The Best Worst Villain, EVER (Part Four: Sure, You're Crazy, But Just How Crazy Are You?)

Part Four in my ongoing investigatory series in which I'm whittling down all the villains, ever, into just the one Best Worst Villain, EVER.
Part One: Naming The Villains.
Part Two: Let's Lose The Chicks.
Part Three: Go It Alone.


The foundation of western Civilization is this one, central thought:

That's so crazy it just might work.

Sure, there are those who contend that the foundation of western Civilization -- the greatest civilization in the greatest hemisphere on the greatest planet ever, up top! -- can be found in different principles, say, ideas foisted off on us by such charlatans as Aristotle or the "Founding Fathers." But what ideas did they ever give us? Nothing, I say. Here's a summary of Aristotle's career:

He was an ancient Greek.

Now, that'll get you pretty far in life, it seems. In fact, for the bulk of human history, being an ancient Greek was an all-access pass to the philosophical high life, kind of like being on The Hills is now: people pay attention to you for no apparent, reason, and you have a pretty good social life. But, on close examination, being an Ancient Greek doesn't contribute anything more, really, than being on The Hills, and I can prove it using the scientific method of comparing the great thoughts of Aristotle with the great thoughts of Heidi Montag:

Representative quote from Aristotle (as located by Googling the phrase Aristotle quote*)
*for an explanation of how science has come to mean, simply, "googling things," see this article, by me.

"A friend to all is a friend to none."

Representative quote from Heidi Montag (located much the same way, but with more interference from pictures of her):

"I plan to win an Oscar. I’m very ambitious."

Let's compare those two, shall we? Aristotle's, to begin with, is dumb. It makes no sense. If I'm friends with everyone (all the people) then I'm friends... with everyone. But Aristotle claims that makes me friends with nobody (none of the people.) Maybe math hadn't been invented by then -- I'm not sure when Pythagoras came up with it -- but even if they didn't have numbers, ancient Greeks should have known that everyone isn't equal to nobody, that all is not none. Right? Who's with me, here?

So Aristotle's saying is dumb, and also unhelpful to society, because what he's really getting at is a claim that we shouldn't be friends with everyone. What kind of advice is that? Thanks, Mr. Antisocial Ancient Greek. Maybe you didn't get invited to parties and wanted to turn that into a virtue, but I'm not buying it.

Meanwhile, look at the simple homespun wisdom of Heidi Montag's inspirational quote, which I'm thinking of turning into a t-shirt -- the modern repository of all great wisdom. Heidi's quote sums up, in 9 words (I counted, and I bet you just went back and did, too), what modern America is all about: fame, and arbitrary recognition of fame. She understands that today, in America, "ambition" no longer requires backing by hard work or talent or drive or even people liking you. No, if you're trying to get ahead in modern America, if you're ambitious, all you have to do is get enough people to pay attention to you and you've made it. And then, at some point, they'll give you an Oscar to recognize that people know who you are. (Or, in some cases, they'll give you a Nobel Peace Prize.)

So if you were trying to get ahead in America, and you could only take advice from one person, and you had to choose between Aristotle and Heidi Montag, you'd be a whole lot better off choosing Heidi Montag, is what I'm saying, and that's proof -- scientific proof-- that the ancient Greeks weren't so hot after all. (Plus, they believed that the sun was driven across the sky in a chariot. Those nuts! Modern people would never believe something that defies all rational logic.)

In fact, villains could use a little dose of Heidi Montag, themselves, because Heidi's advice is a surer route to the kind of world domination they seek to establish, time and time again -- surer and more fun and less costly than, say "Fighting the Avengers" or "Sending 500 Giant Robots Into Center City To Demolish It" or "Turning the Moon Into A Kind of Super NASCAR and entering it in a race against the Legion of Superheroes" (that last one is a script I'm writing that I hope will help resurrect Will Ferrell's Ricky Bobby character.) Fame and fortune, especially fame and fortune achieved almost, seemingly, by accident, can put a person into the limelight and let them become a person of influence...

...Oprah...


...whereas the methods villains use, like the afore-listed and like other methods (cloning, wars, digging into the bank vault using a giant drill) they've tried, fail over and over and over again.

So why do they keep trying?

Because they're crazy. That's why they're villains in the first place, remember. They're nuts. They're bonkers. They're off the ranch. They're a couple throw-rugs short of a model home**
(**That last saying brought to you by the National Realtors Association. Have you hugged a realtor today? If so, you're kind of weird.)

But their crazy isn't to be shunned and feared, like some wackos should be. No, villainous crazy should be encouraged, because, as I said, villainous crazy is building on the foundation of Western Civilization. Remember, that foundation is the phrase:

That's so crazy it just might work.

That quote is so obviously the foundation of Western Civilization that it seems pointless to provide evidence of my assertion, but I'll do it anyway, in question-and-answer form:

Q: How did Western Civilization find the West, in which it formed a civilization?
A: By crazily opting to sail West and risking falling off the edge of the world.

Q: What was the world's understanding of the American and French Revolutions?
A: That they were crazy to try to defeat royalty and then-established world powers.

Q: How crazy were the major accomplishments of Western civilization so far?
A: Seriously crazy: We drilled through mountains to build a railroad, dug through Central America for the heck of it, and even pretended to land a man on the moon in the 1960s. More recently, we have sent roller blades to Mars for no apparent reason, we gave a second TV show to Jenna Elfman, and we came up with pizzas that cost only $5!

I rest my case. Western Civilization wouldn't exist without the crazy ideas to sail off the edge of the world, to set up a new country with no money and no experience, to claim that all people are created equal when some of them are clearly Madonna, and other crazy notions. Forget "democracy" or "capitalism" or "swine flu vaccines at Walgreens:" Western Civilization is founded on craziness.

So. Villains and crazy: We love us some villains, and they love them some crazy, and that's good because it helps advance civilization, right? Right. Without crazy villains, we wouldn't have the technology to invent Death Rays (now being used by Wal-Mart against shoplifters), or single-use Rocket Submarines (commuters in Tokyo have these already) and, more importantly, without crazy villains, we would have no reason to have bank security guards to stand vigilant against constant break-ins, road construction crews to repair damage caused by RoboTanks marching on Metropolis, architects to design fancy headquarters for the superhero groups necessary to guard against these villains, or satellite TV. (It's a little known fact that the Justice League's satellite HQ, when not used for their meetings, is sublet to DirecTV.) Villains, and their crazy schemes, are propping up our economy, and thank God for that, or I'd have to get a real job.

Just like civilization wouldn't exist without crazy, villains wouldn't either. Being a villain means being crazy. It doesn't matter how you get there -- whether you were born nuts, whether you went crazy because Superboy interrupted your experiment and caused you to lose your hair, or whether you went crazy because you realized that you were a zombielike creation made up of vegetative matter found in sewers and therefore will never be with the woman you love...

...Oprah...

...er, I mean, Solomon Grundy...

(Boy, I bet everyone gets those two confused)

However you got to crazy, you've got to get there because otherwise you wouldn't be a villain. Supersmart or superstrong sane people do not move to tropical islands and create MegaViruses. They do not launch rockets at the moon (unless they work for NASA and have some old rockets lying around and need to distract people from the constant failures by making up some story about ice on the moon). Sane SuperPeople with SuperAbilities go play for the Yankees and make $150 million dollars a second, or they make a bunch of hit movies and then become Scientologists and brainwash a wife, or they star as "Arnold" on the hit 80's TV series Diff'rent Strokes, but they do not try to take over the world or kill people. You've got to be nuts to do that.

And you've got to be really nuts to be a great villain. Because crazy, like cool, is not a straight line; it's a circle. Crazy starts out just to the side of sane, but then, the crazier it gets, the further it gets from sanity.. but then, just as the great scientists in Modest Mouse pointed out will happen with the universe, crazy comes back around until it becomes so crazy it's sane.



The Best Worst Villain, EVER, then, will be someone who's crazy -- because he's a villain -- but who is so crazy, so demented, so far beyond the pale that he's almost sane again. His schemes will be so crazy they just might work. Because regular crazy never works -- Al Davis' Raiders never win anything that counts. Hardees' doesn't sell any good food.

But super-duper-mega crazy? That stuff works: Samuel L. Jackson's entire career is premised on it. So is Rachael Ray's. Internal Combustion Engines: super-duper crazy -- "let's power our transportation via a series of explosions!" is the thought behind that.

So our list of remaining Villain Candidates can be pared down by eliminating the crazy-but-not-too crazy. The current list:

Solomon Grundy (New addition!)
Token Female: Reverse Wonder Woman.
The Lizard.
Marvin The Martian
Doctor Octopus
Mangog
Lex Luthor
The Joker
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Voldemort
Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy)
Galactus
The Anti-Monitor
Gorilla Grodd.
[SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen.

From that list, we can cut out:

The T-1000 -- because he's a robot, and robots by definition aren't crazy. They have logic circuits, as everyone knows, and if the logic circuits break down we know it because they just walk in circles.
"The Rake," from the Decemberists song of the same name, and the guy from Country Death Song by The Violent Femmes. Both these guys killed their kids, and while that's crazy and despicable, it's also commonplace and not too smart.

The Red Baron (both the real one and the one from the Peanuts comic): He was a flying Ace. An evil one, but crazy people don't fly airplanes well; they invent wings and use those.

All the old guys who ran all the haunted amusement parks in all the episodes of Scooby-Doo, and Rob Lowe in Wayne's World. Rob Lowe liked Tia Carrere, which is proof of sanity. True, he lost to a bunch of idiots from Illinois, but that's not insane, it's just lame. The old guys? If I recall correctly, the haunted amusement parks were always covers for a secret mining operation to find the lost gold that Grandma had buried there years before. That's a crazy level of effort to go to, but in the end, it's still a desire for gold, which isn't crazy enough. Not with the price of gold these days. (More proof that villains are crazy? Sane people don't invent a haunted amusement park to get gold; they invent a company that tells people to mail their gold in and then trust they'll get money back.)

Mr Norrell (who I think turned out to kind of be a villain?): I'm actually cutting him out because in retrospect I don't think he's a villain.

