Even the mention of the name Tetris automatically creates imaginary colored blocks falling down an imaginary screen. Everyone knows that if a person plays Tetris long enough you start to dream about it as if were seared into your subconscious. How many Tetris dreams have you had? This visual creates a tone. The world then becomes a series of abstract shapes. It compels you to try to get rid of all the empty spaces in life. Tetris brings out the O.C.D out of everyone. This would be a horrible psychological nightmare if it weren’t so damed fun and addicting. Tetris is the most ported game ever, existing on almost every platform possible, selling millions of disk, cartridges, and tapes across the globe. Chances are you have it on your mobile phone right now. In 2007, Tetris made it on IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time list coming in only second to Super Mario Bros because of Mario’s uncanny ability to shoot fireballs from his penis. Tetris has truly made it into the lexicon of modern pop culture but few are aware that it was a product of the Cold War.

Back in the U.S.S.R., back when there was a U.S.S.R., in 1985 the Iron Curtain was closed tighter than a nun’s thighs. The Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse due to military build up of the Cold War and it’s troubled fight with Afghanistan. This time period wasn’t all that bad – I mean, at the very least the Soviet Union served as a really great non-Nazi, but Nazi-like, villain for our movie industry. I’m pretty sure that made them feel much better. Even in Communist Russia there were pockets of creative thinking and individuality. The Soviet Academy of Science’s Computer Center was one of those pockets.

In the Academy there was a kind-faced computer programmer named Alexey Pazhitnov. He looks somewhat like a reddish-brown haired Yakov Smirnoff. All Russians tend to look like either hot, porno, young things that will do anything for an American dollar, an ex-KGB agent who will kill you if you look at him the wrong way, or Yakov Smirnoff (this might just be me, though). Alexy was your general nerdy computer science guy who was just bored at work. He had a love for puzzle games especially a game named Pentominoes. Pentominoes is a game with different shaped peaces you put down like a jigsaw puzzle, the last person the put a tile down wins. Russia then was a world with very little T.V. and Radio so this was as exciting as it got. Inspired by the very boring sounding Pentominoes Alexy set out to create a computer version to “test out the system”. He named it Tetris after the Greek numerical prefix for four, tetra, and tennis even though it looked or played nothing like tennis.

At the Academy of Science, Alexy’s predecessors plotted the trajectory of Sputnik and calculated Soviet superpower; while his contribution to the state would be a way for its citizens to look like they were working to their bosses while totally screwing off. Sound familiar?

Even without color or sound the prototype halted work in the Computer Center as all of his comrades were one by one hypnotized by falling blocks. They all just sat around smoking tons of cigarettes and played Tetris like zombies enslaved to the computer screen. Tetris was copied on to disks and spread through Moscow, then through all of Russia, then through the entire Eastern Block like some kind of lazy virus. The game could have remained behind the Iron Curtain as just a small way of wasting time if it hadn’t made its way to Budapest, Hungary.

Robert Stein was your typical mustache-twirling businessman. He was the president of Andromeda, a British software house that mostly made its money by buying Hungarian software for cheap and selling it to the west for a mint as its own. On one of his visits to Hungary he noticed all the programmers huddled around a single screen. This was how Tetris caught his eye and how he got a blinding gold fever. Stein sold all the rights (that he didn’t own) to Mirrorsoft UK and its USA affiliate, Spectrum Holobyte, owned by Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Foundation before he even had talks with the Russians. This “mistake” would lead to a clusterfuck of legal battles for the next decade. Stein did try to get the rights from Moscow but returned empty handed. With no firm deal in place he had a stroke of brilliance. Why not just steal Tetris and claim it was made by Hungarian programmers? What could possibly go wrong with screwing a Communist Superpower that had lots and lots of guns?

In 1988 Tetris was released for all computers. The marketing played on the fears and fascination the western world had with Russia. People just wanted a piece of what was behind the Communist wall. The game sold insanely well and was received with much fanfare. So much noise was created about Tetris it even reached the ears the Soviet government. The state formed a new company to deal the with the Tetris issue. This company was called Electronorgtechinca, which sounded like a gay European disco band. Thankfully they had a shorter, scarier, more commie name – Elorg. They wanted to know who the fuck was selling their property and why haven’t they received any money for it.

The people of Elorg, though new to the game of capitalism, proved to be quick learners. They realized the person responsible for the theft of their product was Robert Stein. They threatened to cut bring any deal involving him to a screeching hault. Stein, being the ballsy asshole that he was, threatened the Russians back, saying that he would start an international incident. He pressed on, bickering and pestering the Elorg, soliciting a contract for months. Surprisingly, the Russians didn’t kill him; instead they drew up a contract. Stein eagerly signed the contract and didn’t realize that the contract deemed that he only had the rights to Tetris on a computer platform. This contract expressly forbids rights to arcade and handheld versions, and any other mediums “which we did not dream about yet”. This F’d Stein in the A.

Tetris sold like gangbusters to PC users, but how many people had a PC in the eighties? Matthew Broderick in War Games, Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Matthew Broderick in Project X – and that was it. There was a whole other market that was called the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES or Childhood Zombie Creator. Robert Maxwell of Mirrorsoft, who still believed that they had the rights to Tetris on all formats, granted Atari (The mortal enemy of Nintendo) the rights to create Arcade and NES versions of the game under the name Tengen.

Nintendo was developing the Game Boy handheld gaming system and wanted to package Tetris with it. They also wanted to give Atari a little payback. So, they enlisted Henk Rodgers, president of Bullet-Proof Software (Bullet-Proof managed to get the rights to Tetris from Tengen for the NES Japanese version, “The Super Famicon”, earlier that year), to get the rights to the handheld version of Tetris. Henk contacted Stein about the rights, but quickly smelled the steaming batch of backstabbing Stein was brewing. Henk decided to go rouge and headed to Moscow. Stein, sensing why Henk was asking about the rights, also decided the to fly to Russia. Robert Maxwell’s son, Kevin, also flew to Moscow to straighten out the mass scale licensing mess that was Tetris. This all happened at the exact same time forming a three-way orgy of Eighties-style, coke-induced greed.

Henk Rodgers was a friendly and smart businessman, but he arrived in Moscow without any contacts or even an address for ELORG. He had made a very smart move, though, that the others did not. He befriended the creator of Tetris himself, Alexey Pazhitnov. This was how he got to meet with ELORG’s representative, Evgeni Belikov, first. Henk showed Evgeni a cartridge of the Famicon version of Tetris. Belikov was shocked and said that ELORG never gave Henk the right to produce such a thing. This was, of course, not the reaction Henk was looking for. Henk explained that he got the rights from Tengen. Belikov said he never even heard of Tengen. Henk figuratively pissed his pants. Henk began to tell Belikov the whole story that Stein never opted to tell. He then in a show of good faith wrote a check for the million cartridges he had already sold and promised more checks to come.

Stein met with Belikov later that day not knowing he was going to get screwed. Belikov made Stein sign an alteration to his original contract defining computers as “PC computers, which consisted of a processor, a monitor, disk drive(s), a keyboard and an operation system”. Stein did make out with Arcade rights, which would later be worthless. He was lucky to just get out of Russia with his life anyway.

Kevin Maxwell would be grilled like hotdogs in a backyard barbeque about the Tengen cartridge. He had no knowledge that his company sold the rights to Tetris so he told Belikov that it had to be a pirated copy. Kevin Maxwell would leave the office stripped of any rights to Tetris and was only allowed to bid on any remaining rights left after the smoke had cleared.

Ultimately, Henk Rodgers was rewarded for his honesty by receiving not only the handheld rights, but the total console rights for Nintendo. Nintendo would put the screws to Atari by forcing them to stop all sales of Tetris and made them pull all unsold copies from store shelves. Atari had already spent millions on producing and advertising Tetris. Several hundred thousand copies of Tengen’s Tetris sat in a warehouse forgotten like the Arc of the Covenant in Indiana Jones. This was a blow that nearly destroyed Atari. In the midst of the legal struggle to follow, Robert Maxwell’s entire media organization collapsed. Robert Maxwell then died suspiciously “off the side of his boat” when questions arose about his dirty business practices.

Everyone had their pockets lined with gold when the dust finally settled; everyone except the creator of Tetris himself. Alexy Pajitnov continued to work at the Science Academy as just another salaried worker, never receiving even a bonus from his employers. He was given a nicer apartment, though, because that’s just as good as millions and millions of dollars. The Iron curtain eventually fell and Alexy was given an invitation to leave the country by an old friend, Henk Rodgers, in 1991. In 1996 the licenses were renewed and Alexy finally started to receive royalties for his creation over a decade later from the start of his story. He worked for Microsoft from 1996 to 2005; Bill Gates rubbed his hands together and drooled from the mouth the entire time.

Tetris started as a project created out of boredom and became a way to stave off boredom. The name Tetris is as easily recognizable as the names Superman and Batman. It is so ingrained in our pop culture that scientists had to come up with a term for when someone plays so much Tetris that it overshadows their thoughts, mental images and dreams. The term is The Tetris Effect. Tetris is now, and will be forever be, a classic until the end of time, endlessly playing on loop in our hearts and minds. 

Tune in next week for another great moment in nerd history!

When people think about Donkey Kong today they mostly think of the fantastic documentary, King of Kong: A Fist Full of Quarters. They think of Steve Wiebe’s fight against the evil empire, Twin Galaxies, and their personal Darth Vader, Billy Mitchell, to have a high score recognized. They think of this movie and mostly of nothing else, because with the few exceptions of fanatical and, let’s face it, creepy nerds, nobody gives a shit. They don’t care to look passed the high scores and competitive players in American flag ties to see the genius that is the game. Today we look at the game that saved Nintendo of America, and left a legacy that will last a lifetime.

In the year of our Lord (Nintendo) 1980 the world had submitted to a pandemic of biblical proportions. The world had a fever –a Pacman fever. Video game arcades were taking in mass graves of dead presidents by robbing the young and the young at heart of their pocket change. For a quarter you could be yellow guy with an eating disorder or shoot down aliens or stop a city from nuclear annihilation. Money was to be made and this would be a time for new ideas and creativity or blatant thievery of ideas and the death of original thought. In November 1980, Nintendo would decide to do the latter. They released Radar Scope, a shooter that manages to steal the game play of both Space Invaders and Galaxian while still somehow remaining different enough so that nobody could sue.

Radar Scope was a brief success in Japan and Minoru Arakawa, president of the newly found Nintendo of America, hoped that same success would be repeated in the land of the free and the home of the brave (America, back then). Of course his hopes would be crushed like a random Japanese soldier in a Godzilla movie. Americans hated it. It took months for the games to arrive to New York after Minoru ordered them and by this time any hype that was surrounding it had slowly quelled. Also the game’s sound consisted of loud, high-pitched chirping and as everyone knows the only loud, high-pitched chirping Americans will put up with is the kind coming from the drunk girl they’re trying to nail. The game was a flop and Nintendo of America was stuck with thousands of unsold units tucked away in a warehouse like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Financial ruin breathed down the neck of Minoru Arakawa. What was a rich guy who got is job through nepotism do? He would beg, really break out the knee pads and lick the boots of the man who gave him the job in the first place, his father-in-law and Nintendo CEO, Hiroshi Yamauchi.

Minoru wanted a new game to put inside the old Radar Scope casings. Hiroshi realized that his son-in-law had disgraced himself and dishonored the family, decided to get somebody to fix the games instead. He got a young industrial designer named Shigeru Miyamoto a guy that never designed a game before. Instead of tweaking the game for an American audience he decided to “fuck it” and do something fun instead. He would draw from his joys of things like Popeye and King Kong and design an entirely new game.  Miyamoto working with Nintendo’s chief engineer, Gunpie Yokoi made video game history by creating the first game that contained a story, multiple and different levels, cut scenes and graphics that actually looked like characters instead of boxes.

Yes there is a story that exists in Donkey Kong, albeit a simple one. Donkey Kong was actually the pet of a chubby mustached carpenter named Jumpman. Jumpman didn’t give a shit about PETA and abused the ape. Donkey Kong became enraged and escaped but also wanted a little payback and maybe some hot ape-on-girl action and kidnapped Jumpman’s girlfriend.  Her name was originally, generically, Lady. Jumpman set out on a quest to save his girlfriend. I bet you didn’t know that Mario was an abusive pet owner back then. You never know, maybe he laid down the goon hand on Princess Peach also.

Hiroshi Yamauchi believed that the game would be a major hit and contacted Minoru Arakawa with Nintendo of America and sent them a unit for testing. Their verdict was pretty much, “worst game ever”. They hated it because it was so different from everything on the market and they were uneasy about the strange title. They asked Yamauchi to change the name to which hey replied, “fuck you” so the name stayed. (I’m not sure of the actual words exchanged, but I’m sure the sentiment was the same.) Arakawa stood by the game because if your father-in-law, who owns your ass, decides that it’s a hit, then you back the man up. Nintendo of America did add a few things to appeal to the American player, namely NAMES. The Lady was changed to Pauline after Polly James, the wife of the warehouse manager, Don James in Redmond, Washington and Jumpman got his new name, Mario after Mario Segale the warehouse landlord.

Donkey Kong would become an instant hit when it was released in July of 1981. Out of the 3,000 Radar Scope units. 2,000 of them were converted to Donkey Kong. After the initial 2,000 units sold more orders were made and soon they were selling 4,000 units per month by October. Overall 6,000 units were sold and $180 million was made. The next year they made another $100 million. Mario and his abused ape appeared on cereal boxes, board games, pajamas, comic books, toys and they were even made into cartoons for Saturday Supercade on CBS. Mario would move on to be one of the most recognized video game characters of all time, a character still used to sell game systems today. Not bad for a game that was created to fix a mistake.

The mad scientist is a major staple of any geek genre. From Cobra Commander to Dr. Doom, if you are planning to take over the world you better get your ass a PhD. Thankfully, our scientists only use their massive, bulging, heads for the betterment of man kind or to create smarter weapons to keep our dangerous levels of over population to manageable rates. Thank God mad scientists only exist in the pages of funny books and in cheap SyFy original movies. Or do they? Of course there are real mad scientists or this week’s History of the Nerd would be really disappointing. It still might, but you won’t know for sure unless you read on about the “Three Real Life Mad Scientists.”

3) Dr. Sidney Gottlieb: Uncle Sam Wants You to Turn on, Tune in and Drop Out.

Dr. Gottlieb was a stuttering, club footed man so naturally he was a speech therapist and loved to “cut a rug” on the dance floor. He also headed the awesomely codenamed “Project MKULTRA”, a clandestine umbrella operation that ran from the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s and was created by the CIA. MKULTRA was mostly interested in chemical and psychological warfare so naturally they wanted to get their hands on some LSD and dose people until they tripped major balls. Most of the experiments were on the up an up with willing test subjects and the actual scientific method, but let’s face it those were boring and sometimes you just want to cut loose and have some fun – on the public.

Dr. Gottlieb (being only one man) couldn’t possibly have fucked up as many people as he needed for his studies by himself. Like any self-respecting mad scientist he had henchmen to get the job done. Enter Gottlieb’s goons: George Hunter White, an ex-army officer who supposedly killed a Chinese spy in Calcutta and Ike Feldman, ironically a narcotics agent who posed as a pimp.

At first, White and his wife would hold parties and serve up LSD martinis to their unsuspecting guests. As the guest experience either took a magical trip on a boat on a river or the people just, horrifyingly, lost their minds, White made notes on the effects of the drug. This sounds pretty much like a few raves i went to in the 90’s. The project grew out of the White’s apartment and moved to a CIA safe house which they called “The Pad”.  This was when Ike Feldman joined the psychedelic party. Feldman, who was recruited by White, went undercover as a pimp and gathered up prostitutes. They paid these prostitutes to bring their “Johns” up to “The Pad” and secretly dosed their drinks with LSD. Again, as people tripped balls White observed, but this time behind a two-way mirror, making notes and drinking martinis like the 50’s man he was.

By the end of their run, they had secretly dosed hookers, soldiers, doctors, sailors and mental patients. They were ruining lives, relegating many to mental institutions and had killed at least one person who had the ultimate bad trip.

2) Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov: An Army of Ape Man Atrocities.

That’s right, Ape Men! An army of them, crushing the world in their fist with superhuman strength! Yes, a dream only men dare to dream in Stalin Russia. Ivanov perfected artificial insemination at the turn of the century (not the last one, the one before, the one that really mattered) and of course the natural evolution of that technology is to wonder who or what you could stick it into and in what kind of combination. He went on to put strange sperm where it shouldn’t belong to create a whole slew of hybrid animals that spat in the eye of God because he never intended them to exist in the world. Some of these animals were Zeedonks (zebras and donkeys), Zubrons (wistents and cows), a hybrid of an antelope and cow, mouse and rat, mouse and guinea pig, guinea pig and rabbit, and many others – way too many to have funny names for.

Zeedonks and guinea-rabbits sound perfectly cute, but things got decidedly uncute in 1910 when he gave a presentation to the World Congress of Zoologists in Gaz where he went into detail about creating a human-ape abomination. This idea, like a gun in a play, would inevitably have to go off. In February 28, 1927, Ivanov fired off a few human rounds into the vaginas of a couple of chimps. While at an experimental primate station in Kindia, French Guinea, he inseminated at least three female chimpanzees, but promised that he didn’t do it “the old fashioned” way.

When Ivanov returned to the Soviet Union later that year he was still heavy for some hot, hybrid action. In 1929 he eventually got the support of the Society of Materialist Biologists and Stalin who wanted his invincible army of Ape Men. Ivanov planned to perform his experiments in Sukhumi. This time, however, he would round up five human women and a turkey baster full of warm ape spunk. Unfortunately, before he would go around giving the ‘ol in and out to his subjects the only post pubescent male ape remaining at Sukhumi died before they could milk it. Before he could get a new chimp stud there was a political shake up in 1930 and what would you know, Ivanov was arrested. He was sentenced to five years of exile to Alma Ata. He worked at the Kazakh Veterinary-Zoologist Institute there until he died of a stroke on March 20, 1932. The Ape Men never marterialized.

1) Vladimir Demikhov: How much is that doggie in the window with the puppy
sewn to his head?

Again with the Stalin era scientists! Vladimir was actually a pioneer in transplant technology. His crazy-ass experiments actually led to uncountable scores of lives being saved because of his work. This doesn’t mean that he didn’t do some questionable shit, though. His main victims, err, test subjects were dogs. In 1946 he performed the first heart transplant in a dog – Rover survived for five months. In 1947 he carried out the first animal lung transplant, also dog, and in 1952 he conducted the first coronary bypass, on a dog. They all pretty much died from the experiments, but what was up with all the dogs? Nobody really knows, but I’m guessing revenge for some childhood trauma or maybe he’s just a cat person.

Demikhov finally had a dream, a dream of making everyone instantly throw up. One night in 1954 he went about realizing that dream. The experiment involved not one, but two dogs. One fully grown dog that would probably fetch you your slippers when you got home and the other an adorable, cute and cuddly puppy. He somehow managed to stitch the head and upper body of the cute puppy to the neck of the kind and loyal, larger, older dog. He connected their blood vessels and windpipes keeping both animals alive. The puppy could still lap up milk from a plate, but the liquid would just horrifically run out of its unconnected throat.

Demikhov may have added to the advances of medical sciences in the end. We do take for granted the idea of transplants. You may have to wait on a list, but the procedure could save your life. A two-headed dog however – that’s just fucked up.

The following is a video of the Demikhov’s two headed dog. Please do not press play unless you want to get totally freaked out, or if you’re a real sick bastard, aroused.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbFZTUwu8I0

 Next week on History or the Nerd, real life mad scientist: to be continued.

I heard last week from Jonathan London that Rob Liefeld said on his Twitter feed, “Transformers 3‘ set for July 1, 2011!!! YES! I love me some robots in disguise!!!” Sure, this comment shows that he is really excited about shitty movies but it’s nothing compared to tidal wave of shit that has bubbled out of his mouth over the years. In every industry you have what professionals refer to as “assholes”. In movies there is Bret Ratner, in music there is Kanye West and in comics there is none other than Rob Liefeld. He’s not a capital “A” because he couldn’t draw an ankle to save his miserable life. There are some bad artists in comic books; it’s not a sin. Look at Greg Land, nobody is saying he’s an asshole, just that he’s a shitty artist. No, the reason Rob’s so very despised is because he had actually managed to do and say things that would have his tongue cut out in some middle eastern countries. Today we will examine some of these foibles.

