How To Do Anything Better: BLAM! POW! SHAZAAM! The Superhero Edition.

Secret Identities

You know when your mother tells you just to “go out there and be yourself”? Your secret identity is the kind of person that your mom is actually envisioning when she says that – affable, obliging, sweet, frequently hapless and bespectacled, asexual and not surprisingly, pathologically unable to get laid. You should also have an unremarkable but easy to pronounce and possibly alliterative name. It will roll trippingly off the tongue whenever people reject or humiliate you. Inevitably, these bullies will be completely oblivious to the fact that you look exactly like their favorite superhero, probably because you part your hair to the left.

Sidekicks

A sidekick needs two skills: looking less heroic than you and stating the blatantly obvious. If he can do both at once without putting an eye out, he’s an instant legend. To prevent the infinitesimal possibility of your sidekick outshining you, you are well-advised to give him or her the most ridiculous name imaginable and a costume befitting a rodeo clown. A valuable tool for exposition, the sidekick is also a great door-stop, coat-hanger or ottoman. Should your sidekick die, whether he was murdered by a super-villain or suffered a tragic accident while feeding your electric eels, you’ll also have another wonderful excuse for vigilante crime-fighting.

Romance

You’re looking for someone rather dim and possibly clinically blind. Sorry, dear, but your costume just isn’t all that convincing. Maybe if you dressed as a woman? Anyway, your stupid, myopic hottie should be unattainable or about as personable as a wolverine. But don’t actually date Wolverine. He has intimacy issues.

Dealing with Villains

Villains usually fall into one of two categories: scrawny evil genius or hulking destructive dolt. The scrawny evil genius will generally be insidious in his methods, engaging in practices such as pitting you against your dark side (whether metaphorical or actually a black-costumed version of yourself), kidnapping your clinically blind lady friends, poisoning the city’s water supply or leading you through the twisty labyrinth of your mind using riddles, puns, secret codes and old Trivial Pursuit questions. The scrawny evil genius’ fatal flaw is human resources and employee training. Being nefarious gives one very little time to engage in efficient hiring practices and so he is willing to hire thugs and assassins without interviews or proper references. When his staff inevitably fails him by succumbing to your karate chops and Korean murder pinches, all he has left to defend himself with is a death ray and a few syllogisms.

Meanwhile, the destructive dolt is very good at picking up six-storey buildings and throwing them at you. His main problems are those of planning and economics. Unlike the scrawny evil genius who is a charismatic multi-millionaire Rhodes scholar/nuclear physicist/champion polo player with a summer house in the Hamptons and several Vermeers in the basement, the destructive dolt is more likely to be an unemployed docks worker. He does not read The Iliad aloud in the original Greek whilst feeding his enemies’ bloated corpses to a pack of mastiffs named after the Muses. His idea of a great evil scheme can be summed in two words connected by an ampersand: “Smash & grab”. Luckily for him, he is very good at both smashing and grabbing. This is a good time to recycle those Trivial Pursuit questions, reducing the poor lunk to tears of frustration as he tries to remember the names of the original cast members of “Three’s Company”.

Costuming

You want primary colours if possible – a secondary hue indicates that you are a secondary character or a villain. You will also need to get a costume that doesn’t cling to your groin too much unless you want people to mistake you for an exile from the American Ballet Theatre. If you are a woman, one of your superpowers will likely involve possessing a pair of massive, gravity-defying cans so you don’t need to worry about a bra. Well, unless you’re some perky little Batgirl type and then I’m sorry, bitch, but you kind of got shafted. The best superheroes know how to accessorize. How are you supposed to roll with the Justice League if you don’t have cool utility belt, a fanny pack and maybe some kick-ass cufflinks that throw sparks? You’ll have to go back to sitting on the unpopular side of the cafeteria, sharing bologna sandwiches with the Fantastic Four and Aquaman. Do you really want to spend anymore time with those fucking dolphins? I didn’t think so.

The Future Hates You: Ass-trology with Swami Greg, #5

Aries: You come into a small wind-fall early in the month. Yes, for a few shining minutes, your escape the discomfort and embarrassment of uncontrollable flatulence.