Darth Vader: Was he crazy? I don't think so. Darth was the one who didn't believe in giant battle stations, remember, but trusted ancient religions, which would've been a really smart move had the Emperor listened to him. Darth headed off Han Solo in Bespin, and always sent in the stormtroopers first. I think Darth Vader wasn't hardly crazy at all; he had only the minimal level of craziness required to make him a villain -- probably brought on by being called Annie all the time -- and further proof of his minimal craziness is that it took almost nothing to turn him good again; Luke just threw him a Father's Day card or something.

Saddam Hussein and The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists): I think we agree, just not crazy enough.

Toth (from Raiders of the Lost Ark:) He was nuts -- he used his scarred hand to recreate that one thing to find the Lost Ark -- but, in the end, was just a regular kind of nut.

The remaining candidates,

Solomon Grundy (New addition!) Token Female: Reverse Wonder Woman. The Lizard. Marvin The Martian Doctor Octopus Mangog Lex Luthor The Joker Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Voldemort Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy) Galactus The Anti-Monitor Gorilla Grodd. [SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen,

I think we can agree, all display the requisite minimal level of supercraziness to keep on going. Whether they want to destroy everything that ever existed, or exist as a piece of skull grafted onto the Dark Arts' teacher's turban, or use their mental powers as the King of Gorillas solely to fight Wonder Woman and The Flash, these villains are nuts, but really, really nuts -- they invent healing potions, they break their soul into pieces to make themselves immortal, they alone know the power of the Umonium P-38 Explosive Space Modulator and intend to use it to get a better view of the planets by destroying those worlds that are in their way... they're nuts, and nuts enough to almost be sane.
Next up -- I'll cut the list down further by looking at what our Modern Philosopher Queen, Heidi Montag, suggested is the key to existence: Ambition!

The sun and I have never been close.

Sunblocks today are better than ever at blocking the sun and improving your skin at the same time, which is a good thing, because I think the sun is getting a little more powerful each day, and my skin is certainly getting a little older each day. Older and more wrinkly and damaged and leathery and... well, ecch.

That, combined with the sun's trying to get better at what it does, makes it all the more important to have good sunblock, sunblock that'll protect you even on the sun's most vicious days, days when the sun has gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and is just trying to beat you senseless with UV rays.

I'm a newcomer to this sunblock thing; for years and years I didn't pay attention to things like "protecting my skin from harmful radiation," 'cause that's for suckers. But I paid the price for it, in sunburns and painful summer days and now in prematurely aged skin. I'm only 40, but my skin is (as a best estimate) 300-years-old by now.

I've learned my lesson, though, and it's not too late to fight back (or at least prevent further damage), and I've started using the Sunblock reviews at BestSunBlock.com to help me in my battle against the sun. They post reviews there about which sunblocks worked under which conditions, and whether the stuff they use to help fight wrinkles and restore skin works, too, so I don't have to just pick something at random from the drugstore -- I can get the information I need to get the help I need.

And I need help, and so do you -- don't kid yourself. Even now, with winter coming on, it's still important to keep up to speed on what sunblocks work and what don't. Maybe you have a vacation coming, someplace sunny and warm (with an emphasis on the sunny). Or maybe you like to get outdoors in the winter, on a clear-skied, cold day where the sun can hit your frost-bitten cheeks mercilessly -- but either way you need sunblock year round, so you'll need information on which are best, year round.

The First Best Song By Alli Millstein: "Our Love Is Underground."

So you thought maybe I was just making it up when I claimed that I'd been contacted by a world-famous singer-songwriter who reads my blog?

Well, you were wrong. Because unlike the many other delusions of grandeur with which I fill my day and which I use to distract me from things like "work" and "driving safely," this delusion of grandeur is actually true. It's a truelusion of grandeur.

Or something. I'm not really into vocabulary.

Anyway, today is the First Best Song by Alli Millstein, today's song being "Our Love Is Underground." Here's my video for it:



You can listen to the song while you read what Alli has to say. I asked Alli to pass along how she came up with the idea for the song, and she said:

When I wrote Our Love Is Underground I actually wrote the lyrics first, before coming up with a melody. For me, that happens once in a while. Sometimes I have a creative surge lyrically and end up writing five or six sets of lyrics, and then just saving them. Whenever I have writers block I can go into that bank of lyrics and try and pull something out that I haven't used.

When I wrote the song, I was thinking about New York, and it seemed like an interesting idea to me about falling through the cracks in the sidewalk in the city. The song sort of grew from that idea. Like many of the songs written on the EP, I was going through a time of transition when the song was written, and the song reflects my struggle with that transition.

I understand what Alli means. I once wrote a song called Eatin' Gummi Bears, which reflected my struggle with eating gummi bears. As I recall, I didn't like eatin' gummi bears. That experience gave me the insight to ask Alli about any changes the lyrics might have gone through and the creative process she took in writing Our Love Is Underground. She said:

The lyrics for the song have stayed the same since the day I wrote them, although I did consider revising them at different times. I decided against a revision, considering that what I have works, why mess with it?

The melody to the song, and the chord changes came to me after I wrote the lyrics. I remember I had these lyrics, and I was just playing around one day and found a chord progression and melody that fit with the words. I had a recording I did of this song about 6 months after I wrote it, but the recording that's on the EP is a much more polished, professional recording.

The recording is very polished and professional, and quite lovely. (Can I say lovely? I mean, it sounds kind of girly as I type it, but that's really the word that fits best. Whatever. I'm secure in my masculinity, and it's a lovely song.)

I also asked Alli to pass along anything else she'd like to add about the song, like stories about performing it live, maybe. She said:

Our Love Is Underground is a particular difficult song for me to perform live given the vocal part. If the sound isn't set up well, or I'm not concentrating, things can turn sour quickly. Luckily, I think I've worked out those kinks by now, and it finds it way into my set now and again.

The song has a long title, so I think sometimes I forget to announce the name. I at one point considered naming the EP "Our Love Is Underground," but decided not to because I was worried people would think it was a love-song album, which it's not.

It certainly is not a love song album, as we'll see here in the Month of Alli Millstein. Look for another song of hers coming soon. In the meantime:

Click here for Alli's Myspace page,

Click here for Alli's Facebook page,

And click here to buy the EP "Human Nature" on Amazon.

Skin care you can trust (unlike my office coffee)

The war on acne has two powerful new weapons:

1. My office coffee, which is so godawful that it actually makes me cry. I'm serious. My coffee at home is made in a $10 coffee maker from Wal-Mart, and I buy the absolute cheapest coffee on the market, and I love it. At the office, the Office People Who Buy Coffee have fancy coffee makers and fancy coffee and they put all this time and effort into it, and it's so bitter it hurts my soul. I just poured myself a cup and I took a sip and, honestly, I thought I was going to barf, and

2. Dr. Dermal's new revolutionary acne treatment.

Of the two, I'd recommend the latter for dealing with your acne. My office coffee might help, in the sense that it will destroy your life, starting with your taste buds, but it's not one of the best acne products on the market, like Dr. Dermal's stuff is.

Dr. Dermal's innovative skincare treatment products, available now at their online store, are the only products with ac.net, a patented ingredient developed in France that fights all four acne-causing agents (oily skin, skin shedding, bacteria, and inflammation) and Dr. Dermal's products do it with no side effects.

This new acne range of products is available via free shipping for a limited time only, so ordering now can save over $300-- and you'll get getting the best dermatologist endorsed, holistic skin care product available.

This product has never been tested on animals (they know it's side effect free because it's been human-tested) so you don't have to worry about it being cruel -- and you don't have to worry about it working, because those tests have proven it effective.

So don't live with acne any longer, and don't go through the horror of drinking my office coffee, either -- just get Dr. Dermal's new skin care products and get on with your perfect-skin life.

As for me, I'll be sobbing into my coffee mug.

Grocery Shopping In An Alternate Universe: A Parable

This post appeared first on Thinking The Lions. I know it doesn't quite fit here, but it's important enough that I'm putting it on all my blogs today.


I was one of the lucky ones, I suppose.

I was able to get hired by an employer who offered a great grocery plan. And not only that, but the plan covered my family, which meant that only a few months after getting hired, we'd be able to get to the grocery store almost any time we wanted and buy food.

I liked the plan. Even though I had to pay 15% of my income each month towards groceries (whether or not I bought any), my employer was paying 85% of the cost (whether or not I bought groceries), so I could accept that part of my pay was being taken towards necessities I might never use. It even kind of made sense to me that my employer covered 85% of the cost of the Grocery Plan for the higher-ups who made 2 or 3 or 4 times what I made. Sure, they could afford to pay more for their groceries -- and if they did so, it would reduce my own costs-- and, yeah, 15% of my just-about-minimum wage earnings really kind of hurt a lot more than if I was paying, say, 15% of $200,000 like the guys at the top, but it seemed fair, to me, that we all paid the same exact percentage. Besides, whenever it came up in my mind, I just reminded myself to look only at the percentages, not the actual dollars.

In just three short months, I was covered under the Grocery Plan and it was about time, too, as the kids and my wife were really hungry. We'd put off going to the grocery store until we were covered, but not by choice: Without a Grocery Plan, we couldn't find a grocery store that would let us in unless we paid in advance for everything we wanted.

"But I don't know what I want, yet," I told one lady on the phone. "I don't even know what you offer or what it costs. How can I pay for it in advance?"

She was apologetic and said that's just the way it works.

So anyway, when my Grocery Plan went into effect, I called up and got pre-approval to go to one of the three grocery stores that were kind of near us. The one I really wanted to go to, just down the street, wasn't in the plan, but I could deal with that. I don't mind driving a little, especially because it's important to control the costs of groceries by using only pre-approved stores.

My wife asked "What if we just need a gallon of milk in a hurry? Can't we just run to the Store nearby?" So I asked the insurance lady that, and she said that we could, in an emergency, but that they might not pay for the groceries if we did that and we should try to call them first. Anyway, my wife's just a worrywart. We can plan ahead and never need to run out and get milk at the last minute.

Once I had the pre-approval, I drove to the grocery store, but they told me I needed an appointment to shop. When I asked how long it would be until I could get an appointment, they said they could get me in during the afternoon on Tuesday, three weeks from now.

I wasn't starving, yet, but the kids were pretty hungry. The littlest one, Mr Bunches, hadn't eaten since I lost my last job and I was worried that maybe it was starting to affect him.

"Isn't there any way I could get some groceries today?" I asked the lady at the desk. She said that there was an Urgent Groceries across town, if I felt it was that important.