ROB LIEFELD: EMBEZZLER OF MONEY:

I heard once that Rob Liefeld once sold a signed limited edition, gold foil cover of Young Blood for over a thousand dollars at a comic book show. This was of course during the mighty days of Image Comics, a company started by comic creators Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen, Whilce Portacio, Jim Valentino, Marc Silverstri and Rob Liefeld.  During the span of about five years the world was under a magic spell that caused people to buy really shitty comics by the wheel barrel full. I bought them, you bought them and we all look back on ourselves with more shame than the most shameful sexual experience – the STD was the money we lost and will never get back.

Why would someone who starred in a Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee and who was making millions of dollars siphon money from company funds? Because he’s a giant prick, that’s why. In June 1996, Marc Silverstri left Image Comics, taking his studio Top Cow with him like a kid taking his football back home with him. The reason was Rob Liefeld and the fact that he was paying personal debt with Image company funds. This, of course, was just the tip of the Liefeld iceberg of suck.

Rob had his own comic company called Maximum Press outside of Image Comics (Extreme Studios, Maximum Press, Awesome Comics, the man pretty much named every business venture as if he was living in his own personal Mountain Dew commercial) and had plans to move titles over from Image. He also used Image staff to do promotional and production work for Maximum. He also tried to steal artists from his fellow founders studios. He also didn’t pay many of his artists; really the list goes on and on. The Image founders voted to fire Rob Liefeld, Liefeld in return said he quit, which is usually the thing someone said then they get fired. 

ROB LIEFELD GETS INTO A PUBLIC FIGHT WITH RAGS MORALES:

Rob Liefeld once stated that what he thought of Rags Morales and his art in the amazing miniseries, Identity Crisis (You know the story where DC heroes lobotomize a criminal for raping someone and then somebody’s wife gets murdered? If there’s rape, murder and lobotomy, you know it’s going to be good). When Rob got on a message board on Newsarama.com to defend his shitty art and comic sales to a comic fan (rising above it is something Rob just doesn’t understand, that and how to draw hands and feet.) he inadvertently opened himself to an all out attack by Morales.

Morales started by calling Rob an “artistic retard” and went on to say, “So why should I care if Rob doesn’t like my work? It’s not that I really do care, we’re different artists doing different things. But I do care about the fans and when a “professional” says something disparraging, it’s damaging. Comeuppance is required and Rob needs to know I’m not to be toyed with.”

Rob, a man as cleaver as he is talented, said, “Color me shaking in my boots. If I reacted to everyone who cracked on my work, I guess I’D BE YOU. Look me up at the next show, Rag.”

Rags finished the fight with a powerful, “Nah, you react to fans like it’s personal. I don’t. But chump hacks? No way. Give up your P.T. Barnum skullduggery and do something useful… like work. I don’t appreciate you bringing up my name negatively to draw attention to yourself. And as far as being me? I’m sure you’d lop off your right hand at the wrist to be me. If you knew what a wrist looks like.”

If this was a boxing match Rags knocked Rob’s ass out by punching him in the balls. Awesome.

ROB LIEFELD DISSES ALAN MOORE:

In an interview for OC Weekly, Rob Liefeld recounted working with legendary comic’s writer Alan Moore. He then went on to insult arguably the greatest writer of comic books ever. Rob Liefeld asked Alan Moore way back in the 90’s to continue the story of his Superman knock off, Supreme. Moore, who always championed independent comic creators, agreed but with the provision that he was allowed to toss out everything previously done with the character, as he believed that the comic was a steaming pile. He even won an Eisner Award for best writer for it. The follow is from OC Weekly:

“…Alan, I think had really dug what he was doing with us, because by then he’d expanded it from Supreme to Youngblood, to Glory…I still have all his original proposals, they’re a riot, dude. He’s definitely taking archetypes and doing the Alan Moore version…I called him up one time and said, ‘Hey Alan, how about we do a Teen Titans style book,’ and he went quiet and he goes ‘That’s what Youngblood is.’ I thought that was our Avengers-type book.”

“But then he took that formula and just kinda did that same thing, I mean, Tom Strong is Supreme, it’s flattering that he found his groove back with us and started winning awards back with us because people forget, he’d fallen off the map, you can’t really find a great Alan Moore book from ’90 to like ’96, when he did Supreme, even the stuff he did for Todd [McFarlane] was derided like he was asleep at the wheel, like he didn’t care because it was campy, whereas with Supreme he gave it that Silver Age with a twist, and nobody was doing that. And again, what he did for Supreme was ripped off for the next five years by all the other writers. He’s always been a trendsetter.”

I always believed that Alan Moore decided to give Rob Liefeld a break and work on his crappy book, but if you were to believe Rob Liefeld, Moore was sleeping in a gutter begging for work. Alan Moore didn’t do shit in the 90’s except for From Hell, wrote the novel, Voice of the Fire, Lost Girls, Wild C.A.T.s and started and entire line of comics under the America’s Best Comics title by the end of the decade. On a good day in the 90’s for Rob Liefeld, he drew a really big gun that looks like a metal tube, about a thousand pouches on a single belt, stole poses and a layout from a better artist and called it a day.

ROB LIEFELD HATES THE GAYS:

Rob Liefeld created a number of characters in the 90’s. They all had a few things in common, they were all incapable of smiling, they all had big shoulder pads and knee pads, they all had a lot of pouches and they all had stupid names. Cable, Stryfe, Deadpool, Shatterstar, they all sound like named thrown out by 6 year olds having a one-up contest on codenames before they play “soldiers” in the backyard. The vast majority of these characters were abandoned by Liefeld after only a few appearances and other writers took over.

Over the years writers have hinted that Shatterstar was more than a little queer. He never had a girlfriend, hung out with fellow X-Force teammate, Rictor, a lot, and loved to dance to Madonna. Well, in issue #45 writer Peter David decided to take the hints and make it explicit. Rictor and Shatterstar were finally reunited and it felt so good that they christened their reunion with a big gay kiss. This did not sit well with Rob Liefeld.

On his personal forums he wrote: “As the guy that created, designed and wrote his first dozen appearances, Shatterstar is not gay. Sorry. Can’t wait to someday undo this… Shatterstar is akin to Maximus in Gladiator. He’s a warrior, a Spartan, and not a gay one.” I had more than a little issue with this because Rob just got his history all freaking wrong and I’m a stickler for history (see column title). Spartans were all sorts of gay up and down, left and right and in and out (hehe). During a Spartan marriage the woman dresses in drag in boy’s clothing and waits in a pitch-dark room. The Spartan enters the room and uses the good o’l spear attack on her, the spear being his penis. He leaves her in this room to go party with his friends and they all have orgies with little boys. I am not making any of this up. Seriously.

Peter David wrote a little response: “I understand that some parents have the same reaction. They were responsible for their children’s first appearances and, when informed of their sexual persuasion, firmly declare it’s impossible, they can’t be gay.

I find particularly distressing Rob’s contention that Shatterstar can’t possibly be gay because he’s a warrior. That might come as a bit of a shock to Alexander the Great. For that matter, among his assortment of gay friends, I suppose Rob has none in the military since of course gays aren’t allowed to serve unless they keep their mouths shut. Perhaps Rob would like to see “don’t ask, don’t tell” implemented in the Marvel universe.” OH SNAP! You got knocked the fuck out, again, Liefeld!

ROB LIEFELD IN CONCLUSION:

In conclusion, he’s a prick. The thing is that there had always been pricks in comics, just look at John Bryne (at least that guy has talent). Rob Liefeld, however, just doesn’t shut his blowhole. He keeps talking, laying down another brick on his personal road to Hell with every comment he makes. When he gets to Saint Peter or who ever has his job, but in Hell, he is going to look at Rob and say, “What is up with the tiny feet you draw?” I just can’t wait for the next ridiculous thing he has to say.

What do you hold most dear to you heart? As you search the archives of your mind for an answer you may think of your wife, your children or more importantly, your Xbox 360. But you may not be thinking honestly. The only thing, that when taken away, could leave you crying to yourself, listening to Nirvana’s Half The Man I Use To Be would be, drumroll please, your penis. If you are a girl then you are just envious of the penis (this is true because Sigmund Freud said so). For example: Frank Castle’s family was murdered, but he still had the will to live and eventually became the Punisher. If he had gotten castrated in Nam, do you think he would still be doling out the pain or simply crying to himself each and every night?

Editorial Note: please excuse that Hong chose THIS as a representative picture of “The Punisher”

In 2008, Police in the Congo (the same place that Bruce Campbell got killed by gorillas) arrested 13 people for stealing or shrinking other men’s penises. They, of course, were sorcerers that used black magic. 14 victims, who were also detained by police, recounted their horrible ordeal. They said the sorcerers simply touched them and their genitals disappeared or shrank. They didn’t touch them in the crotch however – cause that would be gay.  The funny thing is that the police were trying to protect the perpetrators from being lynched because, when examined, these men still had their penises. It turns out, surprisingly, that the victims were bat-shit insane. They wouldn’t even believe the police when told their junk was still there and that they were just flaccid, impotent, or small. A decade ago in Ghana, 12 suspected penis thieves were kidnapped and beaten to death by angry mobs, the police this time, thought it would be a good idea to not let that happen. The belief in fatally retracting dicks, or shrinking dongs, or a belief in penis theft is commonly known as “Koro”, a Malaysian word for tortoise and slang for penis. Tortoises heads retract into their bodies and disappear, also their heads look likes penises –angry snapping penises. Koro is thousands of years old, happens internationally, and usually happens en masse.

Written record of Koro was first penned by the people that still have the biggest mental hang ups about little penises. I speak of course of my people, the Chinese. Why can’t they just realize it’s not the size of the boat but the motion of the ocean? It first appeared as “suo-yang” in the hilariously racist-titled manuscript, The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. This is a manuscript that dates back to 300BC and it had a sequel called, The Visual Guide to Chinky Medicine and Pop-up Book.  In 1967, a massive outbreak occurred in Singapore. Hospitals were packed with people worried that Mr. Winky had left for vacation inside of their bodies. Guys desperately used anything at hand to prevent their Willies from shrinking into their bodies including: pegs, clamps and even the firm constant grip from concerned family members. In America, we call the firm constant grip from concerned family members “incest”. In 1967 Singapore they called it an “insurance policy”.

The panic apparently stemmed from rumors that pork was poisoned from swine fever inocculations and was causing dong shrinkage. In 1984-1985 and then in 1987, Guangdong, another similar outbreak happened, but this time the culprit was a genital thieving fox spirit, the beautiful Hu Li Jung.

The other largest concentration of Koro incidents was in, strangely enough, Africa. It is strange because anyone who spends any time watching internet porn knows that black people need not be afraid that they have small penises. In Africa, the thieves are sorcerers using black magic and the Koro is usually caused by an unwanted touch from a stranger. The Africans are more focused on the thievery part of Koro than the turtle penis part of it.  Recent incidents were reported in Nigeria, Benin and Ghana.

Asians and Africans are not the only ones who experience this type of cocktastrophe. Koro had been reported in almost every nationality, though there are differences. In the Asian and African countries they believe that Koro could lead to death (but really, is there any reason to live after you lose your WingWong?)

Western countries do not consider this a fatal disease/ailment. In Western countries Koro is viewed as more of a mental disorder or, rather, social scares. Case studies have reported Koro during the following: depression following a stroke, in relation to phobia for AIDS, after a brain tumor, during schizophrenia and sometimes after a bad trip after smoking pot (the drug that makes you hungry and mellow and not the actual drugs that really do make your penis shrink – like Cocaine and Methamphetamines). There is currently no real cure for Koro except one crazy guy in Greece who got better after being prescribed mood stabilizing and anti-psychotic medication.

It’s easy to say that cultures that experience mass hysteria about penis thieves are just primitive, knuckle dragging, crazies – it’s really really easy. I, for one, do not think that sentiment is totally true. I mean there have been more than three incidents in the western world of people freaking the fuck out because some radio station decided to play War Of The Worlds. The truth is people are stupid. We are all primitive, knuckle dragging, crazies and when I find that asshole that took my penis… never mind, I found it in the medicine cabinet.

I stood in the mirror today and beheld a scary sight. I now possess a horrible uneven tan. A friend’s younger sister affectionately gave me the nickname “Farmer Yin-Yang” and now I have two tan lines to match the moniker.  I look like a walking matchstick. Why has this happened? Did I try to sunbathe and then decide to wear my shirt because I was shy about my gut? Nope, it was because of the San Diego Comic Con, the retarded Twilight fan base and 125,000 very flawed and sweaty people. Comic Con International has been around for 40 years now, but only reached the mind-boggling capacity cluster-fuck of sex starved, spoiler starved, pop culture starved, herds of nerds in the last few years. What happened? Hollywood happened and it happed right at the same time I started going to Comic Con, way back in the year 2000.

When Comic Con International started 40 years ago by Shel Dorf (No relation to Steven Dorff as far as I can tell, so it’s safe to assume he’s not associated with any douchiness.) In 1970, there were only about 300 sweaty, socially awkward guys and girls, ok guys, in attendance.  To be fair, that is a huge number of people for a time before Star Wars, The Internet and nerdy girls showing off their pale skinned, slightly flabby, yet delicious goods. Just because the first convention was small and was held in the basement of a hotel didn’t mean that it didn’t have any important guests. Ray Bradbury, Forest J. Ackerman and the god of comics, Jack Kirby, showed up to “rap” with the fans and it didn’t cost twenty dollars for a signature and a shitty Polaroid.

During the early years of the convention attendance pretty much hovered around 5,000 people throughout the 70’s and 80’s. Even some chicks started to show up, but it was still pretty much a sausage fest. Comic-Con wouldn’t become the Mecca for the young and young at heart (also the virgins and virgins at heart) until the 90’s when Comic Con finally moved into the San Diego Convention Center. There was finally room to expand the sales floor and room to walk around. Also with the addition of air-conditioning cut down the sweatiness of the sweaty buzz-kills.

In the year 2000 history was made when I finally showed up to Comic Con. Of course this would be personal history because the rest of the world could give a shit. What the rest of the world would care about was Hollywood showing up to showcase their movies like parading cheap hookers in front of horny prisoners. The first X-Men movie had just come out and with the addition of Lord of the Rings shooting in New Zealand that year, the geeks were finally getting the movies they had always hoped for. Also, these two projects launched Sir Ian Mckellen to geek superstar status.  He also showed up before New Line showed a featurette of LOTR, blowing the minds of everyone in the audience and maybe even killing at least one fat guy with a greasy ponytail. Another great moment was Kevin Smith performing in his second career as a Q&A standup comedian. This was the first time I ever heard his now legendary story about working on the Superman script for Warner Bros. I walked out the convention that year dazed and maybe a little teary eyed. I finally found a place to let my geek flag completely unfurl and I vowed to come back every year from then on. I didn’t realize that everyone would tell all their friends and family about it when I made that vow. 

Through out the 2000’s Hollywood invaded Comic Con International, pushing the central theme, “comics”, out of the spotlight because Hollywood is a selfish prima donna bitch. It seemed like every year there was at least a Star Wars or Lord of the Rings panel, not to mention Spider-Man, Hellboy, and Terminator. If your movie was slightly geeky then it had a panel at Comic Con but it wasn’t just movies, TV also got greased up and jumped into the no-deodorant orgy. Joss Whedon brought Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, while shows like Lost and Heroes got their first push as well. The thing was it wasn’t just clips or trailers that were shown, the entire cast of some of these things would show up as if they were the Beatles arriving to America and the fans loved it. We all took a giant straw snorted up the magic pixy dust that is Hollywood and everything was perfect…until things got less perfect.

Attendance got out of fucking control and Comic Con became an institution for line waiting. These weren’t just ordinary lines; they were lines the made you feel like you no longer lived in a democratic country (Thank you David Sedaris for that joke that I just stole). The sad thing is that you could waste hours in these soul crushing, oppressive lines and still not get into the panel you wanted to see. It’s the Comic Con “fuck you”. The first time this happened to me was for a panel for the show Dexter about a year ago. It’s a good show, but come on.

This year, crazy-assed teenagers camped out all night just to get into the Twilight panel causing us regular-assed adults to think that all the Twilight fans were fucking retarded (Twi-tards). They were lame because my friends and I all got into the panel with out the need for a tent. Sure we had to wait 3 hours under the hot unforgiving San Diego summer sun (we geeks aren’t used to the outdoors, you see), but we got in. The thing was, we went to the Twilight panel (where a certain lead actress looked totally coked up…in the best way) just to get into the James Cameron’s Avatar panel. When you are locked in a room with 6,000 tweens screaming over footage of some muscle-boy taking off his shirt you can’t help but think, what happened to my special convention? I do have to say that I did have fun at the convention this year, eventually. I had forgotten what Comic Con was about: comics. I had the most fun this year when I walked through Artist Alley and browsed the work of people who have talent in the field we care about.

So what is in store for the future of Comic Con? Possibly a new city, for one. Comic Con’s contract with San Diego will run out in 2012 (of course humanity’s contract with the world may also run out on that year, epecially if Roland Emmeric has anything to say about it). Other cities such as Los Angeles, Anaheim and Las Vegas have already expressed their interest on the geek cash cow and are actively courting the convention like it was an ugly high school girl with rich parents. One thing for sure is that things have to change if Comic Con is to survive. They need more room, better organization and to not sell memberships to capacity. What ever happens to Comic Con I will still continue to attend, but for the right reasons from now on. I will enjoy the many comic book offerings that they still have and leave Hollywood at the theater.  

This year had been a major year of famous people dying. Within one week Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Ed McMahon, and Billy Mayes all took the dirt-nap with the baby Jesus. When celebrities die it feels more personal and important. This is because they are more important than regular people cause they are famous. When real people die we tend to think, “Thank god that didn’t happen to me.” When Michael Jackson died, we get sad and say, “What a shame, that motherfucker made Thriller.” This feeling is even amplified more if the death was particularly strange. This is why today on the History of the Nerd I bring you the top five strange celebrity deaths in hopes I could make you feel just a little something in your cold, soulless heart.

5) George Reeves

In June 16, 1959 a man faster than a speeding bullet couldn’t escape the one fired from a gun aimed at his head. Superman laid dead in a pool of blood in is Hollywood home. At the age of 45 George Reeves committed suicide…or did he? Why would a man, an actor, kill himself right before his hit television show was about to be resurrected for the 1960 to 61 season from the depths of cancellation? Why would a man kill himself just three days before his wedding? Why would a man kill himself with his fiancé, Leonore Lemmon, and three friends, in the same house just one floor down below him? Reeve’s mother, who refused to believe that the death of her son was caused by suicide, hired the Nick Harris Detective Agency to investigate. The Agency found the following inconsistencies that were directly adverse to the theory of suicide:

·  The gun used to kill Reeves had no fingerprints.

·  Leonore and guest did not call the police for a half an hour to 45mins after his death.

·  Bruises were found all over his body with no real explanation was presented on how he received them

·  For most suicides where the gun falls is usually consistent. If the victim is laying down the gun usually falls by the head. George Reeves was believed to by lying in bed at the time of the incident but the gun was found at his feet.

·  When a gun is held to the head as most suicide would there are powder burns on the wound. There were none found so the gun had to have been held several inches from his head.

·  A spent bullet shell was found under the body which would be an impossible placement if he was lying down.

This information was never relayed to Reeve’s mother. She died before investigation could find any proof. Even more mysterious was that George Reeves was but a link in the chain of the Superman Curse, a well known urban legend about the actors that played the man of tomorrow. George Reeves died by suicide, Christopher Reeve was paralyzed and eventually died due to a horse riding accident and Brandon Routh’s career died at the hands of Bryan Singer.

4) Elvis Presley

Like Michael Jackson, during the King’s final years he became a grotesque caricature of his former self, unable to pull his shit together to complete a final tour. Like Michael Jackson he developed many health problems that led to the abuse of pharmaceutical drugs. Unlike Michael Jackson the hunk’a, hunk’a burn’n love was dropping a duce at the moment of his death. According to the medical investigator, Presley had “stumbled or crawled several feet before he died”, leaving behind a legacy largely unflushed on August 16, 1977.

3) Natalie Wood  

On Nov. 29, 1981 Natalie Wood. Her husband Robert Wagner and friend Christopher Walken were obnoxiously and loudly getting shit-faced at the Harbor Reef Restaurant on Catalina Island. They were celebrating the success of shooting the movie Brainstorm. (Well, almost. Wood had another crucial, climactic scene for the movie, but what bad could possibly happen during a drunken celebration?) After the restaurant they returned to their dingy and back to their yacht, the Splendor where they went on a three-hour tour. Instead of being marooned on a deserted tropical island where wackiness ensued, Wood drowned.

