligence. But even if your super power is something more humble (See Figure 5: Lamest Super Powers) just remember, it’s not the size of your power that matters, but how you use it. 

– – –

FIGURE 2: WHAT SHOULD YOU DO AFTER IDENTIFYING 

YOUR POWERS?

1. Name yourself

2. Sew a costume

3. Fight crime/commit crime

4. Battle nemesis

5. Repeat

FIGURE 5: lamest super powers

1. Super boring

2. The ability to see 3 seconds into the past

3. Animal communication: worms only

4. Impenetrable dinner conversation

5. The strength of a dog

6. Invisibility to the opposite sex

7. Ennui

8. Heightened paranoia

9. Omnilinguism

10. Je ne sais quoi

Top Five Alien Pornos

1. ALIEN: A crew of spacemen get face-raped and impregnated by an alien whose head is shaped like a giant phallus, and whose blood is made of acidic sperm.

2. EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY: Aliens cross the galaxy to have sex with Geena Davis. The amorous invaders discover that Earth girls are indeed easy, assuming you look like Jeff Goldblum.

3. SPECIES: An alien succubus who conveniently looks like a underwear model has sex with a bunch of men before killing them. It won an Oscar for Most Thinly-Veiled Pretext for Sex and Violence. 

4. COMMUNION: Christopher Walken is given rufies by aliens and then probed in a lewd and invasive manner. There are also some great dance scenes.

5. MEN IN BLACK: Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones star in this sizzling summer blockbuster about secret agents who police alien activity on earth. If you want to see some real sizzling, check out the director’s cut, which has a scene where Jones has to suck the venom out of a poisonous alien bite on Smith’s tongue.

Doomsday Scenarios

I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the world is going to end—maybe today or maybe a million years from now, but its destruction is inevitable. The end may come without warning; everything you know, including your cat, could be obliterated at any moment. “Oh no,” you think, “armageddon won’t happen to me.” You know who else thought that? (See Figure 1: This Guy).

That’s the bad news, and I realize it’s depressing. However, remember, I have good news as well: the good news is that, odds are, the end of the world is going to be awesome. Like a gut-shot gunslinger in an old western, the human race will fling itself over the balcony railing, screaming melodramatically as it falls.

For instance, theoretically, there are one-dimensional cracks in the fabric of space called cosmic string. Although only a proton thin, they run the length of the universe and have incredible density. We’re not sure whether or not they exist, but they might, and if they do, and if one were to touch the earth, the earth would be torn apart in a matter of seconds. The whole earth, reduced to cosmic rubble by invisible space string. How cool is that? (Cooler than nuclear winter, which is another completely plausible doomsday scenario.)

Or, there’s a chance that, if a large enough meteor hits the earth (it’s happened before) it could trigger simultaneous underwater volcanic eruptions that would make the oceans boil, spawning giant hurricanes that merge and form a hypercane, a giant storm the size of North America. Not to mention the volcanic ash and dust that would blot out the sun. Whoah.

Tidal waves, biblical plagues, alien invasion, hell reaching its maximum capacity and forcing the dead to rise from their graves, they’re all exciting possible doomsday scenarios. There are, however, a few boring doomsday scenarios: dwindling natural resources, a global pandemic, pollution, and global warming are all steady, gradual problems that could ultimately destroy the human race, hopefully before they bore us to death. Nobody wants to spend their afterlife telling other spirits “How did I die? Well, the earth’s temperature climbed half a degree every year for twenty years, which doesn’t seem like much, but that increase significantly increased the amount of algea in the oceans, which upset the foodchain and blabbity-blab blab boring scientific stuff.” The biggest reason to fight globabl warming is so we can obliterate ourselves in a flashier way, like by creating a miniature black hole or zombie plague. 

This brings up a frequently asked question: are humans stupid enough to end the world? This is a facetious question, because causing doomsday is anything but easy. Look at dodo birds—the dummies—they came nowhere near obliterating themselves. Rats, pigs—and yes, humans—had to do it for them. In a way, completely destroying our race or planet would be an impressive accomplishment, the crowning cap stone to our pyramid of self-destructive behavior. 