I pictured Mr Bunches and the way he'd stared longingly at the refrigerator, and decided this was pretty urgent. Not a Grocery Emergency or anything, but pretty Urgent. And besides, even if it wasn't terribly urgent, what other choice did I have? I might have been able to wait a day or two, but three weeks?

So I drove to the Urgent Groceries and went inside. The lady at the front desk asked to see my card and asked what I was there for.

"I need some groceries, today," I said. "I've got some little kids, and a wife, at home, and they haven't eaten in a long time." She looked skeptical, like I didn't belong there, and I wanted to say "Hey, it's your fault that I couldn't get into the regular grocery store," but I didn't, because I didn't want to get them mad at me.

She handed me some forms and said that there was a $100 copay, which really surprised me. "I already pay a premium, through my work," I said. "It's 15% of my income, the same as everyone else's in the business, even the higher-ups -- they make, like 3 times what I do but we all pay the same share, so that's fair, right?"

She said that the co-pay is in addition to the premium, and said I should look at my Grocery Card. I'd never looked at it before -- that whole stack of Grocery Policy Papers and things they'd given me was pretty confusing, and I hadn't read it anyway because it was the only policy my boss offered, so it didn't matter whether I liked it or not, I had to take it or leave it. I didn't really like that I'd pay more every time I went to the Store, but I figured if it became a problem I'd limit my trips, go only when I absolutely had to.

The card said that the copay was $50, and I showed it to her. "That's for regular shopping, not Urgent Groceries," she said. "Urgent Groceries are double."

"I have to pay more if it's more urgent?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, and she didn't sound sympathetic.

"But it's not even my fault I'm here. I tried to go to the regular Grocery Store and they didn't let me in."

"Sorry," she said, but she didn't sound sorry. I had to write out a check for this "copay" and hope that they wouldn't cash it before I got paid on Friday, but what could I do? I needed groceries, and I didn't want to go home and see Sweetie and Mr F and The Boy staring at me.

Then she gave me some forms and said to check in with the receptionist, which was weird because I thought that's what I'd done. But I began filling out the forms and telling them my grocery history, as best as I could. I'd never had Groceries before, so I wasn't really sure how to answer some of the questions.

I sat in the waiting room for about 50 minutes, but I didn't mind because I knew I probably shouldn't have been there. I mean, when I looked at the other Urgent Grocery shoppers waiting their turn, they all looked worse than me. One guy kept smacking his lips and saying "Hamburgers!" over and over, and his eyes looked glazed. There was a little girl there who looked really thin and pale, like she'd never eaten. I thought she should have gone to the Emergency Groceries, or maybe even a Fast Food Place. I didn't mind that she got to go shopping ahead of me.

There were a couple other people like me, though, who didn't seem to really be that needy. I bet they'd done what I did: Just realized that they kind of needed to get some Groceries, and couldn't wait 3 weeks.

While I was sitting there, I couldn't help but wonder why it was that the Regular Grocery Stores weren't open past 5 p.m., or before 9 a.m., or even on the weekends. It might make it easier if they were open longer, or had different shifts. I mean, for regular grocery shopping, I'd have to take time off of work just to go get some potato chips, and if I couldn't do that, I'd always be at the Urgent Grocery Store, since that was the only one open past 5 or on weekends.

Oh, well, I figured. They know what they're doing. It's not up to me to second guess how the grocery business is run.

When they finally called my name, I stopped reading the old Shoppers' Guide they had in the waiting room and got up with my list in hand. I was actually kind of excited: I'd waited so long for this and now I was finally going to get some Groceries!

I took the list Sweetie had made and moved into the store. The first thing I needed was the Bakery, to get some Bread. I didn't see a sign for that, and I asked the clerk up front.

"We don't have a Bakery," she said. "This is an Urgent Grocery, so you can't get everything you need here. If you really need something that's not here, we can refer you. The Emergency Grocery has everything, downtown."

I decided that I didn't need Bread so much, and moved into the Cereal aisle. The selection was pretty slim there, too -- just the bare necessities, but that's what you get, I figured, when you have to go to the Grocery Store after hours. I walked around that aisle for a while trying to figure out which one to get, but I'd never had any cereal before and couldn't tell whether any of them was better than the other, or which one I might need, let alone which one a 3-year-old or my wife might need.

There was a Cereal Assistant, though, and I asked her whether she would recommend one or the other Cereals in the aisle. "I can't really recommend anything," she said. "I'm here to take information from you and pass it on to the Cereal Specialist. Then he and I will talk it over and he'll tell you what you need."

So I answered her questions ("I like sweetened cereal for the boys," I said, and "Maybe something with raisins.") She put it all into her computer, and nodded, and then said she'd be back in a while or the Cereal Specialist would come in in a bit.

After about 10 minutes, the Cereal Specialist came in. He asked me the same questions the Cereal Assistant had, looked at my stomach and my cart (which was still empty) and said "You need corn flakes."

"How much are they?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said, "But I'm sure your insurance will cover it. You should talk to them about it." He handed me a box of corn flakes and then patted my shoulder and said to make a follow-up appointment about a week before the box was empty.

I put the cornflakes in the cart and walked past all the other cereals, wondering why I had corn flakes instead of one of those other ones. It kind of bugged me, to tell you the truth. I'm not the smartest guy about these things, I know, but I saw a Dateline report a couple months ago where they were talking about how corn flakes don't really do that much to curb hunger, and they're not all that nutritious or tasty. I didn't watch the whole thing ('cause... boring), but I got enough to know that maybe I'd never try corn flakes.

Still, he was the Cereal Specialist, and nobody's ever really sure about these things, right?

I did know I needed milk for the corn flakes, and I headed over to the Dairy Aisle. All the milk was behind a counter, where a lady stood in a white coat. I wondered if she was a doctor, and asked her.

"No, I'm the Milk-A-Cist," she said.

"Oh," I said. "I need some milk for these corn flakes. We're going to eat tonight!"

"Did you call your prescription in ahead of time?" she asked.

"Prescription?" I asked.

"I can't sell you most milks without a prescription from the Specialist," she said. "If you've called it in, it'll probably be ready. Otherwise, you might have to wait."

"I've been here a pretty long time already," I said, "And I didn't ask about a prescription in the Cereal Aisle. Isn't there anything you can sell me?"

"We've got some over-the-counter stuff that might work, almost as good," the Milk-A-Cist said.

"Let me have some of that," I said, and she pulled out a bottle of water.

Water with cereal? I wasn't sure about that, but, I'm not Grocery Expert. I didn't go to Grocery School for 8 years or anything, so how should I know what's best? Besides, what else could I do?

"Will that work with cereal?" I asked her.

"I'm not supposed to give advice like that," she said, "But the label says it should be okay. Do you have any allergies to water?"

But I didn't know. I'd never been to the Groceries before. Then I had another thought: "Is that okay for 3-year-olds?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No, you'll need Childrens' Water for them." So she got some of that, too, and then rang it up. I showed her my insurance card, but she shook her head.

"No," she said. "Prescription Milk would be covered, mostly, but for over-the-counter things, you've got to pay cash."

That didn't make any sense to me at all, but, again, who am I to say what makes sense in these things and what doesn't? All these complexities are probably just lost on me. They must be, since the other day a guy on the radio said that we have the Greatest Grocery System In The World. So the weird stuff must work, and I'm not questioning it.

I paid for the waters and then was going to head out, but I looked down and thought Cereal and water doesn't seem like much of a meal, so I decided to try and get something a little more hearty. I headed back to the Meat Department to look for some chicken or something.

But at the Meat Department, there was another clerk. She said "Do you have an appointment?"

"No," I said, "But I didn't think I needed one. This is the Urgent Groceries, right?"

She shook her head. "The Meat Department is a specialist. We can't see you unless you have a referral."

"What's that?" I asked. She sighed and said:

"You have to go back to your regular Grocery Person and get them to refer you to us. Then you call us and make an appointment, and we'll help you with your Meat needs."

"I don't have a regular Grocery Person," I said. "I've only just gotten on a Grocery Plan."

"You should call your plan administrator and ask them to assign you a regular Grocery Person," she said. She seemed pretty nice and added "I'd like to help you, but that's all I can do."

I was really kind of upset. I didn't take it out on her, or the Meat Department, though. It was probably a law, I figured -- probably some stupid government law that was keeping them from helping me right now. Those God damn regulations! It's always like that: every time the government does anything they screw it up. I said that to her:

"Stupid Congress, right?" I nodded. She shook her head, though, and said:

"No, sir, it's just the Policy requirements."

I didn't know what that meant, though. So I thanked her and then said:

"Do you know who my Plan Administrator is?"

She said it was probably in my Policy, whatever that is. There was a 1-800 number on the back of my card, though, so I used my cell phone to call it while I walked back towards the front of the store. I couldn't get a hold of anyone, though. They said to call back during "normal business hours." That made sense: I worked during the day, so they must, too. I'd try to call the next day, I figured, on my lunch break.

Luckily for me, I didn't have to check out at all -- my Grocery Plan was going to pay for EVERYTHING. Except the water, of course. I showed my cereal to the cashier as I went out and she motioned to me.

"We need your address," she said.

"Why?" I asked.

"To send your statement of benefits," she said.

Whatever that is. I gave it to her. She also made me make a follow-up appointment. "Will I get more groceries that day?" I asked. She shook her head and said "It's just to see how these groceries went." I wondered if I'd have to pay a co-pay for that, too, but I figured I could just cancel it. She said I couldn't just call in and talk to them, either, and I'm not going to miss a day of work if the Groceries are fine.

I headed on home, where we feasted on corn flakes and cereal. The Boy complained about the dinner, saying that his friend's dad, when he got hungry, had gotten to go to a fancy restaurant and have a three-course meal.

"Well, what Grocery Plan does he have?" I asked. The Boy didn't know what a Grocery Plan was, so I explained to him that everyone has to have a Grocery Plan, that there's companies out there that will "cover" your Groceries, so that when you get hungry, you go to the Store and they tell you what groceries to get, and then they pay for him.

"Why do they do that?" The Boy asked.

"Because it makes sense," I said. "Nobody knows in advance how much their groceries are going to be, and when they'll need them..." but he interrupted.

"But you know you will need them, right?"

"Maybe," I said. "Not everyone needs groceries."

He shook his head. I could see he didn't get it, and he said "Everyone will need groceries some time or other." I didn't know how else to explain it to him, so I said

"Well, if they need groceries, they get on a Grocery Plan through work and then they'll get them."