Days after the death of is wife Robert Wagner claimed that she woke up to fix the banging of the dingy against the yacht that was annoying her. She apparently slipped off the rails and to the icy waters below. The Skipper of the ship, Dennis Davern had a decidedly juicer tale. He said that there had been a fight between Wagner and Walken over who was going to stick some wood in Wood. Wagner got a little pissed off when he thought Walken was sleeping with his wife. He broke a wine bottle and held it to the face of Walken and screamed, “Go ahead and fuck her if you want to so badly!” The fight upset Natalie so much she took off on the dingy to seek solace. Some people believe that Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken plotted and committed the murder of Natalie Wood. I, for one, say that this last accusation is false because if anyone had seen True Romance, The Prophecy or any of the movies Walken has been in now, they would know Walken would show up at my house and kill me with his bare hands. So was Natalie Wood’s death an accident, or a murder? No one will ever know because since the incident Wagner and Walken refuse to comment on the night which looks really, really bad. The case is still left open. 

2) Bruce Lee/Brandon Lee

There was no bigger star than Bruce Lee when I was young, especially since I am Chinese; even though he was already dead by 1973, six years before I was born. My father used to tell me stories of a family curse the plagued the Lee family for centuries. He told me that the curse killed the first-born son of each generation. I never quite thought it was real until I found out years later that Bruce’s own father used to dress his son up in girls clothes to disguise him so the curse would not take his life. This is apparently a curse that never had a grade-school health class and didn’t know that boys had penises and that girls had vaginas. Clothes are what matter to ancient curses.

When Bruce’s father died, at the age of 64, Bruce had a premonition that he would only live to be half his father’s age – he died at the age of 32 of a brain aneurysm.

Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee’s son, also believed that a family curse claimed the life of his father. Unfortunately he would also fall victim to a tragic death at a young age. He died at the age of 28 on March 31, 1993, due to an accident while shooting the movie The Crow. A bullet that was believed to be a blank fired from actor Michael Massee’s (Fun-boy) gun. The bullet hit Lee in the abdomen and lodged in his spine.

Both deaths could be seen as coincidences, but I believe that if you had to choose between accounting for a deadly Chinese curse and a coincidence, you’d have to go with the deadly Chinese curse just to be on the safe side.

1) Sharon Tate

Sharon Tate died the most horrific of all celebrity deaths. On August 8, 1969, Sharon returned from dinner at her favorite restaurant El Coyote with her friends Sebring, Frykowski and Folger at about 10:30pm. That night they were murdered by members of Charles Manson’s Family. I’m not going to get into the actual details of the murders – enough has been written about them over the years. The thing about this death, which is unlike the others, was that this marked a major moment of change in the world. Before the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends, people kept their doors unlocked. People were only killed if they were involved in something that could lead to trouble. The thought that strangers could just break into your home at night and kill you without any reason were inconceivable. Now, in the modern age, fear controls every aspect of our lives. Doors are locked and bolted, strangers are possible murderers, and no one is safe.

I know that there are many more celebrity deaths, more than one person could possibly fit into the confines of a simple article, so it would be hard to even try. I hope that this list at least chips at the morbid and fascinating iceberg of famous people dying.

Take a moment and try to image a very special movie. A movie that would be produced by George Lucas — don’t worry he won’t be directing or writing so you won’t get the Star Wars Prequels again. No, the movie will be directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the genius behind The Godfather and the not-so-genius-but-fun Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Throw in the might, magic and money of Disneyland and you have a picture to have a nerdgasm to. Of course, this flight of fancy doesn’t exist in a magic fairytale land, it exist here in the real world. Who had the power to draw of these forces in, to lure such talent together? That unifying factor was none other than a pop star with a severe Vitiligo, none other than Michael Jackson. And together, with their film, they changed the world (or at least had a song in it about changing the world).

I know you are really, really sick of Michael Jackson, but how can you be sick of Captain EO? You remember the excitement you had of standing in line at Disneyland for at least a good half an hour to an hour in the unforgiving summer sun of Southern California? Weren’t those fun times? No? Well if you don’t like, you could blame the whole mess on Michael Eisner and Frank Wells.

In 1984 Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took over Disneyland and mounted up on the mouse himself. They pursued an aggressive image makeover of the ailing mouse kingdom and tried to fuck it back to life.  They came up with the idea of working with Michael Jackson who was at the height of his fame. He was still basking in the zombiefied glow of his hit album Thriller and had yet to feel the scandal that comes with touching a young boys penis. Michael at the time appealed to teenagers while not offending apron wearing, cookie making moms. If it was Prince it wouldn’t Disneyland’s non-sex image (though who doesn’t want to see Prince’s Captain EO or want some sugar from Snow White?). Jackson, who was such a huge fan of Disneyland that he built his very own, happily agreed. Eisner also managed to get the involvement of George Lucas who in turn got Coppola (George Lucas apparently knew he a shitty director then but for got later when the prequels came out). This was also a major lure for Michael Jackson, who idolized the famed maker of the holy trilogy, Star Wars. Two years later Captain EO was born.

Disneyland would build the Captain his own theater, the Magic Eye Theater over the previous location of the outside Space Stage and opened in May 1986 and played something other than Captain EO. Originally, they played a 3-D movie made for Epcot called Magic Journeys. The Captain would have to wait until September to change the world.

Over it’s run of 10 years at the magic kingdom Michael Jackson’s star faded as the world finally realized he was bat-shit insane. The Captain EO attraction fell out of touch with teenagers who thought it was, “Stupid”, “Lame” and “Gay” not realizing, or not cool enough to realize, that they were watching camp gold. In April 1997, Captain EO was finally drummed out of Disneyland. This however didn’t ground the Captain just yet. It was till shown in Florida, Japan and France but one by one it was replace by the highly shitty, Honey I Shrunk the Audience. The last stand for Captain EO was at the Ciné Magique at Disneyland Paris until it to was replaced in 1998 and everyone knows that when Paris asks you to leave, a place that thought Jerry Lewis was a genius, you know you have walked your last moon-walk.

Then Michael Jackson died at the age of 50 and all of a sudden, what do you know, people are calling for Captain EO to be put back into Disneyland. These, of course, are just the nosy stirrings of the internet; but I will be holding my breath a little in hopes of the possibility. Until then, enjoy the wonder that is Captain EO at the links below.

Captain EO part1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AstW05bDiQU

Captain EO part2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Zt-57Cg0U

I was dragged to Hell last night, sort of. I was dragged to a midnight screening of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I, like the rapist-sociopath, yet endearing main character, Alex, of A Clockwork Orange, felt strapped down in the Ludovico technique and was forced to watch the flickering, headache-inducing, screen. I watched it and now today I am desperately trying to unwatch it. By what felt like the three-hundreth hour of a movie filled with slow-mo running and robot explosions I longed for the adventure of my childhood, for the adventure of an 80’s animated series of transforming robots. In this series, voice artrist Frank Welker and Peter Cullen performed brilliantly to a story of warring robot aliens that disguised themselves as human-made motorized vehicles. Of course I am speaking of the Gobots.  What else did you think I was talking about?

When you were a male child growing up in the eighties you would claw out the throat of your best friend if your parents just promised to get you a Transformer toy. You wanted one more that air, food, water or life itself, so naturally my parents got me Gobots. My family was extremely poor so they naturally got the cheaper item and passed it off as the real thing. They failed to realize that not only can children tell the difference, but they were also little Sarah Jessica Parker label whores when it came to toy branding. I was always wrecked with embarrassment when the toys were brought out at play and I had to pull out Cy-Kill instead of Megatron because kids were cruel little savages. Invariably there would be jokes made involving my family needing the use of food stamps. I do look a back on Gobots with some fondness now because they were really great toys. Gobots were actually constructed better and made of mostly diecast metal unlike Transformers, which had some diecast but mostly plastic parts. That kid with the Transformer may have made fun of me but Gobots hurt more when you used them as projectile weapons.

The 80’s were a magical time where American companies made millions off of the creativity of Japan. They did this a lot. Of course there was a mild freak out when Tonka, through some kind of industrial espionage, found out that rival toy company Hasbro was going to import Japanese toy makers’ Takara Diaclone and Microman Microchange lines of toys to the States as Transformers. What was Tonka to do but to do exactly same thing as their competitors. I mean exactly the same thing. Tonka imported Popy’s (Another Japanese manufacturer who would later become Bandi) toy line, Machine Robo. Hasbro would change the concept of the toys being nonliving machines piloted by people to sentient robots that had personality and souls; Tonka did the same. Hasbro would advertise their toys through a hypnotic, brainwashing, series of animated half and hour commercials, thinly veiled as children’s programming; Tonka did the same. Hasbro’s toy line would become a household name, carving a home for itself in the mind of children and in the pop culture lexicon; Tonka did not do the same.

Tonka went about systematically ripping off every move Hasbro made. A few “similarities” included:

1)      In Transformers the robot home world was named Cybertron, in Gobots their home world was named Gobotron.

2)      Frank Welker and Peter Cullen, famous for their voice talent as Megatron and Optimus Prime, also worked on Gobots.

3)      Both main story lines for the cartoons involve a robot civil war.

4)       They both had better Japanese names for their series Eastern counter part. Transformers was called, Tatakae! Cho Robot Seimeitai Transformer: “Fight! Super Robot Life Form Transformer” and the Gobots was originally a totally different anime called, Machine Robo: Chronos no Dai GyakushÅ«. 

In spite of being the knock off, Tonka managed to beat Hasbro’s release date and got to the American market first. Of course rushing shit out just to beat the competitor sometimes works, but sometimes the corners cut could do more damage than good. (Kind of like the movie Antz and A Bug’s Life or Dante’s Peak and Volcano or Deep Impact and Armageddon.) When Gobots were originally released they enjoyed the sweet narcotic taste of finacial success –for about two months until Transformers came along with their better fancy names for their toys and well thought out business plan and kicked Tonka’s ass back to Gobotron. The Gobots toyline debuted in 1983 and ended in 1987 and the cartoon series lasted for 63 episodes with a feature length movie, Gobots: Battle of the Rock Lords released in 1986.

Humanity is on the edge of the new dawn of the mechanical man. Will they be friendly and lovable like our gay robot pals like C3P0 and Twiki from Buck Rodgers or will they be bloodthirsty kill-bots, hell bent on the eradication of man like every other science-fiction story ever conceived? What about the term “robot”? Just where the fuck did it come from?  What about robot boobs, or as we here at Geekscape call them, “robotitties”? All of these questions will be answered in this week’s installment of History of The Nerd.

For as long as there has been human life, humanity has always looked for ways they could get out of all that pain in the ass work. Unfortunately, for most of human existence the technology just wasn’t available to create an artificial man, so we resorted to abducting people, taking away their freedom and making them do the shit nobody else wanted to do through brute force. Slaves were robots 1.0.

Automations: Robots’ special needs older brothers.

In about 1495, before he set work to create his famous painting of the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci set about creating a mechanical man. I guess he thought Jesus could take a back seat. This machine was a man dressed in a full German-Italian suit of armor typical of the late 18^th century. It was designed to sit up, wave its arm, move his head and open his anatomically correct jaw. Leonardo’s robot wasn’t really a robot. It was a really great, automated, puppet that worked with a series of cables and cranks that simulated muscle movement. Not to say that it wasn’t impressive, I mean it was even programmable through an analog controller in its chest. He was pretty much the first of Disneyland-style animatronics like the Johnny Depp on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride — impressive but not a robot. (While the animatronic Johnny Depp is not a robot, the jury is still out on the real one.) Leonardo was inspired by ancient Greek text that described automations like Ctesibus who created water clocks and organs that had little moving figures.

Of course, the Japanese could not and would not stay out of the race. If there is ever going to be robotic-fuck-slaves it will be Japan that makes the breakthrough.  They are more obsessed with robots then they are with soiled undiepants from schoolgirls and apparently they always have been. Tanaka Hisashige, also known as the “Thomas Edison of Japan”, created a dazzling array of extremely complex mechanical toys during his lifetime from 1799 to 1881. These “toys” were able to serve tea, fire arrows from a quiver and even perform calligraphy artwork. The only thing they weren’t able to do was to take down the entire shaft and cup the balls correctly.

Etymology of Robot: Just where the fuck did it come from?

We could all blame the future plague of robot overlords on the freaking Czech. The Czech with their fancy pants stable political system, their delicious roast pork and their awesomely hot porn stars will bring about the “robot” holocaust because they invented the word “robot”. If it weren’t for them we’d all call it the “automation” holocaust or “android” holocaust, but they just do not evoke the 50’s style terror that “robot” does. It all started with Dr. Karel ÄŒapek and a play that he wrote –R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

In the play there is a factory that creates people. They are called “Robots” but they were not the metal men of modern science fiction. They were flesh and blood, more like clones or the Cylon “Skin Jobs” from Battlestar Galactica. These Robots were, of course, slaves, but happy slaves that loved nothing more then to help out their fellow masters — at first. This play was the first to have robots, and as the first it also set the rules for all other stories that would use robots as a central theme for the rest of time. One of the major rules is that if you have robot slaves you will eventually have a robot uprising. This one was no different, but it does end with the happiest of endings, the death of all humans.

The word “robot” actually is a shortened from the word “robota” which means “labor” in Czech and “Rossum” is a play on the word “rozum” meaning “reason”, “wisdom”, “intellect” or “common-sense”. The play was eventually re-made into a film of the same name by American filmmaker James Kerwin. The movie eventually went on to popularize the term.

The Singularity: We are all totally fucked.

Machines are getting smarter and smarter at an accelerated rate. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits will grow at an exponential rate of doubling every year for the foreseeable future. This means that computers are getting smarter while humans stay the same. A 16 year-old’s iMac is already smarter than half of this year’s graduating class of high school teenagers. A “technological explosion”, described by British statistician I.J. Good, is in the works already.  I.J. Good theorized that if machines could surpass human intelligence even in the slightest, then they would be able to improve on their own designs in way their original dumber, weaker, monkey designers could never had conceived. This would lead to and exponential jump in artificial intelligence leaving us humans behind. In other words the role would be reversed. We will become their monkey slaves and there ain’t shit we can do about it.

People may think that we shouldn’t worry, that our Robot overlords would take care of all the work for us. We would live in a utopia made of happy, happy feelings and gumdrops. These people are, of course, mentally ill. I’m not sure that machines that are smarter are going to to be more compassionate. We’re thought, by us, to be smarter than anything on the planet and we’ve made actual living creatures extinct — quite a few of them. What makes us think that when we get knocked down the intellectual food chain that the same thing couldn’t happen to us. Let’s face it; the final train to Auschwitz is on its way and Skynet’s in the conductor seat. I just hope that Gigolo Joes and Gigolo Janes are invented so we can get our cyber-freak on before they nuke us to Judgement Day.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is possibly one of the most depressing movies to have been committed to film. Okay, Schindler’s List is still more depressing, but only because it has the Holocaust in it and that makes it a totally unfair fight. If you have never seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — it’s about Jim Carrey trying to get over a bitter break-up with Kate Winslet by erasing all his memories of her. For some reason, for me at least, the idea of the physican embodiment of one’s memories fills me with an intense horror that I just can’t shake even years after leaving the theatre or putting pants on to turn of the DVD. The feeling still isn’t gone, but it did evolve. Memories make up the tapestry of what makes me who I am. It’s just that sometimes I hate who I am. I wonder sometimes if I could pull out a bad memory like pulling out a stray thread from that tapestry would I be a better person? Or would my entire self unravel to someone unrecognizable? Thankfully through the wonderful magic that is science I can now find out. It even works a lot like it did in Eternal Sunshine.

It all really started with a young boy working at his father’s meat market. Cattle back then weren’t given the PETA-approved electro-bolt to the head when they headed for Hamburger Heaven. No, they were allowed a taste of sweet, sweet, lead in bullet form. The boy’s job was to feel through the brain to remove the bullet because when you sit down to a sandwich of creamy, fried, cow brains you don’t want to bite down on hard metal, cause that would be gross. (They really eat that stuff Missouri; I shit you not. Oh yeah, and it’s basically roast beef in Mexico.) When he touched the cow’s brains he wondered, was he touching the cow’s memories, was he touching their souls? That young boy was Jim Carrey… No that’s actually wrong, that boy was Joseph LeDoux. Joseph left the meat market and grew up to be a scientist.

In the 1960’s scientists discovered that when you administered a drug called Anisomycin to a fish, they were incapable of creating new memories. This lead to several discoveries, they learned that memories were concrete, physical things that can be measured and touched. They also learned that the building blocks of memories are proteins because Anisomycin is a protein inhibitor that blocks proteins from forming. If you take the drug — no proteins, no memories and then you end up like that asshole in Memento (only with less useful tattoos). Years later LeDoux would study the formation of memories in lab rats.

The experiment worked this way: LeDoux placed a rat into a box. In this box the rat was played a single tone then…he was shocked. LeDoux then laughed and laughed. The rat was conditioned to know that when they heard the tone there would be a mild shock. The rats actually braced themselves for it when they heard the tone. LeDoux afterwards injected a different rat with a drug called U0126 that prevented its neurons from creating the proteins that a new memory requires, and then something weird happened. They never create that new memory so they never equate the tone with shock. They are surprised every time. However if he did it to the rat that was already conditioned, the proteins are already formed and the memory exists, nothing happens. He believed that once memories were created they were there forever. He would have continued to believe that if it wasn’t for Karim Nader — the Barack Obama of the experiment. Look at him! How hansome is he? Right?!…Moving on….

Karim Nader was a colleague and friend of Joseph LeDoux. Karim was the kind of friend that would just show up and throw out questions, which he often did to LeDoux. In 2000, Karim dropped by LeDoux’s lab and asked him what would happen if instead of giving the rat a shock while they were making a new memory, they gave it the drug when it was remembering the memory. Karim just thought it would be cool if it messed with the memory then. Joseph just thought it was a really stupid suggestion, a total waste of money and a waste of time. Well, as Naders do, Nader decided to waste money anyway. Several months later he returned to LeDoux and told him that it worked. He took a conditioned rat and administered the drug to it while it was remembering. Afterward the rat acted as if the memory never happened. It was pretty much a holy shit moment.

     “My Rat friend, why do you look so much like a Hamster?”

    ” I…don’t…KNOWWW!!!”

LeDoux and Karim found that memories are recreated, then reimagined, every time we remember. When that act of recreation is in process and that process is disturbed then the memory is effectively gone. So each we remember it distorts the memory just a little bit every time — kind of like a mental copy machine where you only make copies of the copy — or like the retarded Michael Keaton in multiplicity, only with MEMORIES! The image becomes less and less correct, or true, each time. The time you first kissed your first love? Those great times you think about so often? More fake than a memory you never think about.

LeDoux and Karim moved on from messing with the memories of rats to the memories of people. They gave people a drug that affected only the emotional aspect of the memory while the subject was remembering and the result was a person who remembered the details, but no longer had an emotional connection to the memory. Joseph LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU’s Center for Neural Science, as well as director of the Center for the Neuroscience of Fear and Anxiety and Karim Nader is a professor at McGill University.

Researchers did a study in 2007 with 19 people who had traumatic memories of accidents or of rape and gave some a drug called Propranolol, a drug used to treat hypertension, but also was known to cause memory problems, and gave the others a placebo for 10 days, while they were asked to remember their horrible experience. Those who were given the drug suffered fewer signs of stress when they remembered.

Jim Carrey did the same thing in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He recalled his memory of his lost love and the scientist erased them. As it turns out, the movie came out just a few years after LeDoux and Karim published their paper on their findings. When asked, Michel Gondry, director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, said that the story was indeed inspired by LeDoux and Karim’s 2000 paper. Usually when writers create a story based on scientific concepts you get something incomprehensible like Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis or Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP or Grant Morrison’s The Filth, (okay that last one was mostly about porn, but there was a little science and it was still confusing), but Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry delivered a beautiful, haunting and heart breaking story. They even won an Oscar for best original screenplay, it’s just too bad they didn’t give LeDoux and Karim credit in the film.