Taurus: Your attempts to be likeable only succeed in making others despise you. Accept that you will die alone and be hastily buried by indifferent strangers in an unmarked grave.

Gemini: Your mom was right: you will get hairy palms from excess masturbation. It also may not have been such a good idea to lube up with Rogaine.

Cancer: You will lose approximately eight pounds of excess body weight. Don’t worry; decapitation by guillotine is fast, relatively painless and doesn’t require any aerobics.

Leo: In this low-budget porno called Life, you think you’re “talent” when really you’re just another fluffer.

Virgo: Put down the riding crop and pick up the bullwhip. It’s time to get serious about your career future.

Libra: I’ll let you in on a little secret: when a trench-coated stranger offers you a “magic carpet ride”, it really won’t be what you were hoping for.

Scorpio: The life of a kamikaze pilot is fraught with danger, but mainly that of killing oneself.

Sagittarius: Inner beauty is what is really most important in this world. You should probably hurry out and buy some eye-shadow for your soul.

Capricorn: Why does God let bad things happen? I'm just working on a hunch, but maybe he thinks you’re an asshole too.

Aquarius: This week does not bode well for any ventures involving LSD, a golf cart and a vat of nitroglycerine. Try again later.

Pisces: Born under the sign of the Fish, you are sensitive, caring and artistic. You also live out of a shopping cart and smell like sardines.

Arbitrary Grading: Childhood Board Games

Hungry, Hungry Hippos: A+
Hungry, Hungry Hippos encapsulated two of the greatest pleasures of a North American childhood: colourful cartoon hippotami and unremitting gluttony. One of the reasons I like the game so much because it would never be produced today. Health fanatics would complain that it encouraged childhood obesity and inappropriate portion sizes, whilst parents would obsess over the possibility that their darlings would choke on the white marble “hippo food” perfectly sized to lodge in tiny windpipes. Thankfully, this game was made in the ‘80s when they still believed in survival of the fittest.

Mousetrap: C+
I remember how excited I was when I first received Mousetrap for my seventh birthday. I couldn’t wait to build the giant mouse-catching contraption in where cranks turned, levers pulled and plastic boots kicked. Unfortunately, the problem with Mousetrap is that, like the perfect comeback, the contraption never actually worked when it was required. Just when you were ready to unleash all the convoluted mechanical fury of the mousetrap on your hated foe, the elastic band would break or the marble would fall off the plank, and any remaining feelings of technological superiority would crumble as you fumbled with the damn crank.

Twister: A+
Playing Twister in Grade six was great because it gave you a presumably innocent opportunity for the most outrageous physical contact imaginable to your pre-adolescent mind. Putting your left hand on yellow brought you perilously close to your crush’s groin. Right foot on blue required you to stick your ass in your best friend’s face. Twister was always the prelude to a super-crazy session of Spin the Bottle, where people would actually kiss on the lips for 1…2…3…4…5 seconds! You slut!

Monopoly: A
My favourite part of playing Monopoly was choosing my playing piece. I have been known to spend up to half an hour pondering whether I will play as the puppy dog, the horsie or the boot. The fact that I devoted more intense strategizing to securing the top hat as my proxy than, say, buying Park Place probably explain why I remain a diseased Monopoly failure. Another great thing about this game is contemplating what might have happened if Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky had been able to play Monopoly during their formative years. There’s no better way to teach eight-year-olds a healthy respect for slum lords and the crushing inhumanity of the capitalist machine. Thanks, Parker Brothers!

Risk: B+
The problem with Risk is that everyone agrees to play it with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Your dad would rather watch the football game but he knows that the hateful holiday mob will not leave him in peace. Your best friend is bored and wants to spend an afternoon away from his own intolerable relations, never suspecting that he could be coerced into a board game. Someone gave you this game for Christmas and you know you need to get some of use out it while there’s still company over. Your mom is being nice, smiling politely, and worrying that the turkey is going to become withered bird husk in the oven. Your douchebag cousin thinks he's fucking Tamburlaine, Scourge of God, and plans to battle it out for the next two months if necessary. The major risk in playing Risk is that over the course of six hours your friends and family will off one another until there is one person remaining, a single player slumped over the board, his face spattered with coagulate gore and his hand neatly tucked into Napoleonic waistcoat.