"Can't they just buy a Grocery Plan?" The Boy asked. Sweetie and I laughed at that.

"Sure," I said. " I suppose they could just call a Grocery Plan Company and sign up but that'd cost them a bundle. It's better to get a job and have their boss give it to them."

The Boy still looked a little confused and said "But doesn't everyone need to eat? Shouldn't everyone be entitled to at least get some groceries, somehow?"

You've got to expect that from kids: They think that everything's a right, that things like groceries are just guaranteed to be given to you and that somehow, society can guarantee that. I tried to set him straight:

"Everyone can get groceries, if they want, Boy," I said. "But you can't just go around handing them out. We're not Russia, you know. That kind of thing doesn't work. Besides, imagine if the government were to take over the grocery industry!" Sweetie laughed at that, too.

"The government does pretty good with some things," The Boy said. He's probably got teachers that fill his head with that crap.

"Like what?" I challenged him.

"They deliver the mail all over the country, pretty quick, and it's cheap, too. You can mail a letter for less than fifty cents and it'll go from Maine to Alaska in a day or two."

I didn't even know where to begin with that one. "The Post Office?" I said. "That's your idea of government efficiency? Have you ever seen the lines at the Post Office? You wait forever just to get stamps, and the government has to pay the Post Office just to keep it in business." He was being ridiculous. I mean, yeah, I had to wait to get into the Urgent Groceries, but that was different because it wasn't the regular grocery store, which I could have gone right into if I'd had an appointment, plus, once I was in the Urgent Groceries, I'd hardly waited at all.

"Why do they do that?" The Boy asked. "Why do they pay to keep the Post Office running?"

I'd never thought of that, but I gave him an answer: "I guess," I said, "It's because it's important to the government, and people, that everyone gets to mail a letter or send a package and keep in communication with people."

"Aren't Groceries as important as mail?" The Boy asked.

"No," I said, "It's not that. Everyone agrees Groceries are important, but if the Government got into the Grocery business, it would put the private Grocery Companies out of business, and plus, nobody would want to go into the Grocery Store end of it." Something about that bugged me -- I kept thinking of Federal Express and UPS and the Post Office, for some reason, but I shrugged it aside. "We've got the Best Grocery System In the World, and you don't want to mess with that, right?" I figured if the guy on the radio swayed me, it'd sway The Boy.

That was the end of that, more or less. I was going to, the next day, call ahead and make a Grocery Appointment so I could go to the regular store in three weeks, since the follow-up appointment wasn't for new Groceries, but I was pretty busy and, anyway, I had groceries now, so I didn't need an appointment for three weeks away. I didn't know how long the corn flakes would last, but I guessed that if I couldn't get in when they ran out, I'd just go to the Urgent Groceries again.

The only real shocker was that about 3 months later, we got this thing in the mail. We got, like, four things, actually, all these papers that said This Is Not A Bill and had all kinds of figures and numbers on them. I couldn't figure them out -- I've been to college, but these were confusing -- but I didn't need to figure them out. Since they said This Is Not A Bill, I didn't need to do anything so I just threw them away.

The fourth one, though, was a bill, and it was for $4,000. Four thousand bucks! And they said it had to be paid within 30 days or they might send me to a collection agency.

I didn't have four grand sitting around, and anyway, I had a Grocery Plan, so this had to be a mistake. I finally got a chance to call the number on the bill and talk to the lady -- I had to go outside at work to do it because I'm not supposed to make personal phone calls -- and I said that it had to be a mistake because I had a Plan and because it was so expensive.

"I didn't even know how much those corn flakes cost!" I said, and she said that she was sorry about that but there was nothing she could do.

"But the Cereal Specialist said I needed those corn flakes and didn't give me a choice," I said. She didn't have any answer for that one, so I said "Well, anyway, it must be a mistake because I've got a Plan, so I don't have to pay for corn flakes."

"It's not a mistake, sir," she said. "You're not covered for those benefits you received," and when I asked what that meant, she said that because I was a new enrollee, I wasn't covered for Hunger, as that was something she said was a "pre-existing condition."

"You mean," I said, "If I was hungry when I went shopping, you wouldn't pay for it, but if I wasn't hungry, then you would?"

"Exactly," she said. She explained that helped keep their costs down so that I could afford the Grocery Plan.

I tried to make a payment plan, but she said they didn't do that, and that I'd have to pay in full or they might garnish my wages. I talked to a guy I know about this, and he said that maybe a lawyer could help me, but all the lawyers I talked to just said that I could file bankruptcy, and I don't want to do that if I don't have to. I've been just sending them $20 here and there, whenever we have a little extra money, and hoping that they don't sue me or something. I can't keep that up for long, though, since my boss said that they're going to have to start charging the employees more for Grocery Plans to make ends meet at the business. So they're going to raise the contribution to 25%, which seems fair, I guess because with the recession and all, everyone's cutting back and I don't want to get laid off, so paying more seems like a good idea if it keeps me in my job. We couldn't ask many questions, since he told us about it on a conference call; he's on vacation right now, someplace warm like Guatamala or something, but he said even he's going to pay 25% of his wages, so it's not like I'm the only one sacrificing.

_____________________________________________________________

You wouldn't put up with that kind of thing for groceries... so why put up with it for health care?

Tomorrow, or soon, the House of Representatives is going to vote on the health care reform bill. This bill is not everything that's needed -- but it's a good step along the way.

Health care is a basic right that America should guarantee to everyone, and you can help. Contact your representative and tell him or her that you want Universal Health Care. See the links below.

Then contact the White House, and remind President Obama that he said this:


'We can have universal health care by the end of the next president's first term, by the end of my first term,'' Obama said, bringing 600 union workers to their feet during a question-and-answer session with members of AFL-CIO affiliated unions...

And tell him to quit mucking around and get Health Care Reform passed!

To contact your legislator, click this link and follow the simple directions.

To contact the White House, click this link and fill in the form.

WE INTERRUPT THE VILLAINY FOR AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT THAT WILL AFFECT YOUR VERY EXISTENCE AND SHAKE YOU TO YOUR CORE.

Boy, I hope I'm not overselling that in any way. Nah, couldn't be. This is huge. So huge that it deserves more than simply italicizing that word. This is HUGE.

Still not enough.

This is HUGE!

Hmm. Let's try this:

This...

IS...

Yeah. That's better. I'd forgotten how fun it is to draw in huge block letters with crayon-like instruments. You don't get to do a lot of that as a lawyer. (Unless you work in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals! Ha! Ha!)

Oh, God, I'm sorry. I forgot that "lawyer humor" is not funny to the rest of the world. And also that lawyer humor is not funny.

Anyway, I'm getting distracted from the



News.

The Huge News is this:

Singer/Songwriter/Really Really Cool Person Alli Millstein reads my blog and has gotten in touch with me!

This is Alli Millstein:


Memorize her face because you're going to be seeing it a lot, here and in public and on MTV and VH1 and probably in movies and stuff, too, as Alli Millstein is a singer/songwriter on the rise.

Alli was originally named as the Number 4 Overall Best Quirky Chick Singer, a position she earned through her great music and because she's from Brooklyn. While it's no Staten Island, Brooklyn is pretty cool. But mostly she earned that spot through her music.

Alli then contacted me about having read that blog post, and as we all know, if there's one thing I love more than anything else, it's me, so getting in touch with me and telling me you read something from me is the number one best thing you can do in my life.

(Number two: Give me cookies.)

Alli and I have been corresponding a little and I've decided a couple of things:

1. She's now the Number One Best Quirky Chick Singer, a change I've made official by redesigning the original post, and

2. I'm going to feature Alli's music off her new EP, Human Nature, all this month on The Best Of Everything.

Here's another picture of Alli, since I can't find a picture of her Human Nature EP:


You can find out more about Alli on her MySpace page -- or on her Facebook page -- and it's all very interesting stuff, including the very interesting fact that I just found out, which is that she's maybe not from Brooklyn, after all... but is instead a native of Hartford, Connecticut.

But let's just say she's also from Brooklyn, as doing that will reassure you that my legendary research skills are still legendary, and also still skills.

And those legendary research skills, along with my other skills, will be put to the test as I am declaring November to be Alli Millstein Month on The Best Of Everything. Periodically, over the next few weeks, I will be featuring The Best Songs (And Thoughts) of Alli Millstein, with videos (maybe?) and input from Alli and more.

(I haven't forgotten about the villains. I'll finish those up this month, too. But this was important enough to interrupt.)

So say Hi to Alli:



And look forward to getting to know her better over the next Month.

Click here to see all the other Whodathunkits?!!

Click here to see all the other SemiDaily Lists!


Click here to see all the other MiniBests!

Click here to see all the other topics I’ve ever discussed!

Debatin' Mania!

Do you like Great Debates? Do you question authority? Discuss the important topics of the day? Are you constantly challenging the assumptions and dictates of your peers and authorities around you?

If so, you're either one of my children or you are a person for whom Question Bin is intended.

Question Bin is a site that lets you ask a question about anything on your mind -- and then get debates and answers and topics going about it. Questions already up on the site range from "Where did Will Smith go to high school?" to debates like "Balloon Boy: Did anyone take physics this century?" You can get answers, you can get arguments, you can get in a lot of trouble because you've spent the first hour of your day reading and debating the topic of whether Glaring Mistakes In Movies Just Completely Ruin Them (You BET!)... it's all there at your fingertips.

If you like controversy, or like answers, check out Question Bin and get your debate on.

The Best Worst Villain, EVER (Part Three: Go It Alone.)

All villains, all the time...

Read Part One Here.

Read Part Two here.



Everyone knows that one quote about the one thing about evil winning if nobody does anything, right?

I thought I knew that quote, which goes something like All that is required for evil to win is that it wins, or something, but then I was sitting here on Monday morning, having returned to "work" from my week of Adventures in Babysitting, and I couldn't remember how it went, so I did what I always do, which is Google the question.

(I'm not the only one who does that; "scientists" try -- in vain -- to prove things via Googling, too, which means that when I google things, I'm using the scientific method! And to think that Mr. Karsten, my 6th grade science teacher, thought I'd never learned anything in that class.)

In this case, I tried to search for the quote that I almost remembered, typing in "All that is required for evil," a search which will help me maintain my standing as number one on the Homeland Security watchlist.