I still wonder what kind of person I would be had I not experienced some of the more painful things of my childhood, but I feel that my memories are the patchwork of my soul — my tattered, patched-up-like-huck-finn’s-overalls soul. Deleting an aspect of it would feel like deleting an aspect of myself. This is all very easy for me today, but to the thousands of people that have lived through the kind of hell you only hear about splashed on news bulletins and unwatched documentaries, this could be the only ray of hope. These people could finally be unshackled by the people and moments that haunt and control them. They would still had been victimized, but they would no longer be victims. That would be something to hope for. Fucking. Awesome.

Anton Mesmer wasn’t just some under-educated street hustler; on the contrary, he was born to a wealthy family village of Izang, in Swabia, Germany on the shore of Lake Constance. By the age of 15 he was entered into the Jesuit College at Dillingen in Bavaria and in 1752 studied at the University of Ingolstadt, where he studied philosophy, theology, music, and mathematics. While versed on many subjects a young Mesmer settled on medicine and attended the University of Vienna in 1759 and received a medical degree in 1766. Of course if you were rich enough you could buy a degree no matter how stupid or crazy you were in the 1700’s. Then again George W. Bush would do the same over 200 years later.. I guess things haven’t changed that much after all.

(Franz Anton Mesmer) 

In January of 1768, Mesmer married a wealthy, but-her-face, widow and settled in Vienna to establish himself as a physician. He lived on his wife’s wealth like a rich guy in a period movie, bewigged and made-up like a drag queen performing in Las Vegas. His estate was vast and lavish and Anton became a patron of the arts. There is a story of Anton Mesmer helping out a 15 year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1768, the Emperor ordered that Mozart’s opera, La finta semplice (The Pretended Simpleton) was not to be performed. He did this perhaps because he loved making tiny teenage boys cry tiny, tiny tears. When word of this got to Mesmer, he arranged to have a one-act opera commissioned. Mozart titled the opera Bastien und Bastienne (Bastien and Bastienne) and performed the piece in Mesmer’s personal garden. Later, Nissen, Mozart’s biographer, would state that there is not proof that the performance ever took place or that there was the touching of any penises at that performance. The connection between Mesmer and Mozart doesn’t end there. Mozart would immortalize Anton with a comedic reference in the opera Cosi fan tuttle.

In 1774, Mesmer had a patient swallow a preparation that had a high concentration of iron in it and then attached magnets to different parts of her body. She reported that she felt streams of mysterious fluid coursing though out her body and that her symptoms were relived for hours. Most likely the high concentration of iron was just gently corroding her intestinal lining but what the fuck did you she know. Mesmer didn’t believe the magnets cured the girl on their own, which would be totally insane. I contributed the cure to his discovery, Animal Magnetism. 

Anton believed that the world was filled with a kind of fluid that flowed through all living things, kind of like “The Force” in Star Wars. This fluid he called Animal Magnetism, and he believed that occasionally this flow of fluid would get blocked up and that was what made people sick. Soon he would stop using magnets and would utilize only the power of his voice and the dirty touching in his hands.

 An unfortunate event occurred in 1777 when the parents of a girl named Paradis hired Mesmer to cure their daughter of blindness. The unfortunate event was that he failed to cure her blindness when he tried to unblock her flow of Animal Magnetism with his penis. I guess it was worth a shot anyway. Needless to say her parents withdrew her from his care after the incident. His reputation was destroyed and he was pretty much forced to leave town after this. He moved to Paris in the following year of 1778 to start his life over again.

He rented an apartment in a part of the city favored by the wealthy and established a medical practice. Soon, controversy over Animal Magnetism would divide Paris between those who believed him to be a genius and savior and those who thought he was a fraud who was driven out of Vienna with good reason.

 Anton’s practice was very much like a hippy gathering: his clients were mostly women, s oft music would be playing as everyone would gather into a dimly lit room. As a man of theatrics he wore long purple suits looking as if he raided 80’s pop star Prince’s wardrobe. He moved among the people until a certain girl would call to him. He would sit across from her with their knees touching. This was already pornographic when during the time the very sight of a woman’s bare ankle could send a man into ejaculatory spasms. (That is actually true and why tablecloths were invented — to cover the legs of a table so men wouldn’t get all lusty.) He pressed her thumbs into his palms and locked eyes with her. As he gazed into her he said that her Animal Magnetism was blocked. He proceeded to make “passes” over the client by moving his hands from her shoulder down along her arms. He then placed his fingers just below her diaphragm holding them there, sometimes for hours. When the patient’s flow was unblocked by this they had something called a “Healing Crisis”.  The girl would convulse and scream and vibrate like a surge of orgasmic rage was released throughout her body. This performance is very much like what faith healers do today complete with convulsion and screaming. The girl was then led into a padded room where they were able to loosen their corsets and thrash around or do whatever they need to do to release the healing energy. Word spread of the miracle doctor and his healing touch and he began to have disciples called Mesmerists.

Just like any man that had a hot item, be it tasty fried chicken or the cure to everything, you do what every self-respecting businessman would do — you franchise the mother fucker. Mesmer branched out and taught others. Through doing this his technique evolved. He would go to the woods and “magnetize” trees. He or his assistants would take two magnetized iron rods and touch them to a tree and that would transfer the energy to the trees. The trees would have the same healing abilities as actually being attended to Mesmer himself. When I start my own cult remind me to do this on days I want to sleep in. Groups of people would sit around touching the trees and have orgasms together. There was only one problem to all of this tree hugging and sisterly love, real doctors were losing patients and more importantly, money. They protested to the king.

(The King of Bling: The Blurriest Man in France)

King Louis XVI established a commission that consisted of the eight most famous doctors, naturalists, and scientists of the time in 1784. It was like the Justice League of Science. Their job was to investigate if Mesmer was a true healer or a charlatan. The roster had a few notable figures still highly regarded today (cue Eye of the Tiger):

Jean Sylvain Baily, Astronomer:  He calculated the orbit of Haley’s Comet, reduced Lacaille’s observations of 515 zodiacal stars and in 1763 was elected into the French Academy of Sciences. Later he would become one of the leaders of the French Revolution: the last accomplishment he would regret in his final moments of his life as his head rolled off his neck and into a wicker basket. The French citizens eventually turned on him and had him guillotined during the “Reign of Terror”.

 Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, physician: Contrary to his namesake he did not invent the guillotine; but he did suggest that a something like it should be put into use. During a debate on capital punishment in 1789 he proposed that “the criminal shall be decapitated; this will be done solely by means of a simple mechanism.” This would allow people to witness a spectacular public spectacle and still be able to get back to work before the end of a lunch break.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the father of chemistry: He was the first to state the Law of Conservation of Mass, recognized and named oxygen and hydrogen and also figured out that fire was chemical reaction and not an angry living sprite from the land of fairies. 

Benjamin Franklin, American Ambassador, and inventor: He was fat and jolly and enjoyed a good fart joke. Oh, and he also invented some stuff like, lighting rods, bifocals, the Franklin stove and, you know, a little thing called AMERICA! He was also a gigantic pussy hound and couldn’t bare the fact that Mesmer was getting more tail than he was.

The team devised a series of experiments to test for magnetic forces. Their approach was not to find out if Animal Magnetism worked or not they was more concerned with whether or not Animal Magnetism existed. You might think that if it worked, then it existed, but there is a reason why these guys were smarter than you and me. They were keenly aware that the mind could perform great feats if coerced into the right state regardless of a force or not, so testing if it existed would put an end to the whole debate.

One of their test is seen today as one of the first placebo tests ever performed. On Franklin’s estate, just south of France, he blindfolded a young boy and told him that one the five trees were magnetized using Mesmer’s technique. The boy’s job was to tell them which one was magnetized. At the first tree he began to tremble, at the second tree he began to sweat, when they got to the “magnetized tree”, he dropped to the floor in convulsions. And not a single person touched his wee. Of course the first four trees were not administered to and were not magnetized by a Mesmerist. Because of this and experiments like it they concluded that there was no magnetic field, but they didn’t think that people were faking it either. They believed that a real physical effect was being produced by the imagination of the patient.

After the investigation on Animal Magnetism was concluded, Franz Anton Mesmer was driven into exile. He moved to London to try to start the whole mess again, but it failed. The last twenty years of his life are largely unknown. He died in obscurity in 1815.

Last week on History of the Nerd the original cast (except Nimoy) of Star Trek was enjoying new life in the form of a brand new, high budget TV show, Star Trek: Phase II. This was the deliberator the franchise needed and the heart of the series was beating strong – at the beginning. Then the plug was pulled on the life support so Paramount could cash in on the Star Wars craze that was sweeping the nation. Star Trek: Phase II died so that Star Trek: The Motion Picture could live.

Nearly ten years had passed since the cancellation of Star Trek The Original Series (TOS) when Paramount held a massive press conference to announce the plans for a $15 million dollar budget Star Trek movie. The person attached to pilot the Enterprise back to the hearts of the world public would be none other than Academy Award winner Robert Wise, the man who edited Citizen Kane and directed The Day The Earth Stood Still. Nerds across the nation breathed a sigh of relief and came in their pants at the same time. Too bad they got a two-hour movie that had the cast dressed like intergalactic dentists with chrome plated fanny packs as they stared silently out a window.

The wave of boredom the audience had to endure should have spelled the demise of the Star Trek movie run, but people were so starved for anything Trek related they went and saw it anyway. Star Trek: The Motion Picture opened on 1979 and earned $11,815,203 on its opening weekend. This would have been fine if they stayed on budget, but of course it didn’t. In fact their $15 million budget ballooned to $45million. The film ultimately made enough, $139 million worldwide, to validate doing a sequel.

They would thank Roddenberry by forcing him out of creative control of any of the other movies. Fans may get upset by this but in reality all Roddenberry would pitch for a movie was the strange idea of the Enterprise crew traveling back in time to stop some Klingons from preventing the Kennedy assassination – a strange idea that would have made a shitty movie. Then again was it a worst idea than Kirk traveling back in time to save some whales? Yes, yes it was.

Paramount went on to have a pretty successful movie franchise after Wrath of Khan and all they had to do was shut out the creator and his crazy ideas and cut the budget down to nearly nothing. Now is how you milk a franchise, baby! The Star Trek movies are to this day some of my favorite films of all time. It was a little strange that in their numbering they skipped the number 5. (It never happened!!! Kirk and company never went searching for God in space!!!)  The movies were proving to Paramount that Star Trek could make money, notably with Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home. It grossed $109,713,132 in the U.S. and $133,000,000 worldwide, not too shabby considering it only cost $27 million. This prompted the creation of a new TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG)

When Star Trek: TNG was announced many fans were critical. They didn’t want to see a Star Trek without the original cast. Producers didn’t even originally pick Patrick Stewart as a captain because they didn’t believe that people would accept a bald captain, they almost cast him as Data, the lovable android, which would have been really, really weird. The fans and the executives would later have to eat a metaphorical dick when TNG later soared in ratings over its seven-season run.  This prompted Paramount to crank out the spin-offs like a Ford assembly line and to allow Rick Berman to drive the franchise into the fucking ground.

Rick Berman, the “Joel Schumacher” to Star Trek, took over the franchise after Roddneberry passed away on October 24, 1991. Berman was responsible for all the major fuck ups in Star Trek history. (ok Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier wasn’t his fault, but Star Trek Insurrection was.) He created a mood of micromanagement that never allowed writers to take chances or to be creative at all. Berman acted very much like an opium addict that was chasing the euphoria of his first hit by recycling the format and actual story lines from TNG in hopes of creating the same success. He would use this format of creating a terrible shows with Voyager and Enterprise. The only reason Deep Space Nine, in spite of having a title that can easily be porn parodied (Deep Dick Nine), was so damn good was because Berman was busy laying down the “goon hand” on Voyager. Also another insult was to use a Rod Steward song that was sung by an impersonator as the opening theme to Enterprise.

While the Star Trek spin-off series were slowly bleeding out the souls of their fan base, the Next Generation movies would do the same, only through the other orifice. When the TNG series ended Paramount wanted to repeat what they did with TOS by graduating the cast to the big leagues by putting them on the silver screen. With the exception of Star Trek: First Contact they were all terrible. Star Trek: Generations had Kirk and Picard having a pretty gay get-together on horses. It was pretty much like Brokeback Mountain for that scene. Star Trek: Insurrection had a the crew saving a planet of annoying hippies and a pimpled faced Worf going though a second adolescence. By the time Star Trek: Nemesis crawled on to the screen the world stopped caring and it was also harder and harder to pretend they weren’t getting too old and fat to be starship cowboys.  The franchise was officially dead. 

Thankfully the Star Trek universe wouldn’t stay dead thanks in part to J.J. Abrams. The funny thing was that many of the ideas in the new Star Trek movie were ones that where pitched and turned down years ago. Harve Bennett was the producer of most of the original Star Trek films. He even conceived of the stories for Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock. After Star Trek 5: The Movie That Never Existed, Harve pitched the idea of a young Kirk and Spock’s first adventure while they were still cadets. He titled it the Academy Years. Paramount at first enjoyed the idea but began to feel their balls shrinking at the thought of making a Trek movie without established actors. They also wanted to use the original actors one last time to coincide with Star Trek’s 25th anniversary in 1999, a marketing opportunity they just couldn’t pass up. To be fair, Paramount did give Harve the opportunity to produce a different movie with the original cast. They even offered to produce Star Trek: Academy Years afterwards. Harve declined and ended his involvement with Star Trek.

I believe that even if Abrams hadn’t come by and worked his magic Star Trek would have returned. You just can’t put the beast down, though Berman tried. Star Trek is a concept that is so open that new stories and fresh ideas can always be created from it. Star Trek will rise and fall for years to come. I even believe this cycle would continue until the end of time.

Read Part 1 of the Rise and Fall of Star Trek Right Here!

I’ve been holding my breath for the arrival of the latest Star Trek movie by JJ Abrams. I’ve been holding my breath because Star Trek is my most favorite thing in the whole entirety of the world. The rest of Geekdom could keep their lightsabers and I’ll take a phaser set on stun. Well as Eric Banna’s Nero would say in the commercials, “The wait is over”. I saw Star Trek and my eyes ejaculated tears of joy. No really, I actually cried at a Star Trek movie. These were not tears moved by some emotional plot point, though I had a few of those as well; no, these were tears of awe, sentimentality, and of course joy that my favorite franchise was finally treated with love and respect. The studios had always treated Star Trek, for the most part, like the attention starved slutty girl in high school you shamefully used whenever you were bored. (She had feelings you know!) Whenever Paramount needed a little financial nutting they called upon good ol’ reliable Star Trek and made a movie on the cheap. Thank the heavens for J.J. Abrams because after their last attempt at a movie, the under whelming Star Trek: Nemesis and their last show, the appalling Enterprise, the world thought that Star Trek was officially dead. The world shouldn’t have ruled it out because, since its inception, Star Trek as a franchise had lived the cycle of death and rebirth over and over again like the rise and fall of the mighty phoenix (you are officially reading Geekscape).

At the not-so-young age of 43, Gene Roddenberry secured a three-development deal with the top independent television producer at the time Desilu (founded by Lucille Ball, a redheaded comedian superstar and Desi Arnez, a wife beater.) In the very beginning Star Trek already felt destined for failure. The Star Trek idea was offered to CBS who turned it down for the more family friendly and honky-approved Lost in Space. 

NBC was interested in a show with colorful backgrounds to take full advantage of the new color television sensation sweeping the nation. They ordered a pilot from Desilu and then dismissed it on the grounds that it was “too cerebral”.

Star Trek’s original pilot The Cage was shot on 1964. The cast was completely different from the classic Star Trek we know and love today. It starred Jeffery Hunter as Captain Pike, had a female first officer known only as Number One played by Majel Barrett and an entire cast of all-white faces. It did have everybody’s favorite Vulcan, Spock, but he was strangely excitable, shouting out every line he had. NBC executives hated it. They said it was “too slow”, “too intellectual” and “not enough action”. Also it tested poorly with housewives who couldn’t see out of their own “cage” to see that in the future women could perform in a command position. They mainly thought, “Just who does she think she is telling those men to do things?” Also they thought Spock looked too demonic, which is funny because Spock was going to be painted red until someone thought it was a little too much. Usually at this point a show concept would be canned, but NBC decided to order another pilot instead — an unprecedented move, and a rare one, even today.

Gene always believed in liberal ideas that in the future humanity would finally be rid of racism and sexism. Bold ideas for a white man living during the time when Martin Luther King was fighting for basic human rights in a divided South. When NBC ordered another pilot with changes for Star Trek he must have thought to himself that if he couldn’t get a female first officer, then maybe he could sneak in a gaggle of colored people.

Star Trek’s second pilot had a completely revamped cast that included Captain Kirk who boldly wanted to explore new orifices, Urhura a black hottie Communications Officer, a Japanese Helmsman Zulu, a Scottish Engineer Scottie and Russian Navigator Chekov. The only two returning actors from the first pilot were, Leonard Nimoy would reprise his role as Spock, who Roddenberry fought tooth and nail for and Majel Barrett would perform in a new role as Head Nurse Chapel, who Roddenberry just wanted to nail. As far as liberal agendas go, I think Gene Roddenberry won on the deal. The new pilot was more exciting, sexy, and colorful in more ways than one. How could they fail? Well, a bad rating would be one way.

Star Trek aired in 1966 to lackluster ratings and even less shinny advertising revenue.  Even before it could lurch to the end of the first season NBC was calling for the axe to be dropped because of low Nielsen ratings. So what happened? Why didn’t Star Trek fall to the wayside like so many other failed TV series? We all owe thanks to a loveable redhead. Lucille Ball single handedly prevented Star Trek from being stricken from the airwaves. Now that the show was saved everyone could breathe a sign of relief. That is, until the end of season two.

NBC executives began tying a noose for the crew of the Enterprise once again as season two headed to a close. By this point Lucille Ball sold Desilu to Paramount and no longer had any weight with the networks. If it wasn’t for the power of major nerdom there would had never been a third season of Star Trek or any movies or any spin offs –if it wasn’t for Bjo Trimble and her husband, John Griffin Trimble, there would have been nothing. In 1968 NBC announced that Star Trek would, boldly, be cancelled. The two of them set out and started the now famous “Save Star Trek” letter writing campaign that saved the series for a third season. This may sound simple enough, but we have to remember that this was in the days in the long, long ago before the Internet. They did this all through regular-ass mail.  They dug up mailing lists from science fiction conventions, book dealers and the Paramount mailing room to get addresses. They mailed letters out to fans to ask them to write a letter to the studios and to ask ten more friends to do the same. It worked very much like a chain letter that was used for the forces of good instead of for cursing people to never know laughter. This caught the executives’ attention and Star Trek was born again. Later Bjo and John would use this very same technique to change the first space shuttle’s name to “Enterprise”.

The original series was allowed to sail the interstellar seas once again, but with a slashed budget and the show time moved to the Friday night death sloth at 10pm. The network did their best to bury the show. As the season crawled to a close another letter campaign tried to defibrillate the dying show once again, but this time they were ignored. Also ignored were the marketing personel that believed the cancellation of the show was too damned soon. They discovered that there was something called “demographics” which made the Star Trek audience highly desirable to the advertisers therefore making it a valuable franchise. This warning came too late and the series finally met its doom. 

Thankfully, the show at least lasted for three seasons. If it hadn’t it would have just been shelved and future generations would not have been able to see it, as they did, in syndication. There were of course fans of the show when it aired, but Star Trek really found the success it should have had in syndication. For the first time fans were calling themselves “Trekkies” and were holding homebrewed conventions. The high ratings in syndications and fevered dedication of the fan base actually made Paramount take notice and actually regret canceling the little show that could. The pressure from fans and the dripping saliva of monitary greed was too much for the studio to over look. How can they feed the hunger for Star Trek, but not spend any real money? How about a limitedly animated cartoon? This was the start of Paramount milking the fans, but low-balling the franchise, a tradition that would last for decades.

Star Trek: The Animated Series ran for two seasons from 1973 to 1974 and was produced by Filmation in association with Paramount Television. Originally Filmation wanted to do a kiddy version of Star Trek where all the roles were replaced with cadets. Gene Roddenberry’s blood boiled over at the thought of it. Paramount even tried to bribe Gene with a large sum of money for him to abandon creative control so they could make Baby Trek, but Gene, ever the paragon of virtue, flatly refused. The freedom of an animated series was that special effects were only limited by imagination. The crew of the Enterprise could encounter aliens that actually look alien instead of looking like a dark skinned person wearing buckskin. In spite of this, the show was plagued with quality issues. Filmation was, and still is, best known for crude drawings that barely moved, recycling stock footage, and random mistakes. Because of all this Roddenberry forced Paramount to stop considering the series as canon.  