“Doomsday” in the sense I’m charting doesn’t require global demolition, merely the extinction of the human species (or permanent enslavement by another race, such as the Alien Zoo or Planet of the Apes scenario). The earth is a 4.5 billion year old ball of rock that is much harder to destroy than the human race, and the majority of doomsday scenarios would leave the earth intact enough to support other life forms (See Figure 3: Who Will Inherit the Earth?). 

Even if we avoid the many natural or unnatural catastrophes that could end the world, in a billion years our sun’s steady increase in brightness will evaporate all the oceans, which means there will be no place to vacation and the Earth will consequently be unlivable. Ultimately the universe will either continue expanding and tear itself apart at the seams, or reverse course and contract, ending in a cataclysmic reversal of the big bang.  

And while it would suck to be in the middle of one of those apocalyptic situations, you have to admit that the end of the world is far more exciting than anything else you’ve ever done, including that time you made out with the high school chemistry student teacher and then smoked grass in the back of his van. 

Literary Adventure!

I used to write a series of short stories called Literary Adventure. When my wake-boarding career really took off I had to stop writing, because I was too busy breaking world records for number of flips done on a wakeboard (10). This was before I realized wake boarding was for girls and switched to land luge.

Anyways, here's one of the old Literary Adventures. 

Literary Adventure: War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy began writing War and Peace, his epic story of Russian Society during the Napoleonic era, in 1863 and finished it 6 years later, in 1869. Today, many people spend as long just trying to read its table of contents.

At 1456 pages, War and Peace is far from the longest book in the world (that distinction belongs to the fully-illustrated Uncle Wally's Big Book of Dirty Jokes), but it is long AND boring, with no pictures whatsoever. The last person to supposedly read War and Peace in its entirety was in fact, Leo Tolstoy, and even that is in doubt.

Many skeptics note that War and Peace was originally written in Russian, yet now exists in an English translation. They ask where this translation could have come from unless someone read the entire book. They might just as well ask how baby sparrows learn to fly, or why balloons fall up. Such things simply are. You can shut these naysayers up real quick by asking if THEY have ever read the book, at which point they will stare down at their shoes and mumble incomprehensibly.

In 1935, as part of the New Deal, Roosevelt constructed a team composed of one-hundred and fifty unemployed novelists, poets, vaudevillians, and one actual Russian to read War and Peace. Each person was in charge of exploring approximately ten pages, and then summarizing to the rest of the group what they learned, to try to form a complete picture of the book. Here is a transcript from one of their meetings:

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Uh, well it was hard to say really, what was going on. There was a lonely boy, and he was in Russia of course . . .

Buster Keaton: (makes a funny face and falls out of his chair)

(laughter from the group)

Jilly the Ventriloquist: I actually fell asleep two pages into my section. Before that they were walking in the snow, talking about stuff. I think my dummy, Woody, read the rest though.

Woody: Who you callin' a dummy?

(more laughter)

It was this team which wrote the historical "War and Peace with the Boring Parts cut out," which has been the basis for every subsequent book report, critical review, flip book, and computer-animated musical film adaptation.

The first 200 pages of the epic novel are widely read, but around page 220, readership drops off sharply, and comes to almost a complete halt by 643 (see graph). Despite the many attempted expeditions into the interior of War and Peace, few have pierced its deep, dark center, or glimpsed the fabled 150 blank pages said to lie near its core. Indeed, more is known about the surface of the moon than about page 1028 (if it does in fact exist) of War and Peace.

I resolved to see how far I myself could journey into the impenetrable depths of War and Peace.

Reprinted here are excerpts from my journal which I kept during the journey.

– – –

Day 1:

I pulled a hamstring just lifting the book off the shelf. You use different muscles lifting books than you do in everyday life, and I just wasn't ready for it. Problem numero uno. The native guides took this as a bad omen and fled. I must carry on . . . alone.

Page 10: I decided it's not cheating to skip the copyright page and table of contents. I plunge right into the beginning of chapter one.

Page 12: I am immediately immersed in a world strange and incomprehensible. My compass spins madly; my sextant turns red hot and melts into a puddle of molten brass.

I leave a trail of breadcrumbs and tie a spool of twine around my waist, should I need to find my way out again.

Page 150: Ive set up camp for the night under a dangling participle. Reading going smoothly so far. I tripped over a 16-letter word and opened a small cut on my forehead, but other than that I'm doing fine. We'll see what happens when I hit the first landmark, page 220.