And I was rewarded with the exact quote, exactly as I remembered it, and no doubt exactly as whoever said it actually said it. Here's the quote I got:

All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

That was attributed, by "QuoteDB," to a guy named Edmund Burke. I didn't know anything about Edmund Burke, so I googled him, then, and got to a page of quotations by Edmund Burke. That page, I was gratified to see, had the exact same quote as the number one quote on the page. And, although it was exactly the same and there's therefore no reason for me to re-write it, I will do that, anyway. Here's the exact same Edmund Burke quote:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Wait a second... that's not the same at all!

That made me wonder -- and get sidetracked, as I so often do -- what the exact quote actually was. And where better to get good, rock-solid answers than from a bunch of anonymous people on Yahoo. After all, these are the people who correctly identified the flavor of a white jellybean as "Mystery." So you know they're authoritative. Or at least that they'd have opinions on the subject.

They didn't disappoint, either: Noted Edmund Burke-ologist "RetroRay" discoursed on the subject, saying as follows:


The eighteenth century Irish statesman, philosopher and political theorist, Edmund Burke, is credited with the remark that "evil prevails when good men do nothing". Some have said that the quote was actually "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

In either case, it means that evil will win if good people do nothing.

Of course, the vexing, unsolved problem is to determine who or what is "evil" and who or what is "good." I, for one, often fear those in the world who are sure that they are "good" and are equally sure that those who oppose them are "evil."

But that might not be the last word on the subject, because the Internet abounds with people who have opinions, most of them wrong, all of them hilarious, and a click over from Yahoo! Answers yields "WikiAnswers," where, if you search for "Who said evil will prevail when good men do nothing?" you can find this:


"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

Numerous searches by numerous people have failed to find this exact quotation in any of Burke's writings,and it is now thought to be a 20th Cen. paraphrase.

Friedrich Nietzche made the quote.

I like that: The quote is first attributed to Edmund Burke, but the author then debunks his own answer, and then, without any sources whatsoever, attributes the quote to someone else entirely.

Of course, the main reason why "[n]umerous searches" by "numerous people" (remember: Everyone proves everything by Googling it!) failed to turn up the "exact quote" might be because they weren't searching for the right quote, but let's leave that aside in the interests of accuracy. Internet-style accuracy, that is, in which the fact that someone said something makes that thing they said true.

Which is why The Best of Everything is such an authoritative reference. I say things all the time, and once said, they're true! (Of course, I stole that quote from Nietzche, who himself stole his quote about evil not from Burke, but from The Flaming Lips.)

The reason I was looking for that quote is because I wanted to use it to lead in to Part Three Of The Best Worst Villain, EVER, although in the end, I'm lucky that I got so distracted by the search for the real Quotent Quotable (as Alex Trebek might say, if he was a little drunk)(Can you picture Alex Trebek just a little drunk? I think that'd be awesome.)

I'm lucky I got distracted by the search for the real quotation because I forgot that starting an article with a quotation is among the worst of cardinal sins for writers. Starting with a quotation is superceded, in terribleosity, only by (a) starting with a dictionary definition, or (b) making your post/article/essay an "open letter" to someone famous.

(Someday, I expect I'll read an editorial that begins with a famous person's quote about the meaning of an open letter, according to Webster's, and I'll know then that the long slow death of good writing, which began with Mitch Albom, is complete.)

I was looking for that quote because it's Monday and I couldn't figure out how else to start this post (that's why it's a cardinal sin; it's lazy), in which I intend to narrow down the list of potential Best Worst Villains, EVER by weeding out those who rely too much on henchman, sidekicks, computers, or other helpers to achieve their evil. My point was going to be this:

If it's true, as The Flaming Lips and Edmund Nietzsche said, that all evil needs to win is for good men to do nothing, then why would evil villains ever need henchmen?

And that is my point, whatever the quote actually is. My point is that Villains do not need henchmen. Not great villains, anyway.

There are three kinds of villains-with-henchmen.

First is the super-competent villain whose plans are so large that he feels he must enlist help, or an army, or both, to achieve them. That type of Villain is exemplified by Dr. Impossible, in Soon I Will Be Invincible, or by Walkin' Dude from The Stand or by Hitler, from World War II.

Let's examine those archetypes a little more closely, beginning with Dr. Impossible. He's a supergenius, a mad scientist, has an IQ of 300 or something, and he's invincible and has superstrength. Using that, he tried to conquer the world 12 times (and tries for a 13th time in the book Soon I Will Be Invincible.) In the book, Dr. Impossible reveals that he robs banks and the like to get money for his superplans, and he has an island lair (as many good villains do) where there is an army, or has been an army, maybe. (I read the book a while ago, so I don't exactly remember if there is or was an army.)

Then there's Walkin' Dude, who, following the decimation of 99% of the human race, begins walking around gathering up evil humans to do battle against the good humans for the right to rule what's left of the world, with "what's left of the world" being, apparently, "Boulder, Colorado," and some grocery stores with cans of food that people can break into and steal.

And, finally, there's Hitler, who I don't mean to make light of and I'm certainly not. We all know what Hitler did, and tried to do -- and if you don't know, watch The History Channel, which presents Hitler shows 23 1/2 hours per day. (Last week, Newsweek had a chart at the back showing which television broadcasts have hit which star systems. At some point, The History Channel will hit Alpha Centauri, whose denizens will then assume that nothing happened in the 20th century other than Hitler's rise to power, kind of the way I assume, based on my US History classes, that nothing happened between 1865-1930 other than "The Gilded Age" and Upton Sinclair's writing The Jungle.)

What happened to each of those Villains, in the end? [SPOILER ALERT!, EXCEPT THAT IT'S NOT REALLY A SPOILER ALERT! FOR THE STUFF THAT HAPPENED TO HITLER, BECAUSE THAT'S HISTORY, AND YOU CAN'T 'SPOIL' HISTORY, CAN YOU?]

[SPOILER ALERT! DISCUSSION: WOULD HISTORY CLASS BE MORE FUN IF STUDENTS DIDN'T KNOW HOW THINGS TURNED OUT? IMAGINE A TEACHER SAYING: NEXT WEEK, WE'LL FIND OUT WHETHER THE UNITED STATES WON THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR OR NOT!" ]

[COMMENT ON SPOILER ALERT! DISCUSSION: YOU THINK I'M BEING FACETIOUS, BUT I BET IF YOU ASKED THREE RANDOM HIGH SCHOOLERS RIGHT NOW WHETHER THE US WON THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR, THE ANSWERS YOU'D GET WOULD BE "Um...", "Which war was that?" and "I've got pepper spray, you creepy old man."]

Each of those villains failed, and they failed, in large part, because their troops let them down. As they always will, when working for a Villain. Who goes to work for a villain, after all? People who get forced to do it, or who are villainous themselves, that's who. That's not exactly a roadmap to success: I'm going to pin all my hopes for world domination on those two guys who are only doing this because they need the antidote for the poison I gave them, and that third guy who just tried to stab me in the back, literally.

Nazis, bad people who survived a plague, people who would be willing to go work on a deserted desert island to take over the world using weather satellites: These are not the type of recruits you want, and Evil, far from prevailing, will never win out if it relies on guys who wouldn't get let in the door at a job fair. The Nazis army, in particular, won all its stunning victories before anybody knew they were fighting. If I were to attack you entirely by surprise out of the blue, a la Andy Samberg:



If I were to do that, I'd almost certainly get in a good punch, like the time I fought a guy outside a teen bar when I was 19, and I hit him first and really scored a good one on him, too.

But if you then start fighting back, I'm almost certain to lose, just as I did that fight outside the teen bar, because that guy then punched me in the side of the head while I was celebrating my first-- and only -- good punch, then he tackled me, and then he kicked me while I was down.

Which is what happened to the Nazis, once the world began fighting. They began to lose, all over the place. And that's what happens to all villains who rely on an army to take over the world. Saddam Husseins' Republican Guard -- the "much vaunted" Republican Guard -- collapsed in the face of an invasion that consisted solely of George Clooney, Marky Mark, and Ice Cube. Walkin' Dude's army fared even worse: They were wiped out by a guy called "Trashcan Man," if I remember correctly.

Worse than Competent-Villains-With-Armies are Incompetent villains with armies. This includes guys like The Emperor from The Star Wars movies (I know, I said nobody else from those movies except Darth Vader, but I'm making an exception because I make the rules here), Sauron (and Saruman) from The Lord of The Rings, and Space Invaders.

I'm not even sure how these guys raised an army in the first place, but it's very apparent they are not qualified to lead one, and that their "army" barely meets the minimum criteria for a fighting force.

Space Invaders provide the best example of incompetence at the head of an army. Whatever particular Space Invader was in charge, that person was a complete nincompoop. Line the army up and have them march slowly forward? We figured out a way to stop that kind of attack back in 1776 (although that kind of attack was then tried by the South at Gettysburg, putting whoever led the Confederacy's forces there onto the short list of villains who should ride the short bus.) Even the Galaga invaders understood you've got to try to outflank people sometimes.

Then there's The Emperor, who people equate with "evil genius" but who had the "genius" notion of using an army made of clones.

Let me make the point of how bad an idea that is by looking at corn. As far back as the 1970s, scientists and farmers became concerned about preserving the genetic diversity of crops after "southern corn leaf blight" wiped out 15% or more of crops -- something that was possible because 90% of the corn hybrids shared cell cytoplasm. They weren't clones, not exactly, but they were very, very similar, genetically, and so they were easily wiped out by one common threat.

Now, can you see where that would apply to clones? One bad genetic marker, one discovery of a susceptibility to a virus, and your entire clone army is wiped out.

The only people dumber than the Emperor were the Old Republic/Rebellion, which spent billions on lasers and spaceships and X-wings and cool monitors and droids, but which could have simply funded a small lab somewhere to find a way to throw a retrovirus into the cooling system of the Death Star, kill all the clones -- and then have the Death Star for themselves.

Then there's Sauron, who might be the dumbest Villain of all. First Sauron takes all, or almost all,of his power and puts it into a ring.

Why? Why do that? Is it because the power was itchy and you just wanted to get some relief? How is a ring safer than your own body? Was there some chance that Gollum was going to kidnap you and wear you in a cave?