In 1978, Paramount was prepared to launch a fourth network television station and wanted to use Star Trek as the flag ship show titled Star Trek: Phase II. Most of the crew would return with the exception of Leonard Nimoy as Spock because of legal issues or because he had a stick up his ass. Sets were built, new actors were hired to expand the cast, footage was shot and then Star Wars destroyed all plans for a new show. Star Wars was such a financial juggernaut that Paramount wanted their own space movie and wondered what properties they owned that was similar. This put brakes on Phase II, but gave birth to the Star Trek movie franchise.

READ IT HERE: THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF STAR TREK PART 2: THE MOVIES AND SPIN OFFS! 

The long and torturous wait is long over. We have arrived at the distant oasis and we will drink deep and long. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is finally in theaters. We now can find out if Fox Studios actually did anything different to improve the movie millions downloaded, watched, and were dissatisfied by weeks ago. My guess is no, they didn’t. I had set my heart to “disappointment” a long time ago when Marvel published the Origins miniseries back in 2001. It’s not that I thought it sucked or anything, I just believed Logan’s mysterious past was too important to the character and was one of the key factors for why the he was “cool”. Oh, and I also thought it sucked. So instead of dwelling on the disappointments of the present we will look to the possibilities of the past – the unused, but original intended origins of Wolverine.

The origin of the actual character started when Marvel’s then editor-in-chief, Roy Thomas, took Len Wein out to lunch sometime in 1974. As they were enjoying their afternoon meal Thomas asked Wein to create a Canadian character named Wolverine. He specified that the character must be short because Wolverines are small, but ferocious. It was almost as if they wanted to create a character that would be initially repulsive. This was a superhero that would be short, hairy, prone to fits of rage, and had a weather beaten face created in a time of seven foot tall, corn-fed, chiseled-jawed, handsome man-boys like Superman and Cyclops.

After this conversation Len Wein worked with John Romita, Sr., who designed the furry kanuck’s original look. Len’s original idea for Wolverine’s claws was that they were mechanical and retracted into his gloves. They didn’t pop out of his fist in his first appearance in Incredible Hulk #180 and #181 and adamantium wasn’t even on the table yet. If this wasn’t shocking enough he might have had not even been a mutant or even human.

Someone had the idea that Wolverine was not a human at all, but an evolved wolverine cub created by the High Evolutionary. This is the origin that I want to see in a movie, I just don’t think anyone else does. In an article titled “10 Essential Facts About ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ written by Mat McDaniel, he stated the following as his #2 fact:

“Co-creator Len Wein’s original idea was that the character was actually a wolverine cub that was mutated into human form. He also intended for Wolverine’s signature claws to extend from his gloves, not from his body. But these ideas were dropped when new writer Chris Claremont took over the series.”

Len Wein vehemently denied this statement and pretty much blamed everyone else in his personal blog, Weinwords got his by publishing this rebuttal:

“Let me respond to this as emphatically as I possibly can.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! And…oh, yeah…WRONG!

Well, at least, in part.

While I readily admit that my original idea was for Wolvie’s claws to extend from the backs of his gloves (I figured that since Adamantium is indestructible, telescoping claws no more than a molecule thick could fit into those casings in the backs of Adamantium gloves, which had then been covered in cloth. Dave and Chris definitely improved on that idea), I absolutely DID NOT ever intend to make Logan a mutated wolverine. I write stories about human beings, not evolved animals (with apologies for any story I may have written that involved the High Evolutionary). The mutated wolverine thing came about long after I was no longer involved with the book. I’m not certain if the idea was first suggested by Chris Claremont, the late much-missed Dave Cockrum, or John Byrne when he came aboard as artist, but it most certainly DID NOT start with me.

Just setting the record straight here. As far as I’m concerned, that idea is spinach, and I say to Hell with it.”

I really was with Len on this one until he brought up spinach. Spinach is healthy, delicious, and makes you strong to the finish. I just don’t know what is his problem is with a little green on his plate.

Moving on…

The idea that wolverine was an evolved animal may have actually been Dave Cockrum’s after all. In an interview of the reprint of Wolverine’s debut titled Incredible Hulk and Wolverine he said that he thought about having the High Evolutionary play a critical role in making Wolverine human. He even did the following sketch of a proto-Wolverine.

Wolverine was originally conceived to be only a “secondary” character, and traditionally “secondary” characters (especially in 1974) were used only once or twice and then discarded and forgotten about. This would have been Logan’s fate as well if it weren’t for the rebirth of the X-Men with Giant Sized X-Men #1 written by Len Wein and drawn by Dave Cockrum. The second phase of the X-Men was that they were a team of international mutants. Colossus was Russian, Nightcrawler was German, Thunderbird was Indian, Sunfire was Japanese, Storm was African, Banshee was Scottish and of course Wolverine was Canadian. The lamest (or coolest!) aspect of Logan, that of him being Canadian, might have been the major reason he was brought out of mothballs. 

An interesting note about his costume change in Giant Sized X-Men #1 was that it was all a mistake. Cover artist Gil Kane penciled Wolverine’s costume wrong. Dave Cockrum who drew the book and also inked Gil’s pencils liked the change so much that just kept drawing him that way. He thought the pointed ears looked like Batman’s cowl.

When John Byrne came onto the scene he drew a face for Logan under the mask not realizing John Romita, Sr. had already drawn a face and it had already been used by Dave Cockrum. So like every self-respecting artist, he just used it for another character, Sabertooth. Sabertooth was originally Iron Fist’s enemy, but, perhaps because of his similar powers to Wolverine, Bryne had the notion that he was Wolverine’s father. Chris Claremont and John Byrne worked together and worked out a story in which Wolverine was crushed in an accident. Logan remained a cripple after discovering that his healing factor didn’t work on bones. This would be the catalyst for him agreeing with the Canadian government experiment to replace his skeleton with adamantium. His claws, however, were not bone, but an unintended result of the experiment. This story was never used.

These unused ideas may not have been the most inventive ones, but they had the virtue of being extremely entertaining. While Fox will unleash a bland serving of Wolverine’s identity this weekend you can still have the enjoyment of looking into Hugh Jackman’s face and thinking to yourself, you evolved from a smelly, clawed, weasel. Lord knows I did.

This is how I know about Johnny Appleseed: a Disney Cartoon where there are friendly woodland creatures and a catchy theme song. This short was bundled in a shorts package consisting of other American icons to make up the Disney feature American Legends. They had Johnny, of course, Paul Bunyan, John Henry and The Brave Engineer. I have always thought that these were just tall tales that were passed down through oral tradition and have never known that they had some basis in reality. Johnny Appleseed was a real flesh and blood person and his story of selflessness and generosity were more heroic than any legend. John Henry was a steel driv’n man but was there really a man who worked the rails? What about Paul Bunyan? Was there really a giant guy with a very, very close relationship with his giant blue ox? Well, for Paul the answer is no. He’s total bullshit… or oxshit.  

Johnny Appleseed’s true name was John Chapman and he was born in Leominster, Massachusetts: the “you could keep your fucking tea” state (thank you, John Hodgeman, for that joke I just stole). He was born to Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman on September 26, 1774. They held the child out towards the setting sun against the fiery golden sky. All of the animals of the plains gathered forth and bowed their heads down low (cue Lion King music). The Chapman family was, like many families of the time, ragged and poor. Some say that Nathaniel lost two farms during the Revolutionary War, but in truth there is no historical fact that supports Nathaniel being a farmer at all. He held no deed record to suggest this. But this matters little because he was still the father that sent Johnny on his way to becoming the great man that he was by pawning him off onto yet another man. Johnny was made to apprentice under a Mr. Crawford, who was a man who owned an apple orchard. “Apprentice” was what white people were called when they did slave work back then. During this time, Elizabeth, Johnny’s mother, died giving birth to a child that did not survive. Johnny’s father would later remarry. 

Wanderlust grew within the beating heart of his honey breast. The wild called to him and in 1792 at the age of 18 John Chapman could bear it no longer. He took to the west, taking his 11 year-old half-brother (who was also named Nathaniel) with him. The plan was to make it to the headwaters of Susquehanna. The accounts of his travels are a bit hazy. Being the son of an under educated out of work farm hand, he surprisingly wasn’t taught to keep records in journals or apparently to wash and wear nice clothes. He was like a wild monkey set out onto the land, but at least he knew how to read, which is already doing much better than sixty percent of our public school children are now. 

You may think of Johnny Appleseed as a seed scattering inbred country yokel but that would be judgmental and far from the truth. You should be ashamed of yourself. Apples don’t “true grow” from seeds. An apple tree grown from a seed actually bears little resemblance to its parent. The fruit from these bastard trees would be almost inedible ranging from sour to bitter. In order to get consistent tasting fruit from apples you must clone the tree. The farmer or orchardist would graft trees from preexisting trees that have properties they liked then make an exact duplicate over and over again. Finally, what do you know, you have “Washington Red Apples”. In truth, apples in America prospered because of a process of directed natural selection. 

Apples are not indigenous to the Americas. They were brought over to the New World by the earliest settlers, the Pilgrims, sometime around 1620. That makes the saying “as American as apple pie” pretty retarded, especially since the recipe for apple pie is really Dutch. So the next time your mom says that, be sure to slap her in the mouth and call her a dumb bitch, but only do so if you are white trash. Trees grown from seedlings known as “pippins” prospered in New England. Why were they called “pippins”? Because the British has to gay up anything they name. The trees grew even better after the colonists imported honeybees to improve pollination.  

Now, we all know that apples are nutritious, but back during Chapman’s time apples were not mainly eaten. Instead they were use to make booze; Hard Cider to be exact. Johnny wasn’t just an apple peddler, but the Mother Teresa of that happy fun time juice known as alcohol. You may know Hard Cider by its street name: Apple Jizz. Settlers pressed the apples to produce juice and then allowed the juice to ferment in a barrel for a week or two. The final product was a mild alcoholic beverage that was half the strength of wine. If you want a faster ticket to wino city you could distill the cider to brandy (yum) or freeze it into applejack, which is 66 percent proof (bad ass). In many rural areas, cider supplanted wine, beer, coffee, juice and water for the whole family. These were primitive times where entertainment choices were minimal, so why not spend the entire day in a drunken stupor? The party went on until the 1900s and then we had to start eating apples instead of downing them. The bitches known as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union publicized the evils of alcohol, and pulled the plug on the nation’s collective mixed tape and ended the party for everyone. Prohibition was coming and there wasn’t shit that anyone could do about it. The apple industry felt the direction that the wind was blowing and decided to rebrand the apple. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” was an old adage from the 1800s that was undated and turned into an advertising slogan. The apple would have its comeback during the great depression when fruit sellers stubbornly refused to sell anything else.  

But we’re getting away from the subject of this tale. Last we left off, our intrepid Monkey-man had taken off west with his younger brother in tow. I’m sure that after a week into the trip Johnny must have wanted to beat the child over the head and use his flesh for sustenance, but Johnny was a strict vegetarian. In the spring of 1798 he was travelling along the Allegheny River when he found the spot that would be the location of his first apple nursery. We know through land records dated in 1800 that John Chapman was standing in what today is Licking County, Ohio. 

In Licking County, John was in a planting fever. Congress decided to give the Revolutionary War Vets a bone by passing legislation that would allow them to have from 160 to 2,240 acres of land in the area which up until then belonged to the Indians (because everything used to belong to the Indians). It was nice for the Indians to give the land freely and without a fuss to the Union knowing that Manifest Destiny was ultimately on the White-Man’s side. I mean how can you argue with God, right? Of course, the government took its sweet time doling out deeds so soldiers actually did not receive letters of patent to their grants until 1802. By the time the veterans arrived, Johnny’s nurseries, located on the Isaac Stadden farm, had trees big enough to transplant. Johnny had done most of the work already for them. He would sell each apple tree at five or six cents apiece. 

In 1805, the elder Nathaniel Chapman, John’s father, arrived with his second family and John’s brother Nathaniel Jr. rejoined his father. Nathaniel Jr. would spend the rest of his life trying to keep the memories of rough living and the constant taste of apples out of his mind. This freed Johnny to fill his heart with the wild life of nature that he held so dear. He would go on to spend the rest of his life planting and, because he was a religious man, preaching.

Johnny was fairly shrewd when it came to business. He tried to predict where the pioneers were likely to settle. In those early days, the sites were mainly along the Muskingum River in north central Ohio. He would load a canoe with a mass of seeds and paddle up the river looking for a nice piece of land. He would plant and then wait for nature to take its course. Settlers would come and he would sell to them. The routine John had worked out for himself was to return to his orchards in Allegheny County to get more seeds in the autumn. In the spring he would then look for more sites to plant nurseries and fence them in. In the summer he would go and tend to the fences and nurseries he already had and hire a local agent to take care of the trees. He would then move on and start the whole process over again. This caused him to be on constant movement, traveling with the frontier as he tamed it in his wake. The consequence was that he never had a fixed residence for his entire life. What we call a bum today was what they called a “frontier man” back then.

John Chapman was the apple expert, but he also brought with him many seeds of medicinal plants and the knowledge of how to use them. Ever generous to help his fellow man, he was always ready with aid or to even help with chores. The people began to take notice of him and he became a welcome face. His deeds did not go unnoticed. His legend began to grow, and by 1806 people nicknamed him Johnny Appleseed. Settlers had accounts of welcoming him in to their homes. They would feed him hot meals and provide a solid roof over his head to sleep under. He would exchange their kindness with apples or apple trees and even news and stories of his exploits. The mythology of single handedly taming the wild was woven with reality and made John into a living legend in his own time. People were happy to welcome him into their homes. It would be like having Odysseus stay with you and retell stories of fighting giants and sea monsters or Margo Kidder recounting the time she got high and crazy and slept under a stranger’s rose bush in the front lawn.

It was nice that he was so welcome because he looked like a crazy person even during the time of buckshot and tanning your own leather. He was a man of medium height but emaciated and sinewy. His hair was dark brown and grew down to his shoulders, like a proto Charles Manson. His eyes were bright blue and pierced you down to the soul. He wore a burlap coffee sack that had holes for his arms and tied it at the waist. He also wore the legendary tin kettle that he used as both hat and cooking pot. A woman who knew him described him as such: “Scraggly and barefoot, he’s wearing a sackcloth cinched at the waist like a dress and a tin pot on his head. The man looks completely insane.” Despite his appearance, no one ever thought of him as repulsive, they just thought he was the harmless, helpful crazy guy. Johnny Appleseed didn’t just look strange, but also behaved in ways foreign to 1800s settlers. He went barefoot in any clement weather, be it summer or winter, through heat and snow. The soles of his feet were so callused and thick and leathery that he would entertain little boys by pressing hot coals on them or by shoving needle through them. Johnny also was a strict vegetarian and mostly preferred to sleep outdoors, away from the towns and settlement. His kindness to animals was extended to extreme degrees. He thought it was cruel to ride a horse, chop down a tree or to kill a rattlesnake. He even cared for the insects. One story collected by Henry Howe, a Johnny Appleseed enthusiast and historian, was as follows:

“One cool autumnal night, while lying by his camp-fire in the woods, he observed that the mosquitoes flew in the blaze and were burnt. Johnny, who wore on his head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot, filled it with water and quenched the fire, and afterwards remarked, “God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort, that should be the means of destroying any of His creatures.”

His views towards nature could have stemmed from his religious beliefs. He believed in the writing of Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s doctrine spoke that everything on Earth correlated directly with the afterlife, so in turn, the natural world was intertwined with the mystical and spiritual realm. The righteous do good without looking to be repaid. The deed of doing good was its own reward. All of nature, such as an apple blooming, is both a natural process and a “living sermon from God.” Johnny saw himself as not only sewing seeds but also the word of God. This was hippy tree hugging wrapped in Jeabus. This was directly in opposition to the popular “We own this fucking world, so eat a dick” theology the rest of Americans lived by. There is a story of him being present when a missionary was holding open-air congregation in Mansfield, Ohio. The sermon was long and severe, preaching against the excess and sins of the modern man. He said this because the pioneers were buying extravagances such as calico and store-bought tea. The preacher shouted out to the congregation, “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to heaven bare-footed and clad in coarse raiment?” He repeated this again and again until Johnny Appleseed could not bare the hypocrisy any longer. He walked up to the preacher defiantly and placed his bare foot on the stump that the missionary used as a podium, and said, “Here’s your primitive Christian!” The preacher was so taken aback that he dismissed the congregation and slinked away.

Chapman was also a friend to the Native Americans. This guy is so nice that I almost want to travel back in time and give him a big hug. I wouldn’t, however, because he sounds kind of grody. The Indians came to treat John with kindness, as he would give them medicinal plants. They also helped him in his travels. John blamed the majority of frontier violence on mistreatments of the Indians by the honkeys. Though he would blame his own people, John cared for every life. During a moment in the War of 1812, he elevated himself from legend to hero.

Many people believe that America won the Revolution and the British just said, “fuck all” and picked up and went home. This is of course not true. The British controlled Canada and many parts of the States. The British had been at war with France since 1793 and had begun to impede on trade between the Americas and their allies in France. That was the catalyst but The United States declared war on Britain on June 18, 1812 for a combination of reasons. The Indians allied themselves with the British in an effort to avenge themselves for atrocities that the settlers and government committed on them.

The Indians were ready to massacre the entire town of Mount Vernon. Johnny Appleseed got wind of this and raced “barefooted and bareheaded” through forests and rough terrain as if the whips of God were at his back. He ran for 30 miles from Mansfield to Mount Vernon, Ohio, to warn them of the impending attack and told them to obtain reinforcements. This act saved the lives of many settlers. Some said he rode a horse. I say that those naysayers are just not fucking American. Regardless of all this, he still was able to seamlessly move between the societies of the settlers and the natives.

Johnny Appleseed never took a bride. He was asked once and he replied, “I would not marry in this world, but have a pure wife in heaven.” However there are a few accounts that pointed to him liking them young. Young, like 8 or 10, so that she was a pure and beautiful virgin… which is pretty fucked up. There is another version where apparently Chapman made arrangements with an unknown frontier family in 1833 to raise their 10 year-old daughter to be his bride. He paid several visits to the girl, perhaps bringing her gifts of apples and contributed to her upkeep. But one day he saw that child bride to be was flirting with a boy her own age. They were most likely just making mud pies but he got furious and broke off the relationship. In this story, both Chapman and the family were f ‘d up beyond belief. They never mentioned this on the old Disney cartoon for some reason.

By the 1830s, his empire spanned from western Pennsylvania through central Ohio and into Indiana. In 1845, John went and visited a friend by the name of William Worth. They shared a meal of bread and milk. Johnny, of course, read aloud from the bible until the activities of the day wore him out and he stretched out on the floor to sleep. Johnny Appleseed never woke up. He died at the age of 70. This was a man who lived his life more sparsely than any preacher or priest and left behind an estate that included over 1,200 acres of prime real estate. With the land that was amassed he could have lived as a god but instead chose to serve one.

This is not going to be a just an historical examination of SPAM. No, this is a love letter. I love SPAM: the salty, porky, pink-y brick that coats your tongue in a blissful, narcotic, flavor. It’s like the first time you snorted a fat line of methamphetamine, it’s that fucking good. (No? Just me? Okay.) Spam could be sliced, diced, minced, julienne, grated, mashed, spread, fried, baked, grilled, steamed, and boiled. It’s used, to name a few, in quiches, casseroles, kabobs, fried rice, burgers, stews, and sushi. Nothing makes me feel like more of an American than slicing up a pink block and frying it up nice and crispy. The Miracle Meat fed the hungry, won a couple of wars and entered the pop culture lexicon. A million Hawaiians can’t be wrong. SPAM: if it’s good enough for Eisenhower, then it’s good enough for you! 

Spam was introduced into the American market in 1937. Jay Hormel was born into the family business, meat packing. Hormel was the first to pioneer canned ham in 1926 and when this product was imitated he added spices to make it stand out. Jay Hormel’s ham was by far above and beyond the competition in quality. The competition included lips, snouts, ears and the occasional accidental dead body. Hormel refused to use this type of meat by product, saying that if he is going to stamp his name on pig’s ass it damn well better be all ass. The canned ham business had a large waste product however and that was large quantities of pork shoulder. The shoulder was a cut of meat usually unused because it is time-consuming to remove the meat from the bone. They would sell this at low prices to grocers. All of this quality meat was going to waste and it haunted Jay as it would haunt any buisness man that needed to be richer. Jay Hormel spent many a sleepless night pondering the problem when a storm broke in his mind. He would have someone else solve the problem for him. 