Trouble: F
Trouble was the game you played when your mom made you go and hang out with the kid no one liked.

Sample conversation:

MOM: Come on. You’re going over to play with your friend, Judy.

ME: Oh, you mean the buck-toothed kid whose mom YOU’RE friends with? But she pinches me!

MOM: Well, honey, if she pinches you, you should try and knock out her teeth. That’s how we survive in this world.

END SCENE

Sadly, if you actually owned Trouble, you were probably that kid. All I can say is goddamn you, Judy Fichtner, you fucking buck-toothed orthodontist’s whore. The only even vaguely cool thing about Trouble was the bubble that you had to pop to roll the dice and the novelty of this faded quickly. What I hated even more than loathsome Judy was the Trouble commercial in which a group of wee Aryan Youth types pretended that playing Trouble was the equivalent of actually getting into trouble, thus momentarily disquieting their Eva Braun-alike soccer mom hausfrau. The big catchphrase was “Oh, oh! You’re in Trouble! It's fun getting into Trouble!” For me, typing those words is the rough equivalent of chewing and swallowing dog vomit, then vomiting it up and eating it again.

Snakes and Ladders: D-
Snakes and Ladders possesses a certain symbolic resonance but as a real game that people occasionally play, it sucks. Not even the schadenfreude one experiences at a rival’s unexpected plummet down the back of a boa constrictor can make up for the fact that Snakes and Ladders is pointless and dull. What precisely is being tested by this game? Your wrist’s ability to repeatedly toss a die? Your equanimity in the face of an apparently arbitrary and meaningless cosmos? Snakes and Ladders makes me feel like Jean Paul Sartre and that’s just depressing.

Barrel Full of Monkeys: B+
Like Mousetrap, the concept of Barrel Full of Monkeys was better than its execution. As a kid, I often found myself so distracted by the glee-inducing idea of plastic monkeys that I would complete ignore the goal of the game and proceed to just make my new simian friends fight and talk in falsetto voices. I suppose this makes Barrel Full of Monkeys a success relative to Snakes and Ladders or god forbid, Trouble, but it still can not compare to the feeding frenzy of Hungry, Hungry Hippos or the hormone-fuelled delights of an innocent game of Twister.

ROWR! DINO EAT CREATIONIST! YUM!

I would like to present for your delectation one of creationism’s biggest problems and let me assure you, it is very big. It also comes fully equipped with a tree-trunk tail, a scaly body, a bad attitude and an enormous, slavering mouth full of jagged teeth. The existence of dinosaurs and dinosaur fossils tends to leave creationists a trifle flummoxed. One of the more notorious examples of this dates back to the Victorian period with the publication of Philip Henry Gosse’s ‘Omphalos’, a book that basically contended that God had planted the fossils in the earth as a means of fabricating an imaginary time before creation. Mind you, even at the time, everyone thought this was pretty far-fetched. As much as people prefer not to contemplate their uncanny resemblance to baboons, they also don’t like to think that their deity of choice is a sneaky motherfucker who hides dino femurs in rocks like toys in a Kinder Surprise. In this rousing tradition of nutbar speculation, contemporary creationists have striven to give us credible explanations of fossil evidence. And where Gosse failed, modern creationists have failed harder, with less Greek and far more amusing graphics! Like the brave municipal sanitation worker, I waded through the raw sewage of the Internet in search of only most stanky theological turds. What I found was a delightful creationist mythology, equal parts Hanna-Barbara and Middle fucking Earth. I shall try to recount it to the best of my understanding and with substantially fewer spelling errors. Stop me when things start sounding kind of, oh, I don’t know, crazy or something.