But then, Sauron decides to get his ring back, and take over the world, by relying on Orcs. Twisted versions of elves. That's his big plan. Beings that have all the troubles exhibited by the usual army-in-the-service of evil (that is, conscripts or villains themselves) but who also were made of "heat and slime," or, maybe created as parodies of elves and animated by evil will. (Tolkien tried it both ways.)

So they're basically Solomon Grundy, but without the muscles-and-falling-in-love-with-heroes thing going for them.

(Note: I just decided that, having remembered him, I'm going to add Solomon Grundy to the list.)

Some villains, though, don't rely on an Army of Clones or Easily Demotivated Conscripts. Some villains rely on a small group of henchmen, or just one henchman or assistant.

Villains like Dr. Evil work with a tiny group of almost-as-evil people, while villains like Plankton mostly work alone but get advice and help from one sidekick. In Plankton's case, that's his computer wife, Karen.

Either way, it's a bad idea and proves that you're not worthy of true Super Villainry. Again, not only does Evil not need help, but the help usually brings you down or points out just how inept you are.

Dr. Evil's helpers show both. There's the Will Ferrell character, who is tragically, but comically, inept at his job, and the rest of the helpers are about the same.



Except for Scott, of course. The helpers who are competent, though, are routinely ignored. Scott's suggestion that they just shoot Austin Powers is derided as no good. Number Two, in the absence of Dr. Evil, built Virtucon into a powerful, rich corporation -- and powerful, rich corporations have a far better chance of taking over, or wrecking, the world than any number of atomic bombs. Just ask Wal-Mart, which actually has its own nuclear program, but doesn't talk about it much because they don't need it.

Captain Hook is another example of a Villain with a few henchman, and look what happened to him: He lost to a kid, after repeatedly ignoring his own men's suggestions that they simply sail off somewhere where Peter Pan didn't live, and go back to pirating. Plus, he couldn't even kill Tinkerbell. Or keep her captive.

Villains with only one henchman don't fare any better. There's not many of these around, or at least not many I can think of (and Egocentric Existentialism then proves that those Villains I can't think of don't matter), so I'll go with Plankton, again. Plankton's computer wife works against him in two ways: First, she's always making suggestions that Plankton refuses to follow, to his own detriment -- his plans go awry when he doesn't listen to her. But second, she's always suggesting that he not do his evil plans.

How is a guy, even a one-celled guy, supposed to succeed when his wife is constantly telling him he shouldn't even be trying? How is a guy supposed to, for example, create the World's Best Sandwich if his wife is always telling him that he needs to put on pants and get into the office? (Not that I'm talking about anyone in particular.)(Sweetie, that last one would have been it, and we'd be rich, because, like they say, "Build a better sandwich and the world will beat a path to your door so that Evil can prevail more easily.")(Nietzsche.)

Master Control Program, too, had a henchman: Sark. But MCP was easily bested because Sark was easily bested and Jeff Bridges was able to figure out the intricacies of video games and how to drink electronic fluid and beat him in a movie that wasn't copied by The Matrix at all, really, except that it was.

No, what's necessary for success, if you have a henchman, is that your wife/henchman back you up -- like Richard Heene's wife backed him up, making his plan to rise to fame work brilliantly. At least until she confessed -- another reason not to have henchmen. If you don't rely on a 6-year-old and your wife, you can't be ratted out by a 6-year-old and your wife. If Richard Heene had done his plan himself, we'd even now be watching his reality show on which he and Kate Gosselin travel around the world battling Death Panels.

In the end, Villains work alone, as shown by the quote I almost introduced this post with, and as shown, too, by a far better quote than that. Rather than discussing what is or is not necessary for evil to triumph, one could listen to the words of the greatest philosopher known to the 20th century:

"I'm a loner, Dottie. A Rebel."

Now, I know he wasn't talking about evil, but neither was Burke Nietzsche or whatever his name was; the quote I kind-of-led into this post with was actually about Rock-and-roll. The full, actual quote is this:

All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to keep on claiming that Coldplay is rock and roll when clearly they are not. And what's so great about Radiohead, while I'm on the subject? Aside from Anyone Can Play Guitar, they've never really had a good song, have they? And that wasn't all that great, either. I mean, it was okay, but it wasn't, like a classic...

-- Friedrich Burkington III, in Walden: Or Life In The Woods.


So, what have we learned? That key number two to being a great Villain is: Be a loner.

Working with henchmen, groups, armies... that's for second-rate dictators and soon-to-be-imprisoned madmen.

Working alone: That's the way to go.

With that, I'll pare the list down again. The remaining candidates for Best Worst Villain, EVER are:

Solomon Grundy (New addition!)
Token Female: Reverse Wonder Woman.
The Lizard.
Marvin The Martian
"The Rake," from the Decemberists song of the same name.
The Red Baron (both the real one and the one from the Peanuts comic)
All the old guys who ran all the haunted amusement parks in all the episodes of Scooby-Doo.
Doctor Octopus
Rob Lowe in Wayne's World
The T-1000.
Mangog
Mr Norrell (who I think turned out to kind of be a villain?)
Darth Vader
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists)
Lex Luthor
The Joker
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Darth Vader (and absolutely nobody else from the Star Wars univere including especially not Boba Fett, so don't nominate him.)
Toth (from Raiders of the Lost Ark)
Saddam Hussein.
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists)
Voldemort
Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy)
Galactus
The Anti-Monitor
The guy from Country Death Song by The Violent Femmes (Just to prove that I can think of bad guys from songs by groups other than the Decemberists)
Gorilla Grodd.
[SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen.

A word about why Voldemort is still on there: Voldemort had henchmen: The Death-Eaters. But Voldemort didn't appear to ever coordinate with them, so far as I could tell. He told them, at times, what to do, but he also seemed to mostly work alone when he wasn't attached to the back of a guy's head under a turban. So I'm leaving him on here, for now.

Canada In A Nutshell (But Not Literally.)

Before a few minutes ago, here is everything I knew about Canada:

1. The superhero team "Alpha Flight" was from Canada, and had that cool guy with the suit that was kind of the Canadian Flag. Canada Man, I think he was called.

2. Something about hockey.

But now, I know a lot more about Canada, like, I wish my kitchen was there so that I could get a free $32,000 kitchen makeover.

I was looking for recipes this morning because I wanted to make Sweetie something nice for her birthday, and I came across this "Maple Leaf Market" website. I didn't know what it was, but it had headings like The Butcher, The Baker, and The Pasta Maker, and I'm a sucker for rhymes, so I checked it out.

It turns out that Maple Leaf Market produces meats and baked goods and pasta, and their site has a lot of helpful tips about how to buy and cook meats and some entertainment tips (like "Host a progressive dinner") and "Great Meals In Minutes," all very helpful stuff, but all of it paling in comparison to the $32,000 kitchen giveaway.

The contest requires only that you enter your email (you can enter again each day) and if your name is drawn, you get a $32,000 kitchen makeover: that's like a new kitchen, plus. Imagine what I could do with a brand-new $32,000 kitchen: Fancy countertops to eat my cereal on, new tile floors to spill my cereal on, great new cupboards to get out more cereal... the possibilities are endless.

Unfortunately for me, I am not a Canadian, and the contest is only open to Canadians (just like Alpha Flight!).

If you are Canadian, though, click that link above and enter yourself. If you're not Canadian, then let's all get together and wait until a Canadian wins, and then go to his or her house!

The Best Worst Villain, EVER. (Part Two: Let's Lose The Chicks)

I'm in the process of deciding who is The Best Worst Villain, EVER, a task I am convinced has some value to society.

Yesterday I did Part One: Naming The Villains. Today I begin the process of reducing that list of villains, a process that will continue until there is only one villain left, with that villain being The Best Worst Villain, EVER.

Before I begin narrowing down the list, though, I'm going to add to it, because I thought of a few more villains. So to the List of Villains (everything sounds more important if you capitalize it... try it yourself: President. Cure For Cancer. Pop Tarts. See what I mean?)

To the List of Villains, I will add:

Plankton (From SpongeBob SquarePants.)(See: Capitalization!)
Gorilla Grodd.
Dr. Impossible (from Soon I Will Be Invincible.)
[SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen.

Those were all I could come up with last night, even though I devoted a substantial amount of time to thinking about Villains, at least until I got distracted by Parks & Recreation.

I realized, again last night, that I had no real women villains on the list, and so I asked Sweetie if she could use her insight to name some Female Villains for me. Sweetie's insight into that is (a) she's a woman, and (b) she watches a lot of movies and TV shows that I don't, so maybe she could think of some. Sweetie thought and came up with:

"Lara Flynn Boyle's Character from Men In Black II." Which movie, I note, actually had roman numerals in it, making Men In Black and the Superbowl the only two pop culture events which take themselves so seriously they require Roman numerals to keep track of them.

Or, at least, Men In Black was one of the two; it isn't any longer, I guess, something I just found out because I couldn't remember if there had ever been a Men In Black III, one that I hadn't seen, like I didn't see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 or Spider-Man 3. I never seem to make it to the third installment of movies, which you'd think would be bad, because it would seem to leave me hanging and never knowing how things turned out, but I'm surviving all right. Don't worry about me.

They are, it seems, going to make Men In Black 3, giving up on Roman Numerals but continuing the adventures of the guys in black suits erasing people's memories and making jokes about aliens living among us, an exercise that seems kind of pointless since the first two movies, which had their charms, ultimately were so throwaway that I can't, as I sit here now, remember which scenes that I liked took place in which of the two movies, or, even, what the plots of the movies were, beyond Will Smith fights aliens who are trying to take over the planet.

Nor can anyone, even Sweetie, who's usually good about that, remember details of the two movies, details like: What was Will Smith's character's name? (It was "Ofcr. James Darrel Edwards III", then "Agent Jay," according to IMDB, which I think has it wrong because I believe the conceit of the movie was that the agents were named after letters, so it should be Agent J, but maybe I'm wrong... who cares?) Nor can anyone remember what Lara Flynn Boyle's character was called. I had to look that up, too.

It was "Serleena." Generic and nonmemorable, and also, Lara Flynn Boyle was never really very hot. They should've gotten someone else to play that part.

I then asked The Boy, who likes movies and stuff, to name some female villains and he came up with Aileen Wuornos (although he put it this way: "Charlize Theron in that one movie where she was ugly,") and then he came up with, too, "Jason's Mom in Friday the 13th," and then Carrie, (asking "Was she really a villain, though?')(To which I responded "I don't know. Did she kill someone?")