Day 2:

Page 220: I hit 220 at first light and discovered what has discouraged so many readers before me: a sheer wall of prepositions three pages thick.

I decided to cut my losses and go back. However I turned around to find that voles (or ferrets, its hard to tell from the tracks) had eaten my bread crumbs. My twine is gone as well, and was doubtless untied in the night by mischievous faeries.

There is no turning back now. I must press on.

Day 3:

Page 378: I have befriended a small arctic hare and taught him to walk on a leash. I've named him Leo. He's a capital fellow! We hold long discussions about Nietzsche. I hope I'm able to bring him home to show the chaps at the whist club.

Page 379: Hunger has set in, and I had to eat Leo.

Day 4, or maybe 4,000:

Page 654: I'm lost inside what can only be described as the Literary Bermuda Triangle: a paragraph ten pages long. Without any paragraph breaks, I've lost my sense of direction. I find it increasingly difficult to keep my eye on the folios, and I fear I may be reading in circles.

Page 653: Yes, I'm reading in circles.

Page 654: Hey great, I'm finally back here again.

Page who cares, I'm going to die: I should've asked Debbie to dance, and now I'll never get the chance. I've wasted my life.

Page ???: Legs . . . weary. Vision . . . growing dim. The sea of words is rising higher around me. I surrender to their cold embrace and sink. Darkness washes over me . . .

Day 5:

Page 664: I awake on the shore of page 664. Behind me, stretching unbroken to the horizon, lays the mammoth paragraph which nearly claimed my life. But how did I get here?

In the midst of the sea of words a large sea tortoise floats, waving his flipper at me. He must have towed me to safety! I salute the brave terrapin and set off with new resolve, knowing that providence has handed me a mandate.

Page 725: New words, never before seen by man, scurry amongst the underbrush all around me. I try to catalog as many as I can: bulbouslyish-like, portitudity, gwibberrrrrr, fnoob. Though I'm unable to ascertain their meanings, I can tell you that a fnoob will snatch a ham sandwich right out of your hand if you don't keep your eye on it, and that a gwibberrrrrr is good pan seared with butter and saffron on a bed of baby spinach.

Page unknown: I made a grave error today. I took a nap without laying down a bookmark. When I awoke, I had lost my place. It took me the rest of the day to find it again, after re-reading plenty of pages that weren't interesting the first time around.

Day 6:

Page 800: I am now deeper than any man has read before. The air is very thin here, and I find myself tiring easily.

Page 890: Living so deep within the book, words here have evolved very differently from those at the surface. Many of them are translucent and have luminescent organs, eerily similar to the deep-sea aliens in James Cameron's blockbuster, The Abyss. This merely buttresses my theory that James Cameron is the mouthpiece for the creator of the universe.

Page 925: Something is approaching on the horizon. It's outline is dim, is it a mirage? No! It's an International House of Pancakes with an attached War and Peace giftstore!

The prices at the gift store are outrageous; this is what happens without the healthy competition of a free market. I had to pay $20 for a War and Peace t-shirt. I just had to get it though, because it's really funny. It says on it, "Warren Peace? Never heard of him." If I live through this, I'll kick myself if I haven't gotten a souvenir.

Page 1000: It is no myth. I am standing on the threshold of the fabled 150 blank pages written of in War and Peace lore. Tolstoy peered deep into himself, and envisioned a wasteland so absolute, so empty, that it could not be expressed by words. Either that or I've finally gone blind from peering at the tiny font this book is written in.

Page 1075: Smack in the middle of the wasteland, I find a lone word: PERSPICACITY.

Page 1150: At the edge of the wasteland I come upon three doors. I somehow know that I can only choose one, and how well I choose will decide the outcome of my journey.

I pick the middle door.

Inside is a dusty mirror. Inside the mirror, my mirror-self. He is grotesque. He has little bony-girl legs with gawky doorknob knees and a scrawny chicken neck. His knuckles are hairy. His teeth are gappy. There is a mad, feverish gleam in his pornographer's eyes.

He looks just like me.

He lunges out of the mirror and wraps his filthy fingers around my neck. Though he barely has the strength of a fourth grader, I'm unable to fight him off. I have only one recourse.