Once upon a time there were these two people who had no belly-buttons. Their names were Adam and Eve. Like Prince, they did not require last names. Adam and Eve lived in a hot piece of real estate called the Garden of Eden, co-existing peacefully with all kinds of animals, including gigantic, vicious reptiles. It was sort of like a Flintstones rerun, complete with foot-propelled stone convertibles and dinosaurs being used as can-openers. Adam and Eve were very happy indeed, until they violated the terms of their lease and God evicted them, condemning our darling honeymooners to unspeakable pain, death, no central vac, etc., etc. Adam and Eve proceeded to frolic about in fig-leaf Fruit of the Looms, popping out little sinners and when necessary, hunting dinosaurs for meat and lizard-skin pants. Flash forward to Noah, who was asked to build a great big cruise ship so that he, his family and two of every animal could escape a plumbing problem caused by vengeful landlord God to drown all the evil-doers. So Noah loaded on the lions, the zebras, the flamingos and oh yeah, a fine assortment of T-rexes, veloci-raptors and brontosauri, which he kept in wooden pens beside the sheep, the cattle and the pigs. La famille Noah all guzzled pina coladas on the ship deck while everything else died in horrible agony and then they pranced off the ark into a fresh, new minty-smelling world laden with rainbows and covenants. All through the Bible, dinos continued to pop up in funny places with kooky Hebrew names like Leviathan and Behemoth but the descriptions made them sound suspiciously like whales and water buffalo. Finally, in the Middle Ages, knights killed many, many dinosaurs as a means of scoring hot princess babes, until all of the dinos went extinct, into hiding or became children’s entertainers. Everyone lived happily ever after, in spite of the fact no one managed to figure out how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

THE END

Okay, why didn’t you stop me at, say, the third sentence? Apparently Christian fundamentalists are under the impression that dinosaurs used to give people pony rides. That right there is a choice cut of crazy. It is also notable for sucking all the fun of dinosaurs, which derives principally from them being huge ferocious creatures whose heart’s fondest wish was to rip your throat out. Of course, even more fun is the fact that they now can do no such thing because they stumbled into tar pits and we use their remains to drive our Honda Civics to the Mall of the Americas. I have nothing against faith but if you’re going to believe something so eye-bleedingly absurd as hard-core creationism, I think you’d better be sure to make it the most astonishing, entertaining belief system ever. In that case, you should have Darwin and dinos and God and maybe even a dino God that chomps Darwin’s head off in one bite and then spits it into a bucket. Toss in some unicorns, hippogriffs and monkey men too, while you’re at it. Why the hell not? I mean, if you aren’t the least interested in piffling details like scientific evidence, empirical reasoning or reality, you can imagine pretty much whatever you like and then maybe you can even teach it to third graders! Personally, I’d like to believe that millions of years ago (or last Monday, by creationist estimates) dinosaurs were chasing Jerry Falwell and his crew of hate-mongering fundamentalist zealots through the primordial rainforests of Pangea. I flatter myself that it is a rather plausible alternative to Intelligent Design.

An Anti-Valentine

Every rose may have its thorn, but unfortunately not every thorn has its rose. Such is the case with Valentine’s Day, a day destined to make you profoundly uncomfortable, whether you are in a relationship, swinging through singledom or somewhere in between. If you’re dating, February 14th becomes a kind of romantic pissing contest. Inevitably, someone is the romance winner and someone is the despicable romance loser who must spend the next 364 days atoning for his or her paltry offering of daisies, baby’s breath and musical card. Romeo chugged some Drano for love so in the spirit of competition, Juliet must off herself with a rusty butter knife. The only bright spot in all this coagulate gore is that neither one of them will have to shop at the Hallmark store ever again.

Being single on Valentine’s Day is comparable to being the lone analyst in the world’s most diabolically pink asylum. Some of the patients are euphoric, others hysterical and even more are deluded, but they are all united in believing that their collective lunacy is far preferable to being single. It becomes necessary for even the most sentimental of singles to adopt a stance of indifference or cynical amusement if only to avoid being straitjacketed oneself. Helpful and cleansing activities on Valentine’s Day include playing darts, bowling, taking a few playful pokes at one’s voodoo doll with a particularly sharp knitting needle and watching Evil Dead whilst eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s finest iced cream. Comfort yourself with the knowledge that while you may be lonesome on occasion, lonely aloneness is far better than loony togetherness.