He finished up with: "How about Daryl Hannah from Kill Bill?" which made me proud of The Boy because he's finally given in and agreed with me that Kill Bill is one movie. That's a huge pet peeve of mine: People who refer to Kill Bill as two different movies. It's ONE movie. It was released in halves because it is one long movie. I've run into people time and again, though, who say "I liked Kill Bill One but not Kill Bill Two." Do you realize, you people, how idiotic that sounds? It's like saying "I liked the first half of The Godfather but not the second half," if in saying that you meant to imply that the first half of The Godfather was an entirely different movie than the second half.

The Godfather, by the way, was not a good movie. I got a little bored watching it and had no desire to see The Godfather II.

Oh! Three things that use roman numerals!

Having then exhausted our collective knowledge of Female Villains, I gave the issue some thought today and made a decision. Originally, I was going to have the first cut-off be something different, but having spent nearly 24 hours thinking about it, off and on, I had to change my plans and make the first cut-off Are you a man?

That is, if the villain is female, then the villain has absolutely zero chance of being The Best Worst Villain, EVER, as I am hereby today removing all women villains from the list.

I have to do that, because Women Villains are either nonexistent, or terrible, or both. Everyone I ask to name a Woman Villain stumbles around and then comes up with some half-baked villain that they can't even remember the name of, really, and can't remember what she did or what she was all about.

The Boy, in talking about Daryl Hannah, said "I don't remember her name in the movie." I don't, either. I remember that she had an eye patch, and was blond, but beyond that, I don't remember much about her at all, making her a useless villain.

As most women villains are. Desperate to pad out the list, I considered my options: Make up a villain? I thought about that, seriously thought about it. Reverse Wonder Woman, I figured I could make up, adding Reverse Wonder Woman to the list and figuring that nobody would figure it out because nobody really cares about female villains, and because Wonder Woman was a lame superhero, anyway, with no good villains of her own, so far as I know. She was always fighting Flash castoffs, or maybe Greek goods, or just palling around with the rest of the Superfriends. Reverse Wonder Woman, I bet, could easily have passed for a real supervillain. I could invent a backstory that ripped off Bizarro and Reverse Flash (did he run backwards? Go really slowly? DC Comics, you really have a problem with understanding opposites) and move on, eventually dropping Reverse Wonder Woman off the list at some stage of this process.

But that seemed too easy. There must, I thought, be some female villains out there, and just because I don't know about them doesn't mean they don't exist, right? (The fact that I don't know about something doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it just means it doesn't matter. I am the first-ever practitioner of Egocentric Existentialism.)

So I finally googled around to try to find some female villains, and came across a couple of sites that attempted to claim that the Woman Villains they were discussing were worth paying any attention to whatsoever.

AfterEllen.com has the Top 10 (Hottest) Female Villains, which isn't exactly feminist, I think, or is it? Is it anti-feminist to say women are hot? What if it's women saying women are hot? Is that okay? What if it's women who like women saying women are hot? Isn't that just as sexist as if a man says a woman is hot? Modern politics confuse me.

Whatever credibility that list had, though, was undermined quickly by putting Demi Moore on it. Demi Moore apparently played a female villain in those worthless and annoying Charlie's Angels movies that came out a while back. Appearing in Drew Barrymore's twice-a-decade "Chick Empowerment" flick is not to your credit; every few years, Drew Barrymore puts out a movie that promises to totally empower women and be fun and female centric and blah blah blah and every few years we have to hear how Drew Barrymore is on top of Hollywood, and then the movie bombs and we can go back to our regular lives, which hopefully include neither Drew Barrymore nor Demi Moore.

The AfterEllen list also has Meryl Streep from The Devil Wears Prada, and that, too, is an argument against counting female villains towards anything. I'm ashamed to live in a society where people like me, God-fearing, honest, hard-working (?) people know what Prada is, let alone that there was a movie about people who know what Prada is.

Then I went to something called the "OFCS Top 100 Villains List," and scoured that for female villains. Out of 100, I counted 15:

8 Wizard of Oz, The - The Wicked Witch of the West

17 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Nurse Ratched
18 Manchurian Candidate, The - Mrs. Iselin

22 Misery - Annie Wilkes

49 Double Indemnity - Phyllis Dietrichson

53 All About Eve - Eve Harrington
54 Bad Seed, The - Rhoda

57 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - The queen

63 Basic Instinct - Catherine Trammell

66 Rosemary's Baby - Minnie Castevet

69 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - Jane Hudson

70 101 Dalmatians - Cruella De Vil

71 Metropolis - The evil Maria -

75 Last Seduction, The - Wendy Kroy

82 Batman Returns - Catwoman

But there were also two villains who aren't even human

19 Jaws - The shark
28 Alien etc. - The alien

But, technically, the Alien in Aliens was a female, or at least one of them was, the one Sigourney Weaver battled in the suit that the makers of The Matrix would then copy for their crummy sequels.

But at least we've got some women on the list now, right? Before I remove them from the list, that is, since, now that I've got some women on the list, I'm going to strike them right back off of it, because the first criteria I've established for being The Best Worst Villain EVER is: You have to be male.

Why is that, you may ask, while also thinking "Man, Sweetie has a jerk for a husband." Here me out here, though. I've got a valid point to make, and that point is this:

Female Villains Suck.

See how that looks better with capitals?

They do, though. They're terrible, for a couple of reasons:

1. They always focus on clothes. Every female villain in every movie, book, song, television commercial, or political campaign, at some point focuses on clothes. Take Lara Flynn Boyle in Men In Black II (I've already forgotten her name!). She begins her scene in the movie by crashing her (tiny and cute) spaceship into the ground and then...

... Picking up a fashion magazine with an underwear ad in it. Would male villains do that? Okay, probably, because men will look at an underwear ad under any circumstances. I guarantee you that the guys on the Apollo 13 mission, en route to the moon while trying desperately to fix whatever it was that had gone wrong with the ship, would have stopped to pass around an underwear ad had one been in that spaceship. The only reason that thing got fixed was because the Mission Control guys didn't have access to magazines, or the Internet, so they had the ability to focus on repairs instead of "just happening to glance at that ad, Sweetie." (Also a good line: "I was looking to see if there's something you'd like.")

(That latter one does not work if you were caught at a strip club. Be warned.)

Anyway, before I get too distracted, back to the point: Chicks and clothes. It's always about the clothes. Hillary Clinton ran for president, and talked about her pantsuits along the way. Sarah Palin ran for (in her mind) Empress of a Talk Show Or Somethin' and began her run by going clothes shopping. Both women wanted to be leaders of the country, and couldn't get their minds off clothes.

Cruella De Vil's entire reason for being evil was to get clothes. Sure, she wanted to get them in an evil way, but clothes, as a motivation? Lame.

Women trying to take over anything for clothing will face competition only from other women, ultimately. Men don't care. Or notice. "Go ahead. Rule the clothing department or whatever," we'll say, when confronted with women's evil demands. And we'll say that about ten minutes later, when it finally sinks in that you're talking to us.

Oh, and before I forget: Lara Flynn Boyle's quest in Men In Black II is to get a piece of jewelry. That alone ought to be enough to disqualify all women villains from Supervillainry, but there's more:

2. Women Villains Have Feelings. When not out shopping for kicky pumps to totally rule the universe with, Women Villains get all bogged down in emotions that men villains don't bother with, like love and having babies and love. You can't be totally evil if you love things; how are you ever going to push the button on the Universe Eraser (TM The Best of Everything 2009) and create a blank-slate new start that you can mold in your own image if just before you do that, you remember Your son/That man who left you at the altar/Fatty Shnookumkins, your widdle kitty who you totawy wuv, then wipe away a tear and walk away, head drooping down over your magnificent breasts, encased in...

... whoa. Got carried away there. But how will you do it? How will you not feel the love that women have overflowing in them all the time, for everything? Sweetie cries during Cheerios commercials, and Sweetie is a woman.

Catwoman loved Batman. Black Cat loved Spider-Man. Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction loved Michael Douglas, for reasons lost on everyone except Catherine Zeta-Jones. Rosemary had her baby (didn't she? I've never watched the movie, but I assume she did.) Annie Wilkes loved that writer. Willow loved, I don't know, someone or other who then turned her into Dark Willow, if my hasty reading of the AfterEllen list is correct, but Dark Willow probably still loved whoever it was that had turned her into Dark Willow. Jean Gray loved Cyclops before she became the Phoenix and tried to destroy the world. (I hope that's right, too, because I never really read X-Men, and I've fallen asleep each time I try to watch the movie, leaving my only lasting impression of the X-Men being that they mispronounce Magneto. They say Mag-neet-oh, but that's wrong. It's Mag-NET-oh, just like a "magnet" is a "magnet," not a "magneet.")

Women love clothes, and women love feelings, and the two of those keep women out of the running for Best Villains, because it means they're focused on all the wrong things and can never make it to the big time.

That's the end result of women villains, if you think about: they never make it to the big time. They always focus on some little nagging detail, some project, or get hamstrung by emotions. All the women villains in all the movies, books and other media end up aiming low: they want their daughter Snow White out of the way. They want to kill some johns in Florida. They want to eat a little girl on a faraway planet, a little girl that they'd tolerated living there for years and years and years, even though they (the Mother Alien) were apparently able to not only move around but also to think intelligently, meaning that if it was really so important to kill that little girl, it would have been taken care of years before, instead of waiting for Sigourney Weaver to come along and try to rescue her, at which point Mother Alien pulled out all the stops. So it must not have been that important, or there was another motivation behind that big fight Mother Alien put up, and, as we've seen today, we know what that motivation was: Either Mother Alien loved little Newt, or Mother Alien loved what Little Newt was wearing.

In any event, I'm done with worrying about whether there are, or aren't female villains out there that I don't know about (or care about) because I'm removing them from the list of candidates. The first criteria to meet in being The Best Worst Villain EVER is that one must not be hamstrung by caring about clothes, or by caring, which means that one must be male to be in the running.

Out of deference to women, though, I will leave one woman on the list of potential candidates, a Token Female who can carry the torch (or Jimmy Choo strappy sandal, or picture of a cute puppy in a bow tie) for all of female kind.

With that, the list is hereby narrowed down to:

The Token Female: Reverse Wonder Woman.