Hormel asked his personal chef to create a product for him. The French Chef thought to himself, how could I get rid of all this meat and use the least amount of creativity and muscle power. The answer was simple, grind the meat down and add a fair amount of salt and cook it right in the can. The first experimental 12-oz can of luncheon meat turned out to be 8-oz of meat and 4-oz of juice. The juice, while refreshing, was a little lacking in nutritional value. As the meat cooked the cells broke down, releasing a torrent of pig juice. Hormel tried many things to reduce his juicing problem and the final solution was to mix the meat in a vacuum environment and then seal it in a vacuum seal can. Though logistical issues were taken care of Jay couldn’t rest easy yet. Hormel knew that in order for an indistinguishable, processed, geometrical, pink meat substitute to sell it was going to need a catchy name.  

He threw a lavish New Year’s Eve party for his country-club friends and family at his 170-acre Austin, Minnesota estate. Spam was served to rave responses from the guest. Jay made them pay for their liquor by making them suggest a name every time they ordered a drink. He even set up a $100 dollar cash prize for the best one. The winner was Kenneth Daigneau, radio actor and brother of Hormel Vice President Ralph Daigneau. The name was a mash-up of the words Spiced and Ham, or Ralph could have been drunk and was slurring his speech and there you have it, SPAM was born. Even though it was touted for its value and convenience, SPAM was not an instant success upon its release. It would need some Nazis to launch it to fame.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Back home in America, the nation let out a united sigh, muttering something along the lines of “Damn, sucks for you asshole” and went back to listening to The Chase and Sanborn Hour. On December Ah 1941 Japan attacked Pear Harbor, they also attacked British and Dutch holdings in Southeast Asia simultaneously, but history books show that we only really cared what happen to us. We were always a little self-absorbed as a nation. The United States is kind of like the well-meaning Uncle that never spends any time with you but drops by once in a while and give you twenty bucks. Well the attack on Pear Harbor woke up a sleeping giant, and we weren’t hitting the snooze button any longer.

Napoleon once said that war was won on meat. WWII was won on SPAM; they didn’t call it the meat that won the war for nothing. Sure, the Germans may have had better guns, tanks and scientists, the Japanese had the insane dedication to duty in killing themselves for the glory of their God Emperor, and the Italians had a laid back attitude, mopeds, and an appreciation for food and wine, but we had SPAM. That was the deciding factor; we had a can packed with salt and pork and the Krauts didn’t.

During World War II it was impossible to send fresh meat to feed the armies. SPAM came to the rescue. Hormel supplied the Allied troops with 15 million cans of SPAM per week. Soldiers, who had to endure not only bullets but a endless sea of culinary nightmares, called it “meat loaf without basic training”, “ham that didn’t pass the physical”, and “my girl friend Mary-Bell”. Some people got lonely ok. In spite of soldier complaints that they were eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, World leaders such as Eisenhower, Margaret Thatcher and Nikita Khrushchev praised SPAM for its effectiveness. Khrushchev himself credited the survival of the starving Russian Army to SPAM. If you were carving up your best friend as a turkey dinner in a Russian winter (like something out of the movie Survival) you would worship Hormel for sending SPAM.

The War ended with the United States dropping a couple of nuclear bombs on Japan. There were many important reasons the US decided to take such drastic measures so late in the War. One: Japan refused the terms of surrender under the conditions issued by Truman and other Allied leaders as stated in the Potsdam Declaration. Two: It was a preventative measure to save Allied soldiers lives by forcing Japan to surrender then to invade Japan in armed conflict. Three: For shits and giggles. Spam would have been on that bombing run as well. We just unleashed nuclear hell fire on civilians, time to pop open a can, cheers. Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending the war but not our love affair with SPAM.

Johnny came marching home and tried to get back to the business of getting laid and having children. As anyone that had been in military action can attest to, upon return to regular life everything just seems boring. After you saw heads explode by artillery shells you can’t exactly go back to working at the tire factory. In order to relive the psychological and physical torment these veterans demanded the pink stuff. SPAM became an American staple. During the cold war people would stock their bomb shelters with SPAM knowing that it could be stored indefinitely without refrigeration. Fathers would sleep lightly for fear that the Russkies would blow everyone to the great beyond or someone would steal their SPAM. I think there was even a Twilight Zone about this every scenario.

It is impossible to talk about SPAM and night mention the Hawaiians. SPAM proliferates in areas that:

A)    Consume a high amount of pork as apart of its common diet.

B)     Has or had a large military present and

C)    Where white people wear white, hooded sheets and burn crosses for kicks.

Hawaiians has two of the perquisites needed to have an appetite for SPAM, but they not only like it they love it in a unholy and unnatural way. However if you ever get a chance to try SPAM Musubi you will understand how they could be hypnotized by luncheon meat. It’s damn tasty. By 1959 a billion cans were sold and some say half of it was to Hawaii. Because whether cold of hot SPAM hits the spot.

SPAM has carved a small spot in our hearts and our bowels in the last seventy years. That doesn’t mean that it’s not “hip” to the way kids jive today. SPAM comes in a variety of forms to fit all the cool individuality all the kids are into today. Here is a list of SPAM products and the personality types they belong to.

SPAM Low Sodium: If you love the flavor of SPAM but you doctor tells you if you don’t lower you sodium intake your blood vessels could burst and kill you then why not try SPAM Low Sodium. It has 60 percent less sodium than regular SPAM but a full 80 percent more than that of Lot’s Wife after she was turned to a pillar of salt.

SPAM Lite: I know you eat when you’re sad or depressed but now you could do it without the guilt! That’s right SPAM Lite is for you. It has 33 percent fewer calories and 50 percent less fat. Now with SPAM Lite you could really taste your own tears as they stream into your mouth as you eat. When nobody loves you, SPAM Lite will.

SPAM Singles: You’re a man on the go. You don’t have time to open a can and slice it. If you are stuck on a subway and will kick out an emergency window to get to that of office meeting on time then you’re a SPAM Singles man. SPAM Singles because you’re a lazy asshole.

SPAM Spread: Your wife doesn’t know that you go to those clubs and bathhouses. She’s starting to suspect something however because you ask her to buy a lot of SPAM Spread. You know it isn’t right but once you’ve experience the joy of smeared meat over yourself and your special boys, how can you save your marriage?

SPAM With Cheese: You’ve got a gun in your mouth right now but you know that it’s going to be messy for your mom to clean and haven’t you put her through enough. Well SPAM With Cheese is the way for you. It’s like having Dr. Kevorkian in a can! And it’s just as fast.

SPAM With Bacon: Just go back and reread the SPAM With Cheese section.

SPAM Oven Roasted Turkey: It’s Thanks Giving and you have the whole day off from work. You think that no one is going to call and you are right. People at work doesn’t know that working at the post of office is all you have and you pray every night that they won’t fire you. You could have these same thoughts with the Thanks Giving flavor of SPAM Oven Roasted Turkey. SPAM Oven Roasted Turkey is almost as good as having a family that actually cares about you.

Of course in the information age the word SPAM doesn’t conjure up fond thoughts of salty pork but horrible thoughts of yet another email suggesting that you need to have a larger erection. So how did pink blocks of meat morph into a term for unwanted mail? It actually started before the Internet, during the wonderfully analog days of the 1970’s. It started with a group of wise-ass British guys. The Monty Python did a sketch in which a restaurant had nothing but SPAM on the menu. Also there were some Vikings that would sing a SPAM song over and over. The word SPAM was repeated so many times it bordered on annoyance. During the early days of the internet people were bombarded with junk messages that they equated the repetition of the messages with the repetition of SPAM in that old Monty Python sketch. Of course Hormel wouldn’t take the misuse of their brand name sitting down, or would they?

Hormel initially took modest legal action in the 90’s to stop the use of the word spam as a reference to junk e-mails, but really how do you stop cultural slang? The answer is that you don’t. Today Hormel takes a stand of trying not to be a whinny bitch. They are ok with people using spam in its slang from but they do ask that when you write about pink blocks of pork to follow trademark guidelines. If you notice I capped the word every single time I mentioned SPAM, well Hormel is why.

Jay Hormel must be proud to see what had become of his creation, more proud of it than his actual children. See with all theses advances in canned meat SPAM will be around far into the future. It quite possibly will be the last thing the human race consumes before we turn to cannibalism during the last days of the world. SPAM: The meat that won the war. SPAM: It’s what you’re fucking eating.

Who doesn’t love magic? Once when I was ten or so, I spent my entire allowance on a cup and ball trick from a magic shop. The old shop owner fogged my mind by making the little red fuzzy ball disappear in mid air only to pop up in the cup or to push the ball through the solid bottom of the cups. I took the trick home and read the manual. After I found out what was the trick was, an extra ball cupped in the palm of the magician’s hand, the entire magic spell fell apart and shattered into a couple of cheap cups and red fuzzy balls. At ten, I wished I never read the manual. I still wish I never knew. So what can magic do? Can it change the world or the perception of the world? Maybe it doesn’t do anything; or maybe it could fight one of the greatest threats the world has ever known. If only we believed that it could. Today on the Way Back Machine we find a man that believed in magic and fought a war with it, the true story of Jasper Maskelyne and his magic army.

Jasper Maskelyne was born in 1902 in Great Britain. The Maskelynes were a renowned family of established stage magicians with family roots that traced back to the great royal astronomer also named Nevil Maskelyne. John Nevil Maskelyne, Jasper’s grandfather, was seen as the greatest illusionist of his time and like Houdini spent a great portion of his life exposing people that would perform cases of mystical fraud. He was also the inventor of the pay toilet. Jasper’s father, Nevil Maskelyne was also a noted stage magician that continued John Nevil’s work. He was the author of many magic books and also worked in the area of wireless telegraphy. Magic and ingenuity was in Jasper’s blood and he himself would take to the stage with great success but little did he know there would be a greater calling.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland marking the start of World War II. This moment will be important to video game makers in the present who just can’t stop making games about the worst military conflict the world had ever seen. Also in 1939, Jasper enlisted in the British Army. Here was a guy whose background was pulling rabbits out of hats and unlocking stubbornly interlocking rings -what the hell do you do with him? Well the British were just as contused as to what use he could be and assigned him to the Royal Engineers Camouflage Corps. Jasper, hoping for adventure and glory, went off to training. But while in training he failed to convince his superiors that he would be of any use other than to supply the real troops with a source of entertainment. Random British soldiers would constantly stop him and make him do some card tricks. He was shoved around and picked on. This made him feel like the prison yard bitch, yet Jasper remained undeterred. He would one day show them his quality.

Jasper was aware that Lord Gort who was the Inspector General of the British Army, and not some Lord of the Rings villain as his name suggests, was making an inspection of the camouflage training facility. To prove the point that magic could be used in war, Jasper hid a machine gun nest using trickery and ambushed the general, but he wasn’t done yet. Later that day he called out to the watchtowers of the north, south, east and west and evoked the name of Manon to draw upon the dark energies of the Tobin Spirit Guide and made a German warship materialize in the Thames River. Ok -he used a model and mirrors. This made Lord Gort realize that illusions of armaments could be used in combat and sent Jasper Maskelyne to where their numbers were lacking in the North African Battlefields.

When Jasper arrived in Egypt in early 1941, his principle duty was to supply agents with counterfeit currency. But when Jasper arrived he complained that he had a lack of cash. The master counterfeiter without counterfeit money, his credibility was at that moment reduced. After this he was treated once again like an interloper, a birthday party sleight of hand man that should be entertaining the troops on a stage rather than in the fighting arena of the world stage.

During this time the Imam, Islamic leader of the Whirling Dervish tribe, was restricting the movements of British soldiers through their domain. They stated that any such violations would trigger a jihad. Jasper’s superiors would order him to go and confront the Imam and find a resolution to the conflict. They did this to see him fail and because of his family connections. Nevil Maskelyne, Jasper’s father, worked with Sir Lawrence of Arabia during the First World War. Prince Hassan, who was sympathetic to the British, arranged a meeting between Jasper and the Imam in Damascus. The meeting, after a few pleasantries, devolved into a full-blown magic duel. Imam used a trick involving a flexible weapon and a gimmick belt which created the illusion of a man being impaled through the stomach with a spear. Jasper countered with his version of the gun trick where he pretends to fire a bullet through the palm of his hand. By the end of this exchange of magical prowess the Imam was so impressed by Jasper’s abilities he agreed to allow the British safe passage through Syria.

Commander of the British forces in the North African theater, General Wavell ordered the formation of a special unit dedicated to counter-intelligence and deception fashioned after the Nazi’s own tactics of espionage. This unit was known as the A-Force (cue the A-Team theme). Jasper was posted to the Camouflage Experimental Section of the unit, led by Major Geoffrey Barkas. He was posted to the section because they thought he was a witch. To aid him in dispatching the enemy by using the dark arts of mirrors and smoke, he assembled a team 14 misanthropes and rogues. Some members of Jasper’s band of roughians were pulled from the ranks of soldiers facing dishonorable discharge. More importantly, they were a band of out-of-the-box thinkers, with backgrounds in chemistry, electrical engineering, and stage construction. This group was to use their creative talents to develop deceptions for use in combat. They were informally known as the Magic Gang. Like most stage workers in high school plays they mostly hung out in the back and smoked cigarettes until it was time to actually do shit.

The Magic Gang themselves would be an invaluable source of innovative thinking. These were their key members:

Michael Hill, a down-to-earth private, willing to cut corners and break regulations, and invaluable at procuring badly needed items. He was the bad boy who all the girls wanted to “get with.”

Theodore “Nails” Graham, a skilled carpenter; he would never shut up about how Jesus was a carpenter. He could also kill a man in eight different ways with a hammer.

Bill Robson, a shortsighted cartoonist and artist. He was a pacifist cartoonist, and an artist whose name was known to thousands (except to anyone alive today).  He was over six feet tall, bespectacled, and very thin, so of course he was the nerdy one. At night he would masturbate to his own drawings of Betty Boop.

Philip Townsend, an “upmarket” artist and the gay one. He too had a crush on Michael, but was always too shy to tell him.

Sergeant Jack Fuller, a more orthodox disciplinarian, who knew Cairo well and understood the ins and outs of Army bureaucracy. He was Jasper’s right hand man and confidant. He was also the liaison between Jasper and the upper brass, like Squanto but less Indian.

And there was Mr. T: the black guy.

The Magic Gang would become a force to be reckoned with. But first they had to play with camel shit.

In May of 1941, Barkas gave the Magic Gang their first big job. Their job was to magic up about ten thousand gallons of camouflage paint. The army had over two hundred British tanks that were originally intended to be sent over to Greece. Apparently someone changed their mind and sent it to the desert instead. This is great news except they were painted green and made for easy targets. Lucky for them Townsend knew about the chemistry of paints, they would need a pigment to produce the color and a liquid base to fix and preserve it. The team scoured the desert and came upon a huge dump in a warehouse in North Cairo. The warehouse contained miscellaneous junk, but in the mass of putrid matter were endless rows of tin drums that contained tainted Worcestershire sauce. This would be the base, but where would they get the pigment? Hey, camel shit looks brown! The dung patrol was born, soldiers running around like monkeys scooping up fresh camel dung from city streets and Arab caravans. The recipe consisted of Worcestershire sauce, flour, cement and camel dung. In a week they were able to produce two thousand gallons of paint. The tanks were painted and left out in the sun to kill the stench of camel shit. Maskelyne told his men, “Remember, when someone asks you if we can do the job, the answer is yes. Don’t think about it, don’t worry about it, the answer is yes.”

General Wavell was under orders from Churchill to make an offensive maneuver against the Afrikakorps, the German expeditionary force in Libya and Egypt, codenamed Operation Battleaxe. Maskelyne’s task was to maneuver their tanks secretly into position without being spotted by German reconnaissance planes or ground observers. Maskelyne made a series of fake tanks, but the stroke of genius was to cover the real tanks with lightweight frames that made them look like innocent trucks. These frames were called sunshields. To complete the illusion, friends in the Mechanical Experimental Establishment developed a device attached to the rear of the camouflaged tank to erase the tank tread and replaced it with truck tracks. The sunshields were an effective form of camouflage but Operation Battleaxe itself was an unfortunate and embarrassing failure for General Wavell. During the battle, ninety-one British tanks were destroyed while only twelve German tanks were lost. This led to General Wavell’s replacement with General Claude Auchinleck. The war moved on.

The vital Mediterranean port of Alexandria was being brutally ravaged by nighttime raids courtesy of the German Luftwaffe. There were a number of proposed solutions from covering it up to using mirrors and optical illusions, but all were unfeasible or impractical. Maskelyne pondered this and said, “We can’t cover it up. We can’t disguise it. And we can’t hide it. There’s only one solution left to us, isn’t there? …We’ve got to move it. ” Jasper and crew went on to build a massive decoy three miles away from Alexandria at Maryut Bay. They ran lights on the ground and built dummy buildings so that, in the night sky, it was indistinguishable from the real thing. They even built lights to simulate return fire. For eight nights the Luftwaffe came and bombed the wrong harbor until they received orders to concentrate their efforts on Operation Barbarossa, the secret invasion of Russia.

Major Barkas would have more work for Maskelyne. He asked if there was a way to camouflage the Suez Canal, a vital supply line. The answer was a resounding yes even though the Canal was 107 miles long. They thought and thought on the matter. Jasper finally had the solution to create 21 “dazzling lights” down the length of the canal. These were powerful searchlights, with 24 different spinning beams that projected a swirling, cart wheeling confusion of lights up to nine miles into the sky. The symphony of light confused and blinded the enemy bombers. Maskelyne called it the whirling spray. I would have called it The Symphony of Light, the Whirling Spray sounds like a knock off Slip and Slide or some unspeakable sex act; but no matter, it worked.

Jasper and the Magic Gang’s crowning achievement would be the decisive battle of El Alamein. This was the battle that was the turning point for the British in the North African campaign. Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery took command of the British Eigth Army from General Claude “I didn’t do much shit in this story” Auchinleck in August 1942. Montgomery devised a massive offensive for October 23rd, 1942. The attack was codenamed Operation Lightfoot. Montgomery’s plan of attack was to fool the Germans with not only the date of the attack, but at which precise point the attack would be made. Montgomery would personally meet with General Barkas and Jasper Maskelyne and two other dudes I haven’t brought up or care about. He authorized them to develop an urgent deception plan. This would be Maskelyne’s moment of glory: to pull off “the greatest magic trick in history.” Maskelyne had to hide the assembling army in the north while simultaneously creating an illusion of a second army gathering in the south. The deception was codenamed Operation Bertam.

To deceive the enemy of the date of attack and the location from which the attack would occur, they built a fake water pipeline, codenamed Diamond, snaking its way south. The German reconnaissance planes would study the daily progression and calculate that Diamond wouldn’t be operational until November. Real tanks disguised in sunshields to look like trucks were assembled in the North while dummy tanks gathered in the South.  Stockpiles of fuel for the main army were assembled and hidden in advance. They did this by creating fake dumps with waste materials such as empty packaging and stuck them under camouflage nets. The Axis would naturally notice this but would do nothing. As time went on and seemingly no changes were made to the dumps they would be ignored. In actuality, the waste materials were moved out and real supplies moved in. In the dummy army to the South, a small team of soldiers were under orders to simulate signs of mass activity by driving trucks around for long periods to create extensive tire tracks. The British attacked on October 23 on the northern front at the same time a small scale diversionary attack on the south was made. By November 11, 1942, it was made clear that the British were victorious. The German Defeat at El Alamein would mark the end of the German expansion in Africa.

After the war, Winston Churchill praised the War Magician for his role in the war, but only in private. No medal was awarded to Jasper, no honor or recognition was made. He is only remembered in history through limited written records of his exploits as if history itself sought to swallow him whole and forget him. Jasper would return to the stage, but would never retain the level of success he had before the war. The public had lost interest in magic and stage magicians. Eventually he would move back to the land he tried to make his mark in, Africa. In Kenya, he settled down and opened a driving school. He died in 1973. Jasper Maskelyne may be one of the few people in history to have ever successfully fought in a war without having to fire a single shot; which, if you ask me, is magic in of itself.