Finally, we must consider the people whose love lives are virtually ripped from French cinema. Everything is exceedingly complicated and frequently wreathed in smoke. Valentine’s Day can only be painful for someone who needs the rough equivalent of a Flaubert novel to explain his or her relationship status. It is difficult to determine whether a card is necessary for the friend with benefits, the occasional mistress or the off-again, on-again lova with whom bickering inevitably leads to sex and sex inevitably leads to bickering. While Miss Manners would undoubtedly advocate sending a pleasant note to the person whose genitals you’re spending time with twice a week, what should you actually write? Here let’s give it the college try: “Hi, Janet. Thank you for liking me enough for sex but not liking me enough to try and make me hold hands in public. That’s awesome. Respectfully, Howard.” You see? Awkward. Even if you genuinely care about said person, the toxicity of Valentine’s Day will cause you to appear either willfully blasé or terrifyingly clingy.It is inevitable that you will either do far too much or far too little, significantly decreasing your odds of amicable commitment-free debauchery. The only graceful and practical solution for people in positions like this is to fake one’s own kidnapping on Feb 13th and then mysteriously materialize on Feb 15th bound and gagged in the back of a warehouse.

Cupid has his chubby finger poised on the nuclear detonator of Love and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Although, Iranian police have torn down heart-themed shop decorations and Indian Hindu Nationalist Party members have gone so far as to burn greeting cards en masse, Western commercial holiday madness will inevitably prevail. Why? Well, everyone’s got to go home eventually and there’s going to be hell to pay if you aren’t armed with a few compliments and a pricey box of chocolates.

The Fear Factory

The international beauty company Clarins recently announced the launch of a skin product called Expertise 3P, which they claim will protect consumers from the damaging effects of inescapable electromagnetic waves that emanate from televisions, computers, cellphones and pretty much everything else in our techno-centric society. When I first read about this, I was flummoxed. After all, as Clarins’ press releases are quick to point out, ‘electro-magnetic waves can penetrate through walls’. Right through the fucking walls! I don’t think Superman can do that. So can someone please tell me how a 3.5 oz bottle of ‘protective’ mist selling at $40 a pop is going to save me from this insidious electromagnetic terror? In spite of this fuzzy logic, Clarins reps attest that Expertise 3P is flying off the shelves and I can believe them. Like the news media and every politician in existence, the business of beauty has latched on to the best racket going: the mass production of fear.

All of us live in a fear factory. In addition to the phantom horror of electromagnetic waves, we quite rightfully dread global warming, trans-fats, gun violence, the avian flu, SARS, nuclear proliferation, corporate downsizing, creeping ugliness, hatchet-wielding serial killers, the spread of AIDS, the spread of disco fever, natural disasters, terrorism, erectile dysfunction, and so on. Life presents us with a smorgasbord of unsavory possibilities, altogether too many of which regularly swim through my mind before seeping out one ear or the other. While I take a certain pleasure in laying the options out in a veritable menu of menace, some certainly seem more plausible than others. And some, many of the more sensational, seem constructed specifically as a means to profit on consumers’ panic and their morbid fascination with what is most ghastly, like rows of commuters craning their necks to see the ten-car pile-up, to bear witness to the outline of another person’s body shrouded beneath a white sheet.

Who profits from public fear and from the voyeuristic desire to watch those fears play out - from a safe and passive distance? Corporations like Clarins, for example, have no problem making money based on these fears. Expertise 3P is but one of the many flavors of snake-oil sold to men and women in attempt to profit from insecurities surrounding ageing, health and attractiveness. The news and entertainment media routinely exploit our shared anxieties as a means of engaging and entertaining audiences. If a person’s only exposure to the outside world was through 20/20 and CNN reportage, he or she could be forgiven for believing that life was a 24-hour anxiety attack. After all, “if it bleeds, it leads,” and networks prefer the blood to gush, spurt or pump rather than to trickle. Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all, is the way governments routinely play on public terror as a means of controlling and diverting the energies of their citizenry.