Saddam Hussein.
The Lizard.
Sauron
Marvin The Martian
Frankenstein
"The Rake," from the Decemberists song of the same name.
The Red Baron (both the real one and the one from the Peanuts comic)
All the old guys who ran all the haunted amusement parks in all the episodes of Scooby-Doo.
The team that always plays the Harlem Globetrotters.
Doctor Octopus
Rob Lowe in Wayne's World
The T-1000.
Bowser (from Super Mario Brothers.)
Hitler
Walkin' Dude
Mangog
Klingons
Captain Hook
Mr Norrell (who I think turned out to kind of be a villain?)
Darth Vader
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists)
Lex Luthor
Master Control Program
The Joker
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Lex Luthor
Darth Vader (and absolutely nobody else from the Star Wars univere including especially not Boba Fett, so don't nominate him.)
Toth (from Raiders of the Lost Ark)
the Qotile from Yar's Revenge.
Voldemort
Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy)
Galactus
The Anti-Monitor
The guy from Country Death Song by The Violent Femmes (Just to prove that I can think of bad guys from songs by groups other than the Decemberists)
Space Invaders.
Binky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.Gorilla Grodd.
Dr. Impossible (from Soon I Will Be Invincible.)
[SPOILER ALERT! IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE OR READ THE COMIC BOOK THIS'LL KIND OF WRECK IT FOR YOU] Ozymandias, from The Watchmen.

In the interest of fairness, I need to note that Robot Chicken invented
Negative Wonder Woman and did a skit about Reverse Superheroes.
But Negative Wonder Woman would be nothing like Reverse Wonder Woman.
Reverse Wonder Woman would be made of anti-matter
and would have short blond hair and her bracelets would attract bullets, and...
...I give up. They're the same thing, essentially.
Seth Green, if you want to sue me, go ahead. But if you do, all I'm going
to do is keep pointing out that you read this blog.

Go on to part THREE: GO It Alone by clicking here.

The Best Worst Villain, EVER. (Part One: Naming The Villains.)

The FBI released it's updated 10 Most Wanted Last week, and it was notable for (a) not including Richard Heene on it, and (b) for being boring.

Not to downgrade either Richard Heene -- whose true crime is giving his kids stupid names -- or the seriousness of the actions that get someone placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, but I felt, as I watched the news story about the new guys on the list, a little let down, a little like, well, there should be something more to the 10 Most Wanted List than just... a bunch of murderous drug dealers.

Where, I wondered, are the REAL villains of the day? Where are the real bad guys, the bad guys that in their insane lust for power, their depraved genius plots to take over the world, kidnap the girl, destroy the sun, whatever, would show us a glimpse into the evil that lurks deep inside humanity, the evil that is so terrible that upon its rearing its ugly head, we have to rise above our own base natures and become heroes... nay, we must become SUPERHEROES, to fight such an evil.

In short, I wondered: where are the good villains?

I wonder a lot of things about a lot of things, many times wondering what's happened to the good parts of society. Because it seems like society is slowly dropping out all the good parts. We're giving up on Thanksgiving -- as I predicted, some stores are now open on Thanksgiving, making it only a matter of time until Thanksgiving takes its place among second- or even third-tier holidays, noted on a calendar and in sales at Sears, but nowhere else -- but my wondering isn't limited to holidays. I also not so long ago wondered why we don't get any new good superheroes; I recently picked up a comic book, a brand new comic book, reading a superhero comic for the first time in 20 years, and the superheroes in this comic book were the same ones that were old when I was first reading comics back in the 70s and 80s. Recently, I pointed out that we don't really have movie theme songs anymore, pointing that out because it's true, and because we're the poorer for it.

Unlike some so-called "thinkers" (Aristotle, Colonel Mustard), I don't just sit around and ponder things like some latter-day Thoreau mulling over my thumb in my ethereal blog-cabin. I do something about things, taking the time to explain how lame things can be cool, and what rock-and-roll really is, and now I'm going to do it again, via a series of posts that makes the world a better place by focusing on people who want to make the world a worse place. (Worse-r place? Why not?) By focusing on people who want to make the world a worser place.

I'm going to do that because, as I said, we need villains, and we need good villains. Wait, that's an oxymoron, and Nature Abhors An Oxymoron, as I learned in my physics class.

(Yes, I did learn that in my physics class. I think I've made pretty clear that I never actually learned, in school, what the school hoped to be teaching me, resulting in an "education" that has given me "intelligence" which can be best described as "a hodgepodge of half-truths, beliefs, and facts gleaned from comic books," although there's also a smidgen of "absolute certainty that neither dark matter nor velociraptors exist or existed."

(I haven't yet made up my mind about Fruitadens haagarorum, although the fact that the name calls to mind a cereal mascot makes me suspicious that the so-called tinosaur (really? Can we just quit being lame about this, please?) was invented as a publicity stunt for a new cereal along the Booberry line.)

(Then again, I tend to think everything is a publicity stunt, because in my mind, marketing departments no longer worry about television commercials and instead are always trying to get a pack of gum to be landed on the moon via laser shot from Shaquille O'Neal's bicep or something. The only thing I didn't immediately peg as a publicity stunt was Richard Heene's claim that his son floated away on a balloon, or didn't float away, or whatever it was he claimed. I didn't even know about that until after the fact.)

(But, just to be ahead of the curve, I'm going to go ahead and say this: The claims that Richard Heene faked Balloon Boy as a publicity stunt are themselves a publicity stunt, a meta-stunt that will have you all reeling, and I said it first.)

So we don't need good villains, we need bad villians, worse villains, worst villains. We need villains for the same reason we need rain, bitter-tasting foods, people who hate Brett Favre for no apparent reason, and the country of Uruguay: Without the bad, we don't know what's good. Or, put differently, good cannot exist in the absence of evil. Pizza can't exist without broccoli (maybe... I'm a little unclear on the science there) and Superman can't exist without Lex Luthor.

Maybe... although I think actually Superman existed before Lex Luthor did, and now that I think about it, I'm positive he did, and in fact, Superman created Lex Luthor, in that lab accident that made Lex Luthor go mad and start trying to kill Superman.

Whatever. The point still stands: Evil defines good as light defines dark. Some of humanity's greatest moments have come when good faced off against evil, and the greater the evil, the greater the good that overcame it.

We saw that when The Americans forced the Brits to leave this country, letting us found a country premised on idealism and equality and the determination to someday claim that any government intervention in anything is socialism and should be damned.


We saw that when Peyton Manning faced off against the then-undefeated Evil New England Patriots*, and failed to bring them down... only to have his greater and nicer younger brother rise up and vanquish Tom Brady and Bill Belicheat for once and for all, at least until this season started and they began scoring 300 points per quarter.

We saw it in World War I, and World War II, and we'll see it in World War III, which should be starting any time now, according to my 2012 Farmer's Almanac, which I got at a discount because for some reason it ends on December 21st. (Must have been a printer's error.)

Nowadays, though, nobody truly knows what evil is, what a villain is. Everything is Hitler this and Stalin that. People can be accused of horrible crimes and have half of Hollywood come to their defense, or their funeral. Public figures can shoot someone in the face and still hold office, but a politician who suggests that perhaps the richest country in the world shouldn't, maybe, let people die in the streets for lack of insurance is a fascist. We imprison an old man, rightly, for ripping off people in a massive Ponzi scheme, but then hand out a trillion dollars in bailout money to the Wall Street bankers and insurance executives who ripped people off in a different massive Ponzi scheme, and then we hurl insults at the President because he got awarded a prize he didn't earn, but also didn't seek.

It's time to set things straight, and teach people what evil truly is, what a villain truly is. It's time to stare, as Conor Oberst urged, to stare into "the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair," and not just to their faces, but into the faces of madmen and dictators and scientists who become reptiles and beings that eat planets and more, and time to show humanity what evil truly is, define it and categorize it and shape it, and in doing so, time to name The Best Worst Villain, EVER, who, when we look at him (or her, it could be a her, even though women really can't be great supervillains, just like they can't dunk, but, sure, her, okay) when we look at him... we see the dark half of ourselves that will then lose to the brighter half of ourselves.

So, over the next few posts (until I grow bored, to be honest) I'll do that, naming various villains and bad guys and supervillains and then slowly winnowing and sifting them out until only one remains, the one that embodies all of the necessary qualities it takes to be The Best Worst Villain Ever.

I will begin the way all endeavors must: with a bologna-salami-mozzarella sandwich and bowl of "Roast Beef" flavored Ramen noodles, which I had for lunch while I came up with a preliminary list of all the Villains I could think of, from real life and comic books and books and movies and songs and "various" and "whatnot."

This list is what I'll be working off of. It's not a comprehensive list of every bad guy ever, mind you. It's just the bad guys I could think of while I ate the aforementioned endeavor-beginning lunch. But if I couldn't think of a bad guy in that time, he's not a very bad guy, is he? So it's a pretty good list to start, although I retain the right to add to it. (And if you think of one I've left off, make sure you mention it.)

Here's the villains, bad guys, she-demons and others currently in the running for The Best Worst Villain Ever.

Saddam Hussein.
The Lizard.
Sauron
Marvin The Martian
Frankenstein
"The Rake," from the Decemberists song of the same name.
The Red Baron (both the real one and the one from the Peanuts comic)
All the old guys who ran all the haunted amusement parks in all the episodes of Scooby-Doo.
The team that always plays the Harlem Globetrotters.
Doctor Octopus
Rob Lowe in Wayne's World
The T-1000.
Bowser (from Super Mario Brothers.)
Hitler
Walkin' Dude
Mangog
Klingons
Captain Hook
Mr Norrell (who I think turned out to kind of be a villain?)
Darth Vader
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists)
Lex Luthor
Master Control Program
The Joker
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Lex Luthor
Darth Vader (and absolutely nobody else from the Star Wars univere including especially not Boba Fett, so don't nominate him.)
Toth (from Raiders of the Lost Ark)
the Qotile from Yar's Revenge.
Voldemort
Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy)
Galactus
The Anti-Monitor
The guy from Country Death Song by The Violent Femmes (Just to prove that I can think of bad guys from songs by groups other than the Decemberists)
Space Invaders.
Binky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.
Snow White's Stepmother, The Queen.

That was all I could think of for now, but I'll add to it.

I'll note that as I finished this up, I asked both Oldest and The Boy to name villains, and both said: The Joker. But I'd already thought of him.


Click here to go on to Part Two: Let's Lose The Chicks.