You, the reader, may have already guessed that I love history and nerdy stuff. This column is called History of the Nerd after all. So you may also guess how excited I get when worlds collide and I find some history in a nerdy medium. The first time I read issue #31 of Sandman titled 3 Septembers and a January it was one of those moments. I was grinning like a kid who just discovered masturbating because Neil Gaiman was writing about one of my favorite historical figures, Emperor Norton I. The story was the type that Neil excels at, heart warming, with noble characters and emotionally moving. If you have read the story you know what I’m talking about, but you may ask yourself, “what about the real Emperor Norton? Who was he and how was he?” Today we find out about the first emperor of the United States, but be warned, the truth is stranger than the fiction.

Joshua Norton, or Emperor Norton I, was born in London sometime around 1819. The exact dates are fairly unknown, mostly by myself. When he was still young his family moved to Algoa Bay at the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and got extremely wealthy. They achieved this most likely by raping the nation of its natural resources and spilling the blood of the black man, but hey, it was just what white people did back then. His father John Norton passed away when Joshua was at the tender age of 30 and left him with $40,000. Joshua was fear stricken and paralyzed with the fear that he might have to actually move out and would not be able to suck at the teat of his family’s riches that he was so fond of. Inspiration blossomed in semi-young Norton and he thought, “hmm, my family got rich off the suffering and servitude of black people, maybe there is another race out there that also needs the gentle hand of the white man to suck the life force from them.” Joshua Norton set out for San Francisco knowing that there was a whole horde of Chinese folk that needed a little financial butt fucking. Why didn’t he just go to China, you ask? Their Kung Fu scared him.

Norton arrived in San Francisco in 1846 and soon became a rice trader knowing that the yellow man needed, air, water and rice to live. His little business was extremely lucrative and by 1853 he made a quarter of a million dollars. (adjusted for inflation he would be able to own Bill Gates.) This wasn’t good enough for the future Emperor, so he decided to corner the market on rice and to bleed the coolies dry. This caused the price of rice to skyrocket and was regarded by the Chinese immigrants of the time as a “dick move.”  Disaster struck for Joshua in the form of the Japanese, as it does from time to time. Two Japanese cargo ships unexpectedly arrived in the harbor with a stockpile of rice. This left Norton’s bank account as barren as his soul was. He vanished from the world for three years.

So how does a rice trader become an Emperor of these United States you may, wonder? Well first you would need a note. On September 17, 1859, Joshua Norton returned to the city of San Francisco after he had apparently lost his mind. He walked into the offices of the San Francisco Bulletin and handed in a note that was to the first of his many proclamations. It read:

“At the peremptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the past nine years and tem months of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these U.S., and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in the Musical Hall of this city on the 1^st day of February next, then there to make such alterations in the existing lows of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in stability and integrity.”

The editors at the Bulletin must have had a slow news week and giggled their asses of as they took it to print. The next day the headline for the paper was, “An Emperor among us?” Yes, San Francisco was always filled with kooks and nut jobs, and the jackasses who point and laugh at them. Thus began the reign of the first Emperor of the United States.

The new Emperor was not only tolerated, he was embraced. Emperor Norton would walk the streets dressed in a regal manner. He wore Civil War uniforms alternating daily between blue and gray. This was to show his support for both the Union and the Confederacy. Norton apparently wanted everyone to be free, but enjoy the occasional flogging of someone every now and then. But really who doesn’t?  His costume also consisted of a large multi-feathered beaver hat, a walking cane and a large saber strapped to his side. Maybe people didn’t just think of him as some cute and eccentric, but thought that if they didn’t placate him they would be ran through with a large bladed weapon. Nothing commands respect like a sharp piece of metal. Remember that if you are ever sent to prison.

Norton, though he never became wealthy again, enjoyed a wide variety of benefits that came with donning the crown. He ate at some of the finest establishments in the city for free in exchange for the privilege to put up signs that read, “By Appointment to His Emperor, Joshua Norton I.” Whenever his clothes became worn the Board of Supervisors would ceremoniously present him with a new set for which he would thank them with a note thanking each and every supervisor. They City also gave Norton a bicycle as a means of royal transport. His two dogs, Lazarus and Bummer, and himself were allowed into any play and concert in the city’s theaters. His most important duty was to review the police to check that hey performed their duty, review new cadets at the University of California, march at the head of the annual Police Parade and, in each precinct, a special chair was reserved for him. Norton also printed his own currency with his image on it. The Norton bucks were accepted at most places and even some banks in San Francisco, travelers from out of town would also trade real money to have a signed Norton dollar. He also published proclamations that would resonate through out time and can still be felt today. On March 23, 1869 one of these edicts called for a bridge to be built from Oakland Point to Goat Island and then to San Francisco whenever it’s convenient. In 1872 he banned the F word; who every utters the “abominable word ‘Frisco,’ were to be fined to the tune of $25. Also in 1872, he called for a bridge –twice. He just couldn’t let the damn bridge thing go but to his credit he got his bridge 64 years later. The Golden Gate Bridge was completed on November 12, 1936.

With all the perks Norton gained through establishing his claim on America it was good to be the king, though not everyone saw the Emperor as – well – an emperor. January the 21st, 1867, an overzealous Patrol Special Officer, by the name of Armand Barbier, arrested His Majesty Norton I for vagrancy. Overzealous in history speak means asshole. People pointed out that Emperor Norton had $4.75 in his pocket and lived in a boarding house so he wasn’t technically a vagrant. Still, Armand Barbier, drunk on power declared that Norton was of unsound mind and arrested him as a danger to himself and others. This was surprising to me. This may have been the only time ever in history that an enforcer of the law abused his power and arrested an innocent man, black people not withstanding. This caused a public uproar. The newspapers jumped in to fan the flames by publishing several scathing editorials about the arrest, hoping to stir the mob into a full blown riot because it was a slow news week. The grand Emperor was held in custody pending an examination by the Commissioner of Lunacy. This was a real person and not a Tex Avery cartoon as his title suggests. City Police Chief Patrick Crowley saw to it that the hearing was never held and apologized to the Emperor and ordered him released. After all, he was up for reelection and could use the humanitarian angle. All police officers began to salute Norton I when he passed them on the street from that point on.

Emperor Norton didn’t just preside over the people and get arrested by the po-po he had some notable friends as well. Samuel Clemens, or as he is more popularly known, Mark Twain, worked next door to Norton’s boarding house and saw the man almost every day. He defended Norton and claimed that the man was as insane as people thought. The King of Pain, (Who also appeared in that issue of Sandman) a well-known liniment salesman also offered Norton a new suit, which Norton declined – mostly out of pride. Twain later, after the Emperors´ death, modeled his character, “The King” in Huckleberry Finn on Emperor Norton. Norton is also mentioned in The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury, The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Stevenson’s stepdaughter, Isobel Field, also mentioned Norton in her autobiography entitled This Life I’ve Loved. The Emperor also declared his intent of marriage with this announcement in 1875:

“Whereas, it is our intention to take an Empress, and in consideration of the visits by the Royalty abroad, we, Norton I, Dei Gratia Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, do hereby command the builders of the Palace Hotel to fit up a portion of their building for our Imperial Residence, as becoming the dignity of a great and hopeful nation.”

I imagine the Emperor Norton leaned back in a comfortable rocking chair, waiting for the bitches to come pouring in. This would not be so, no one came a knock’n. This is a mystery to historians like myself, I mean he could eat for free at most restaurants, what else could you want? There is just no pleasing women.

I mentioned earlier that the Emperor had two dogs, Lazarus and Bummer. There are many accounts that they were his constant companions and followers. Indeed many of the contemporary cartoons showed Norton walking his dogs or feasting at a buffet with the two dogs adorably begging at his feet. The latter was an actual cartoon created by Edward Jump titled “The Three Bummers”. In reality their relationship was taut with tension and was tenuous at best. The two dogs would often gossip about their human friend and insult him within ear shot, when confronted they would say that he was paranoid and that, “it’s not always about you”. This was why the cartoon by jump set the usually gentile Norton into a fit of rage when he saw it in a storefront window. Norton attacked the window and destroyed the cartoon or as some claimed he attacked the window but it was too thick succeeding in only breaking his walking stick and then crying a little. Norton saw himself as a king and hated the idea of being a bum or a derelict and then to be associated with two flea bitten mongrels that talked too much smack was intolerable. The friendship of Lazarus and Bummer to the Emperor was perpetuated by Samuel Dickens in a book written in the 1950’s titled “San Francisco is My Home”.

Lazarus was killed in 1863. In his book Samuel Dickens claimed that Lazarus was kicked by the horse of one of the city’s fire engines, though many accounts reported that he was poisoned by being given meat laced with “ratbane” after biting a boy. Samuel Dickens seemed to not know shit about San Francisco. San Franciscans put up a $50 reward for the capture of the poisoner though there are no reports of the poisoner ever being caught. Maybe Norton did it. Just putting it out there. Bummer was taken in by Mark Twain after the death of Lazarus but never the less died a lingering death after being kicked by a drunk by the name of Henry Rippey. Due to Bummer’s popularity the city arrested Ripley to avoid violence. Violence still followed Rippey however. When his cellmate, a popcorn vendor named David Popley, found out what he did, Popley reportedly, quote “popped him in the smeller.” End quote.

Mark Twain produced a eulogy for Bummer that was published in the Virginia City Enterprise.

Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico while on his way to a lecture at the Academy of Natural Sciences collapsed in the street and died. The cause of death was apoplexy. The Morning Call ran the headline; “Norton the First, by the grace of God Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, departed this life.” Wealthy Citizens paid for the funeral expenses and on the 10th of January 1880 Emperor Norton was buried in the Masonic Cemetery. His funeral procession was two miles long and an estimated 30,000 people attended his burial, lining the streets of the city that loved him. The day was marked by a total eclipse of the sun.

Last Friday (for those who didn’t just TiVO it) we witnessed the semi-satisfactory conclusion to one of the best science fiction series ever to grace the small screen. Many have already deconstructed the final episode –- this will not be one of those articles. I will not bring up the fact that Head Baltar and Head Six are angels and that Starbuck is apparently Jesus Christ who died for Caprica’s sins…no I want to bring up what happened before. This is History of the Nerd. There is a phrase that Head Six once told Gias Baltar, “All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again” and when it did happened before it was in 1985 and it was called Robotech. Holy shit, did I just blow your fucking mind? Maybe? No? A little? Everyone knows that Battlestar Galactica is a remake of an old and beloved TV show but it is much more of a live action version of the seminal anime series, Robotech than a remake of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica and the following is why…

The Characters

Admiral Adama + Captain Gloval:

Humanity’s last hope for survival sat directly on the shoulders of one man. He is the leader of the fleet and the military charged him with fighting off the enemy. He’s Admiral Adama or Captain Gloval. You could really just take your pick. They are both father figures to their wayward crew, both gruff, but lovable and both vaguely ethnic. If you stuck a Navy Captain’s hat on Edward James Olmos, they’d look like twins! I dare you to tell them apart, I mean look at them!

Helo and Athena + Max Sterling and Miriya Parina:

Sure, Helo can’t pull off the blue hair like Max does, but how many of us can? They are, however, huge bad asses. Helo single handedly took on Cylon Centurions on occupied Caprica with nothing but a handgun and moxie while Max is an alien killing machine fighter pilot. They both had the very kinky need for exotic poon so much that they went looking outside of their species. Athena and Miriya both started their journey as evil characters hell bent on the destruction of man and the preservation of their own species, but then became more and more human. They both masqueraded as humans when they first appeared to their significant others; though they had different intentions. Miriya wanted to kill Max while Athena just needed Helo’s man juice. Regardless, both characters fall in love and start knocking boots. All this boot knocking leads to an alien/cylon hybrid daughter -a symbol of peace between two warring factions.

Lee Adama  + Rick Hunter:

These two share the path of being young idealists trying fill the large space cast by the shadow of their father figures; and they are also both fighter pilots. Lee began as a boy who reluctantly followed in the path of his father Admiral Adama, though he only fully became a man when he chose his own path in politics. Even though he tried his hand in a suit and tie, by the end he still needed to grab a gun and shoot. Rick only wanted to be a pilot and hated the military until he was called to action by the need to live up to his big brother and father figure, Roy Fokker. He becomes a man when he finally fills the role his brother held, leader of the Skull Squadron. They both took different paths than their fathers/the military wanted them to and they both had the coming of age role in their respective sagas.

Anastasia “Dee” Dualla+ Claudia Grant:

They are not there just because they are black. They are there because they are black and work at the command deck as communications officers. Come to think of it, so was Uhura on Star Trek. No matter what Sci Fi universe you exist in, if you are black and female you are going to have your ear strapped to a communications device. Also, they both went jungle fever with white fighter pilots (not Uhura, though she did make out with Kirk in the episode titled Plato’s Stepchildren).

Cavil + Khyron:

They both start as fairly insignificant characters that the viewer loves to hate. They then grow to control all of the remaining enemy forces by the end of their stories. Then (spoiler alert) they die.

Cylons + Zentradi:

Synthic beings created to be a slave race who just so happen to look exactly human. They are so alike even their blood matches humans.
 
Galactica + SDF-1:

Yes they are both battleships, but they are also the heart of their shows. They are majestic symbols of what the human race can aspire to. They also functioned as space fairing aircraft carriers. They even look alike.

Plot Points

Cylons/ Aliens attack! Without warning!:

At the beginning of Battlestar and Robotech the characters were in the middle of a celebration in regards to their battleships when the enemy started blowing shit up. The Galactica was being decommissioned while the SDF-1 was being commissioned. Let’s face it, births and funerals are pretty similar –- they both have their equal share of crying. Earth doesn’t get nuked like Caprica does, but it comes pretty damn close.

Edge of your seat action!:

The dog fighting action looks so much alike I’m sure the special effects supervisor of Battlestar loved some Robotech. Check out the following videos.  

Cylons/Aliens sent to infiltrate the humans!

Robotech did that too. Zentradi command sent in three shrunk down soldiers to spy on the humans. Unintended was that being close to humans and human culture affected the soldier in ways that were never intended. Sounds familiar?

Hybrid Baby!

Ok I already mentioned this one, but the hybrid baby storyline is pretty damn close to Robotech.

Cylons/Aliens try to live with the humans!

In Robotech, Earth was eventually turned into a nuclear wasteland just like Caprica was. The humans and Zentradi tried their hand at living together on Earth, a planet that can barely sustain life but their alliance quickly turned to shit. In Battlestar they found New Caprica, a planet that’s bearly habitable and then cylons showed up only to lend a helping hand with the government — then things turned to shit, of course.

Cylons/Aliens, wait they’re on our side now?!

Cylons secede from their forces and join the humans in a final stand against their own kind to the secure preservation of their existence. Zentradi exposed to human culture are sick of war and turn on their own kind for a chance at peace.
 
Galactica uses the Daedalus Maneuver!

The final episode of Battlestar had this intense moment where they ram the very H.R. Gigger (German artist who won an Academy award for designing the alien in Alien) looking Cylon Colony. Marines jumped out of the front of the ship ready to kick ass. During this moment I screamed, “Holy shit they’re using the Daedalus Maneuver!” The
SDF-1 in Robotech transformed into giant robot (of course) and the right arm was a battle ship called the Daedalus, which was rammed into gigantic alien mother ships. The bay doors on the Daedalus would open up unleashing an army of robots and hell.

I’m not saying that Battlestar Galactica ripped off Robotech. They are very different shows, but the similarities are uncanny. I’m sure there was more than one anime fan in the writing room. Robotech is a classic and an amazing show and I can’t blame anyone for wanting to use some of the better elements and discarding the rest. Thank God there wasn’t an annoying pop star with a high pitched voice on Battlestar. There are major differences in both shows as well, though. Battlestar Galactica had an underlining spritual angle that Robotech lacked, while Robotech had a much better ending. (Don’t deny it. You think I’m right!) Robotech has lived on in the hearts of nerds everywhere, and now, so does Battlestar Galactica. I just can’t wait for the next show that does the same thing because, as you all know, all of this will happen again.

In America today the rising obesity problem in our nation is clogging the arteries of our online dating services. That hot photo of Cutegirl_500 on okcupid.com is really ten years old and twenty thousand pieces of fried chicken ago. I do not have a problem with this really. There are a lot of guys out there that will stick their penises into just about anything that moves and, lets face it, the heftys are willing to “give it up” thereby saving our colleges from another sexually frustrated school shooting. Today I stand up and salute one of the architects of our nation’s low self esteem, and creator of some of everyone’s favorite Nerd-Food, Colonel Harland Sanders and the invention of the 11 herbs and spices.  

Sanders was the son of a coal miner, born on September 9, 1890. Thankfully for him, and for the sake of the future, his father died at the age of six forcing him to learn to cook for the family since his mother took to the work force. When Harland was 12 his mother remarried. Harland’s step father disliked all the children, so his mother sent them all away. I guess she thought that she could always make more. Trying to shake off the emotional scarring of his childhood he took on a number of odd jobs. He was a steamboat driver, an insurance salesman, railroad firefighter, and farmer. Harland joined the Army to try to get some kind of direction in his life. He served as a private in 1907 in cuba, most likely drinking the night away and dancing with Desi Arnaz. I know that Desi wasn’t born till 1917, but it’s a nice mental image I’d like to keep.

At the ripe age of 40, Sanders owned a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky. He must have thought to himself that if this doesn’t work out then he could at least use the gas to take himself, his family, and a third of Kentucky out in a literal blaze of glory. The Sanders family lived at the station in living quarters in the back and the greasy cook would serve the famous chicken for his family. The smell of the finger licking good food would waft out to the customers. It didn’t take long for some rude asshole to inappropriately sick his head in and ask for some food. This would be the start of a sensation. They renamed the gas station the “Sanders Court and Café”. Soon the chicken outsold the gas and the Sanders family had to move to bigger digs. They expanded the gas station into a motel and restaurant right along the highway. It seated 142 people and Harland was, of course, the head chef. Harland hit a peak of glory that he hungered for all his life. Kentucky Governor Rudy Laffoon made Sanders an honorary Kentucky Colonel in recognition of his contributions to the state’s rising number of heart attacks. This was an award that was given to pretty much everyone. Dave Thomas founder of “Wendy’s” is also a Kentucky Colonel and you don’t see him rubbing it in anyone’s face.

In the shining year of 1939 the “Sanders Court and Café” was listed in Duncan Hines’ “Adventures in Good Eating.” Okay, let’s have a little sidebar on “Adventures in Good Eating.” Back during the horrible and unimaginable times before cable television, families would be so bored that they would a have to do something before cabin fever set in and dad chased you around with an axe and murderous rage. To remedy this natural tendency to kill one’s own family, people of the time would pack into their cars and hit the road to see some of the more crappy parts of the country. This was apparently fun. The guidebook for millions was the Duncan Hines’ “Adventures in Good Eating”. People planned their vacations around this thing. Getting or not getting into the book could mean the difference between owning a successful shit hole or a just plain ol’ shit hole. Now back to the story.

Sanders was riding high and the Kentucky Colonel thing went straight to his head and made him a little crazy. He started dressing like a slave owning plantation master. God took note of this and decided to knock him down a peg. In 1939 fire struck the “Sanders Court and Café” which burned down to ashes. The restaurant was soon rebuilt and opened again but God would have the final say much, much later.

The Colonel first made his chicken by pan-frying; this was a long process that took up to a half an hour. This was much too long for customers who were now addicted to it like heroin. Harland thought this over and came up with a solution. Apparently not learning from the fire incident he decided to cook the chicken in pressure cookers. This did give the customers fresh chicken much faster but would cause World War II style carnage if the things ever blew. Colonel Sanders was not only a great cook, but also he was an old man with a death wish and a taste for blood.

Harland was an obsessive man who spent more time cooking than servicing his wife with the kind of deep dicking that’s required to keep a successful marriage working. By 1948 they were divorced. The Chicken Pimp, as some would call him, got over it pretty quick. A year later he married Claudia Price and would once again be neglecting someone he pretended to love. Claudia met Sanders while working at his first restaurant as a waitress, setting the precedent for old crusty restaurant owners to bone their young teen waitress.

The battle between God and the Colonel continued on in the early 1950’s with the building of an interstate bypass that completely bypassed and “flipped the bird” to Corbin, Kentucky entirely. Without the highway drivers Sanders knew that God had won and his culinary empire was doomed. He auctioned off all of his operations to pay off all his debts and lived off the $105 dollars he got from social security. This was needless to say pretty upsetting to the Colonel, but he was a person with more than enough moxie to try something new.