None of these contentions are really revelatory to anyone. Fear has been big business for a long time, driving the urge to accumulate money, possessions, relationships – from an evolutionary perspective, the instinct to survive at any cost. Fear can be a positive emotion and it can motivate us to act in the best interests of ourselves, of one another and of the world around us. But I contend that perhaps the purveyors of fear have been too successful in selling their product. We live in a world where the Threat Level never dips below “Elevated,” as represented by an eye-stinging shade of yellow. I can’t imagine a contemporary politician proclaiming as Franklin D. Roosevelt once did, “There is nothing to fear but fear itself”. Nowadays, all too frequently it seems that the only thing we don’t fear is Fear and that itself is something to be afraid of. In conclusion, don’t fucking be afraid of electro-magnetic waves or getting older or zooming on jet planes to beautiful and exotic locales. Be afraid of the fascists who want you to be afraid, and then go do something about it. Or I don’t know, I guess we could all just douse ourselves in Expertise 3P and huddle under our coffee tables in the fetal position.

How To Do Anything Better: Supermodel Survival Edition

Part 1: Enemies with Long, Stabby Fingernails

The big, wide, fashionable world outside the Vaseline-lensed pages of the Sears catalogue is a dangerous place. Miss Tyra is not your friend and Naomi Campbell will cut you, bitch. Well, actually, she’ll probably bludgeon you to death with her cell-phone first. But those are just other models, sweetheart. Anna Wintour wears bangs to hide the Mark of the Beast etched into her forehead like a designer label on a $40,000 leather handbag. You have just entered the dark realm of Hecate and you need to tread with care lest you rouse the wrath of the reanimated corpse of Karl Lagerfield. He is wearing a smoking jacket and stovepipe pants, with a profusion of lace ruffles gathered about his neck, and his veins are pumped full of the finest embalming fluid in the land. Oh la la, c’est chic!

Never forget that the pretty starlet is your natural enemy. Although she is probably a foot shorter than you, she stars in romantic comedies and still retains some secondary sex characteristics, which means she will steal some of those coveted magazine covers whenever a new movie comes out. Being an actress, she is also better at pretending to be human and/or humane. You can take comfort in the knowledge that clothes hang better on you and that you will never have to stoop down and pretend that you’re in love with Tom Cruise unless you’re hypnotized into marrying him.

Part 2: The Look

Being gorgeous is good but it’s super-double-plus good to be gorgeous in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of a space alien and/or a praying mantis. Do your lovers ever wonder if you are laying eggs inside their stomachs? After sex, do they seem particularly nervous, as though they feared having their heads chomped off? Are you nevertheless devastatingly angular? These are all signs that you were born to be fabulous.

To succeed in fashion, you will require three expressions – the Blank Stare of Fashionable Ennui, the Smouldering Stare of Sexy Loathing, and the Almost Friendly Stare of Cosmetics-Induced Glee, otherwise known as, “I’m smiling with my eyes.” The toothy grin of the supermodel is a phenomenon on par with a sighting of Hailey’s Comet. If you ever feel the temptation to smile, the Wicked Wintour will get a twitching in her thumb and send her hell-imps to poke you between the ribs with Choos and Blahniks. To avoid any undue exuberance, spend as much time as possible contemplating that glorious memento mori, Corpse of Lagerfield.

Part 3: The Winning Attitude

Repeat after me, “I am not a coke addict. I just have a perpetual cold. I am not a heroin addict. I’m a really skinny Type 2 Diabetic. I am not on speed. I’m just clinically insane. I am the picture of health, even on the days when my BMI dips under 10. It's just my meth-tabolism - I mean, metabolism. I am a totally functional human being and will continue to be this way at least until I’ve been on French Vogue twice.” This is to be your mantra until you marry a rock star. At this juncture, feel free to strut around sweatshops in stilettos, construct elaborate coats out of 101 dalmation puppies and just be too, too unspeakably "it", preferably to the dental drill sounds of German industrial music.