I pull my mental self back into my physical body. I come to in my high backed Windsor chair, covered in cobwebs, the mammoth book open and glowing in my lap. A strong wind--a vortex--tears at my smoking jacket, threatening to suck me back into the pages. My pipe is sucked out of my mouth and disappears into the book.

With every last bit of my strength, I close the book and hurl it into the fireplace. This accomplishes little, since the fireplace is never lit (Im allergic to smoke). I quickly take the book outside with a pair of tongs and burn it on my hibachi, where it explodes in a noxious tower of blue flame which all my neighbors complain about the next day.

Epilogue:

What did I learn from my journey? Did I learn anything about myself? Did I learn anything about the tragic comedy known as the human race? No. All I learned is that War and Peace is a dog from hell, and that bitch will finish you if you don't finish it first.

"But you didn't finish the book," I can hear some of you smarty-pants in the back row saying.

I'm sorry, but that is the end of this week's adventure

 

Different Types of Aliens

Comic Book Sound Effects

The world depicted in comic books is very different from our own. Impossibly-muscled heroes with powers far beyond those of mortal men leap around in outlandish costumes foiling unnecessarily elaborate crimes, extraterrestrials and ancient gods periodically threaten the earth, and all women have perfect, round boobs. How could comic book reality be any more different than ours? Oh, that’s right, when you punch someone, giant floating letters appear in the air. 

What you and I call comic book sound effects—or SFX, punch words, or sound scribbles—are examples of onomatopoeia, a large, pretentious word that can score you major points with the brainiac squad (See Footnote 1). Onomatopoeia’s use is not limited to the realm of comic books. For instance, words like zap and zip mimic the sounds of their respective actions. Certain birds, like the chickadee, whip-poor-will, and cuckoo got their names based on the sounds of their calls, because the ornithologists who were in charge of naming them apparently had better things to do than sit around all day trying to think of names that didn’t sound like they had been invented by toddlers (See Figure 1: Onomatopoeiac Bird Names). 

FOOTNOTE 1

So I’m on the campus of Carnegie Melon, right? The campus is right down the street from my apartment. And I’m playing street hockey in one of their fancy courtyards, by myself, because I’m so good at street hockey that nobody else can handle playing with me. So I score this killer goal, right through the front doors of the library, and the puck hits some genius in his big genius head and he starts crying. He gets in my face and says “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” and I say “Onomatopoeia, bitch!” which leaves him totally speechless, so I grab my puck out of his hand and skate away. Final score of the game? Carnegie Melon 0, The Mighty Fucks (my street team) 3,000.

FIGURE 1: Onomatopoeia-inspired Bird Names

Tweet tweet

Clucky

Mr. Quackers

Tweedley-Dee

Humphrey Hoot Hoot 

MC Chirps-a-Lot

Honker

Dr. Cockadoodle

Comic book sound effects underline the medium’s glaring technological limitations. Simple stacks of glossy paper held together with staples, they have no video component, and must instead substitute small, primitive drawings in the place of high definition widescreen. They also, incredibly, lack an audio component—a feature even the lowly gramophone has (See Figure 2: Most Exciting Inventions of the Victorian Era)—and must instead communicate the sound of Captain America’s shield punching through an F-16’s cockpit glass using large, cartoonishly distorted letters. 

Many scientists believe that within twenty years this primitive art form will be completely replaced by television, movies, and video games (See The Future chart on page xx). Studies have shown that television and movies are better for your brain, because they eliminate the wear and tear that reading causes. And although comic books are good at desensitizing children to violence, they simply can’t compete with video games’ ability to realistically replicate the visceral experience of shooting someone in the face, or battering a hooker. It’s only a matter of time before comic books join heiroglyphics, Mayan doomsday carvings, and cave paintings in the pantheon of sequential art that nobody cares about.

Some critics have pointed out that I myself use words and drawings in this very book. When they point it out, they do it all dramatically, like Sherlock Holmes uncovering the identity of the murderer (“Who is in this very room!”) However, the crucial difference is that this book is merely a companion to the film version of Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, (if you haven’t seen it yet, Orlando Bloom plays me; he had to work out a lot and wear a prosthetic chin for the role) and is intended for people in remote areas such as the Mojave Desert, Antarctica, and West Virginia. Seriously, we merchandised the shit out of that movie. (See Figure 3: Everything Explained Through Flowcharts Movie Tie-in Merchandise.)