In 1951 at the National Restaurant Association convention in Chicago, the Colonel would have a chance meeting with a man who would change everything. The convention was thick with the noise and smoke of drunken conventioneers. These fat cats who got rich screwing over their illegal employees were finally together for some down time and they planned to party like it was 1999. This was appalling to Harland and Claudia. Harland had a salty tongue, but drinking, smoking, and molesting booth bimbos was behavior that he personally hated. It’s polite to pay when some molesting is done.  Naturally, he was drawn to a young quiet couple, Pete Harman and his wife Arline. They were from Utah. Yes, they were Mormon. No, they were not polygamist. Yes, they did enjoy board games and Jell-O deserts… I’m going to move on now. Harland and Harman instantly struck up an enduring and alliterative friendship. On the way to a trip to Australia, the Colonel stopped by Salt Lake City to visit his new Mormon friends. Pete Harman took Sanders on a tour of city that day taking in the beautiful sites of the Temple Square, the Bingham Copper Mines and the large statue of Joseph Smith that had a placard quote that said “I only did it for the poontang.” (You might have guessed that I made that last part up.)

Pete mentioned that he was looking for a dish to be featured at his restaurant, the Do Drop Inn. One could image the old hawk raising his eyebrows when he heard this. Sanders offered to cook Pete dinner that night. Harland cooked like a fiendish madman, obsessive in perfection because “the crackle’ns had to be just right for the gravy”. It took him all night and dinner was served at 10pm. Pete and Arline took one bite and were hooked. Pete convinced Harland to cash in his social security checks and start franchising out his chicken to restaurant around the country. Pete himself was the first to put up a sign on his restaurant that said “Kentucky Fried Chicken” the very next day after their fateful meal. This would be the model on which Sanders would sell his chicken. He and his wife would ride around talking restaurant owners into letting him cook dinner for them. He would take until the coming of the “End Times” to do it, until they were nice and starved out so that anything would taste good. The restaurants would feature his chicken and they give Harland five cents for every piece of chicken they sold. I’m sure he swung around demanding his cut or smack them bitches around, like the pimp he was.

Colonel Sanders’ temper was known far and wide. He was perfectionist, which is a nice way of saying that he was an asshole. Most people that call themselves perfectionists usually are. The Colonel was known to bust into a restaurant and yell at some poor underpaid cook for not making the gravy right and on more than one occasion caused tears, lots and lots of tears. If a restaurant really was a mess he’d grab his bag of seasonings and his special pressure cookers, and backed over them in the parking lot. This was prison mentality; beat somebody up and make him your bitch. You just didn’t fuck with the Colonel.

That first year Sanders only sold four franchises. But in just four years, by 1960, more that 200 restaurants in the United States and Canada were offering sweet southern fried fry-ieness and soon Sanders had to stop traveling to focus on managing his growing business. His old friend Pete created the marketing strategy of his enterprise and also created the famous KFC bucket. Pete Harman recalled years later that they filled the bucket with chicken and lifted it up and it didn’t quite feel like you had your four dollars and seventy-five cents worth. They put in a pint of mashed potatoes and gravy and that felt more like you got your money’s worth. This was a charming sentiment, but let’s face it, not the best model for a business, “this weighs about $4.75, here you lift it…” But who am I to judge? By 1964, the franchise had grown to over 600 franchised outlets in the United States and Canada. This level of popularity was soon killing the 75-year-old chicken slinger. He remarked in News Week article, “[it] was beginning to run right over me and mash me flat.” If you were to read between the lines, it would have said something like, “I feel like someone took the largest drum stick in the batch and began vigorously ramming my brown zone.” He would soon know the meaning of true anal rape when he sold his business later that year.

Sanders sold Kentucky Fried Chicken to Jack Massey and his partner John Y. Brown, Jr. Jack Massey was a Nashville millionaire and John Y. Brown, Jr., was a young would-be entrepreneur who wanted to apply modern sales and management strategies to Kentucky Fried Chicken, i.e. he wanted to fuck the shit out of everything the Colonel and Pete created. The Colonel received $2 million in addition to a lifetime annual salary of $40,000 for publicity and advisory work. (This amount was later increased to $75,000.) Sanders was also guaranteed a spot on the Kentucky Fried Chicken board of directors until 1970. Harland eventually found out that this was a deal with the devil and no amount of fiddle playing would get his ass out of this one. Kentucky Fried Chicken was changed from a sit down restaurant to a take out restaurant and the worst example of heresy to the colonel was the changes to his recipes. Foods that were once hand made were being prepared in minutes by untrained cooks. The mashed potatoes and gravy were replaced with instant products that no one in their right mind really enjoyed.

In 1971, the Colonel sued Heublein Inc., the company that then owned Kentucky Fried Chicken, over alleged misuse of his image in promoting products he had not helped develop. Heublein Inc. settled out of court for over a million dollars. This was most likely shut up money but the craggy old chicken stewart just couldn’t stop running his mouth. He was sued by Heublein Inc. for libel because the Colonel stated publicly that their gravy was “sludge” with a “wallpaper taste” and that what they were serving was “crap”. Apparently thems be fight’n words to say that their food tasted like shit but Heublein lost that fight. R.J. Reynolds then acquired the company and then sold it to the Pepsi Cola Co. in 1986 for a cool $840 million dollars of which the colonel never saw a dime. 

Colonel Harland Sanders battled leukemia for seven months and died in Shelbyville, Kentucky on December 16, 1980. Over 1,000 people attended his funeral and he was buried with his classic white suit and black tie in Cavehill Cemetary in Louisville, Kentucky. The secret of the 11 herbs and spices is still publicly unknown and is locked away in a vault at corporate headquarters. 

This week I continue with my argument that the 70’s gave birth to the big, fat, crying, angry baby we know as nerdom. The films of the 70’s redefined the movie industry and breathed new life into what many considered a dying art form. Yes, people were crying out the doom of the movie industry even back then, but then again they had reason to. Before the 70’s, Hollywood ran on the “studio system”, the system where demigod studio executives micromanaged everything from which stars should marry whom to which gaffer should be shot in the head and thrown down a river. The “studio system” collapsed, though, and from the ashes arose a new Hollywood that was desperate to find new blood. Between the hippy movement, the civil rights movement, and the “I want to rock out to Zepplin and get high” movement, restrictions on language, adult content, sexuality, and violence had loosened up allowing a new wave of experimental film makers to enter the scene and make their mark. These new filmmakers, nicknamed the “Movie Brats” were less concerned about entertaining an audience of mindless zombies and more concerned with fucking them up in the head. For Christ sake there was a 12 year-old girl masturbating with a cross in The Exorcist. That shit would never even make it past the ratings board today. Not only did these movies push the boundaries of human taste, endurance, and understanding, but they made (and continue to make) a butt load of money. Who were these rogues? They were and still are, the greatest directors to ever exist. Today we focus on Three legendary directors and their top movies.

Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather (1972), The Godfather II (1974):

Francis Ford Coppola started his career making low-budget movies with “The King of the B’s”, filmmaker Roger Corman. He made a name for himself when he received an Oscar for writing the movie Patton and, spurred on by this success, he received the job to create The Godfather. Coppola nearly lost out on The Godfather, though. The original choice for director was Sergio Leone, director of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Thank God that fate was on Coppola’s side because the Godfather would go on to win three Academy Awards, Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor, Marlon Brando. It launched the careers of Al Pacino and James Caan, made over $133 million (adjusted for inflation, over $568 million) and is widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Unfortunately, the movie made every Italian American think they have ties to the mob and forced the general public to be annoyed by assholes who do Marlon Brando impersonations.

The Godfather II changed the way sequels could be done. Not only was it a sequel it was also a prequel. Two Characters from different generations, set in different time period told a parallel story of the Corleone crime family. The Godfather II continued the story of the first movie, but also added depth and scope to the original. Not a small feat by any standard or measurement. The film doubled the previous movie’s Academy take with 6 Oscars. It won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Supporting Actor, Robert De Niro. (Nerd Fact: Francis Ford Coppola also directed The Conversation in 1974 which was also nominated for Best Picture. This was only the second time in Hollywood history that one person was nominated for two movies for Best Picture in the same year.)

Francis Ford Coppola not only left a legacy with his movies but also with mentoring another famous director, George Lucas. He even produced his first two movies: THX 1138 and American Graffiti.

George Lucas: THX 1138 (1971), American Graffiti (1973), Star Wars (1977):

If you are reading this article you already know about George Lucas. You know that he looks like a Wookie and he is either the guy who created your childhood or the guy who later raped it — or you’re like me and he’s both. He is both loved and hated in the popular geek society; but to be fair, without Lucas you would have never been a geek in the first place. He gave us more good shit than bad. His first movie, however, was bad shit;just different from his current bad shit.

THX 1138 was a movie that had a bald Robert Duvall fornicating with a bald Maggie McOmie against a white background. Then the viewer usually falls asleep or turns the DVD off. It is that exciting. The studio even asked for their money back when they finally saw the film. Needless to say it wasn’t a success.

Following the abysmal failure of THX 1138, Lucas’ friend and mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, bet Lucas that he couldn’t do a fun movie, the kind of movie that had viewers. This film would be American Graffiti. American Graffiti was a box office success making 92 times the amount of its budget and is a personal favorite of mine. This made George Lucas an instant millionaire four times over. This film launched damn near half the careers of actors in Hollywood including: Richard Dreyfuss (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Ron Howard (Happy Days), Harrison Ford (Duh!), and Cindy Williams (Laverne & Shirly). The most important thing  the movie did was make Lucas enough money to make Star Wars. 

Star Wars… ‘nuff said.

Lucas would hang his directing hat after Star Wars and got better writers and directors for his other ideas. The Empire Strikes Back was written by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett and was directed By Irvin Kershner. Raiders of the Lost Ark was written by Lawrence Kasdan and was directed by Steven Spielberg. If only he stuck to this winning formula for the Star Wars Prequels, maybe he wouldn’t be known as the rapist of childhood memories.

Steven Spielberg: Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977):

There will never be another director like Steven Spielberg again. He is the maker of dreams and the creator of art. The most amazing thing about Steven Spielberg is that he really seems to enjoy movies and filmmaking. Even the old bearded man of today has eyes that dance at the thought of his first love: movies. Not bad for a college drop out.

His first theatrical feature film was The Sugarland Express. Despite having a title that suggests pornography or jazz music it received critical praise. However, it had a limited release and did poorly at the box office, proving that critics do not matter.

His next movie would make Steven Spielberg a household name (even in non-Jewish ones). Jaws had a fake looking shark, was plagued with rewrites, and was nearly shut down due to delays and budget overruns. No one could have foreseen the $470 million world wide that it ended up making (adjusted for inflation 1.9 billion). Jaws was nominated for Best Picture, but lost, fittingly, to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It did will for Best Film Editing, Best Sound, and Best Original Score. After the country literally went insane for killer fish projects, many more were thrown at Spielberg. He was asked to do King Kong and Superman, but he turned them all down to do a movie about little green men.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was in many ways Spielberg’s passion project. Even though the movie was released in 1977, the movie was in the works for a little over three years. It was a critical and financal success making a total of $132 million domestically (adjusted for inflation, over $400 million). It was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, but only won one because the Academy is pretentious and hates movies that don’t have anything to do with Nazis. He would finally get his Oscar for Schindler’s List and another for Saving Private Ryan, both of which featured Nazis. Never let anyone tell you that Spielberg doesn’t learn from mistakes.  

Well, I only scratched the surface of great 70s directors and films. I haven’t even mentioned the works of Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, and Stanley Kubrick. With the creation of videogames, computer technology, and contribution to film I believe that everyone would agree with me that the 70’s was truly the decade of the nerd. And this, my friend, is an arguable fact that you can take to the bank, or your local party. Might as well bore women with something TRUE! Until next time!  

In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form, and void. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light.” And then there was light. Then he took a nap until the 70’s and created everything we as geeks and nerds actually care about. Many can argue that nerdom has been around since the beginning of history, but those people would be wrong. They are wrong because they disagree with me and everyone knows I’m always right, especially when I’m not. The 70’s brought to the world: the first personal computer, the start of the Internet, video games, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, comics stories with adult themes, and major genre television shows. Even the word “Nerd” was first used as a slang term for “a person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept” in 1970. The 70’s gave birth to nerdom and today we look at a small part of it: Computers, Video Games and The Internet.

Computers:

Look at your beautiful computer. It sings to you with its soft humming fan. It tells you the answers to all your questions like “when the movie is going to play?” to “how to get to your ex-boyfriend’s new apartment in order to slash his tires?” Its glowing screen is so warm and inviting that it fills your heart with joy — especially when you’re watching porn. And when it dies on you it feels like your connection to the world is lost. Really, if you had to do a Sophie’s Choice between your computer and your sister you might have to think about it for a second. The computer wasn’t always man’s best friend. There was a time in the long, long ago when the computer used to fill a small airplane hanger with a tangling of wires a diodes. Those early computers couldn’t even play Solitaire. So how did computers shrink down to a small box? It all started with the microprocessor.

The microprocessor is the magic device that incorporates all of the functions of the CPU (Central Processing Unit or the computer’s brain) into one single integrated unit — but who invented it? Well, nobody knows for sure who came first because three different companies developed similar devices all around the same time. The three companies were Garrett AiResearch, Intel, and Texas Instruments. Nothing advances technology like the universal need to kill one’s enemies more efficiently. In 1968 the US Navy needed a new digital computer to compete with current electromagnetic computers for the main flight control computer of the new F-14 Tomcat fighter jet. For that they turned to Garrett AiResearch and designers Ray Holt and Steve Geller. They completed their design in 1970, which was overwhelmingly superior to the mechanical system and 20 times smaller. All early Tomcats were fitted with Garrett AiResearch microprocessors. In 1971 both Intel and Texas Instruments developed microprocessor originally for handheld calculators. Intel released the 4-bit 4004 chip on November 15, 1971 and some consider it the first commercially available microprocessor but some say Texas Instruments beat them by a month. Texas Instruments introduced the 4-bit TMS 1000 in September 17, 1971 and also filed and was awarded a patent for the single-chip microprocessor architecture on September 4, 1973. Whoever invented it, the microprocessor is a major reason why modern computers are affordable to the average Joe and why the average Joe doesn’t have to set aside an entire bedroom to house it.

Video Games:

The history of video games does extend before the 70’s but they were mostly MIT students messing around on analog computers out of boredom. In 1971 Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created the first commercially sold coin-operated video game, Computer Space. In the game, the player controls a rocket and fights off two flying saucers hell bent on destruction. At the end of 90 seconds if the player’s score is higher than the saucers’, then the player is awarded another 90 seconds. This cycle continues until the day Jesus returns to smite the wicked. The game was a first, but not a success; and this is despite being featured in the movie Soylent Green (piss, it’s made of people. PEOPLE!!!).

The Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console entered the homes of rich American families in 1972. The Odyssey was packaged with dice, poker chips, and score sheets like a board game because the system couldn’t keep score itself. It also didn’t have sound and needed translucent plastic overlays placed over the TV screen to simulate color. These short falls and crappy marketing by Magnavox in retail stores led to poor sales. Months after the release consumers believed that the Odyssey would only work on Magnavox television sets. The could be that they were misled by some shadowy force or that they were just stupid, no one can know for sure. 

Nolen Bushnell and Ted Dabney created the company Atari and followed their failure of the Computer Space with the crack-like intoxicating success of Pong. The arcade version was released in 1972 and the home console version in 1975. Bushnell was “inspired” by Magnavox’s game Tennis. It “inspired” him to steal the idea outright. This would come back to haunt Atari in the form a lawsuit in 1975. Bushnell would settle out of court in 1976 because legal costs would have destroyed the company regardless of a win. In spite of the lawsuit, Pong improved on the Tennis game with the innovation of sound, a scoreboard, and the paddle changed the angle of the ball depending on where it struck. Before these features the game actually, really, sucked. (Nerd Fact: Women were actually better at Pong than men, on average. Scientists believed that this was because women had better small muscle control. Whatever the reason was, girls in the 70’s would hustle guys at bars with Pong. Now they only hustle guys using sex.)

The Internet:

The Internet is your teacher, friend, and lover. The most important thing it brings to you is, of course, Geekscape, so why not celebrate its creation? The precursor to the Internet was the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). ARPANET was developed by ARPA the Advanced Research Projects Agency (not to be confused with AARP, an association comprised solely of pissed off old people). ARPANET was brought online in 1969 and only connected four computers at major universities: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah. The true Internet matured in the 70’s through the result of TCP/IP architecture. TCP/IP is a protocol that is the basis for transmitting and routing data packets on the Internet. Its technology is still used today and is the one thing that all current Internet sites have in common. All of this techno speak and jargon is great and also boring. What about the Internet as we know it? The haven for people to say whatever they want without the fear of getting killed by the black guy you called the “N” word, or the fat, powerful guy you called the “F” word that isn’t “Fat”. Let me point you to Usenet.

Usenet, though not technically considered a part of the Internet, because it didn’t use TCP/IP protocols, did allow the connection of Unix systems around the world. Usenet was created in 1979 by graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. Usenet users were able to log on and be a part of online discussion groups known as Newsgroups. Newsgroups were like Internet forums today, they ranged from a variety of topics and were posted by people all across the globe. This was originally intended to be a medium for people to share information, ideas, and cultures in a Roddenberryesque utopian online society. People used it, so eventually it devolved into a place of cultist, cliquish behavior full of paranoia and name-calling. This proved that if people are allowed anonymity and a public forum they will turn into ruthless savages who revert to their gradeschool stock derogatory nicknames and expletives. This has continued over the Internets today, I mean just look at the Ain’t It Cool talk backers. (Nerd Fact: Godwin’s Law is an adage coined by Mike Godwin. The law states: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”)

Well, this is it for Part 1 of Decade of the Nerd: The 70’s, come back next week for Part 2: The Movies of the 70’s!

3D movies are quickly becoming a major moneymaker for the struggling industry. With the current state of the economy going down like a cheap twenty-five dollar hooker, the Studios are looking to the new 3D technology to keep the industry “recession proof.”  The film industry did very well during the first American Great Depression, but not because movies were a great distraction from the fear of death by starvation. They did well because “talkies”, or movies with sound, were new technology at the time. Last year 3D movies took in only about 200 million dollars but this year over 15 titles from major studios will be literally “in your face”, launching the projected gross to over $1 billion. That being said, the fact is that 3D movies will be here to stay. Not bad for a technology that’s about 200 years old. As the studios look to the future of 3D movies, we will take a look back at the history of stereoscopic movies. 

Stereoscopic, or 3D photography works to trick the eyes into seeing depth. We as human beings naturally see the world in 3 dimensions because we happen to be blessed with two eyes. (Unless you are one of the more unfortunate pirates.) The eyes are set about two and a half inches apart, so each one sees from a slightly different distance. It is this called Stereopsis, or retinal (binocular) disparity, and this is one of the ways the brain judges distances. If you were to take two pictures at the same slight difference apart, and were to look at it through the aid of a viewer, you will achieve the illusion of depth.

The funny thing is that stereoscopy preceded photography by over 200 years. Giovanni Battista della Porta who lived from 1538 to 1615 made binocular drawings while the first known photo was taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1825. It did take until 1838 for Sir Charles Wheatstone to invent the first stereoscope to actually view images in 3D, though. Stereoscopes became all the rage after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were presented with one by Sir David Brewster, the person who conceived of the binocular camera. (Nerd Fact: the penis skewering piercing was named after Prince Albert because he supposedly had one because he had a giant cock. People wore their pants really tight back then, much like asshole teenagers do today, but they didn’t like unsightly bulges. The ring through the penis was used to hold it to one side or the other by the use of a hook in the pants. This might just be an urban legend, but it’s still fun to think about.) Because of Sir David Brewster’s gift, by the mid 1850s stereoscopes were the entertainment centers for over a million homes.

Moving pictures wouldn’t adopt stereoscopy until William Friese-Greene developed a technique for it in the late 1890’s. This involved two projectors firing off side by side on the same screen. The viewer had to use a stereoscope to merge the film into 3D. This was too mechanically complex, so it was never adopted by movie theaters. 3D films were shown to audiences here and there as testes, but it wasn’t until the 3D film The Power of Love, that people actually started paying for it in 1922. It was also the first time a film utilized dual strip projection to create that annoying red/green effect that caused a mind-numbing headache for the viewer. They even had to use those silly red/green glasses for the first time, and they weren’t the cardboard kind.

The “Golden Era” of 3D films started on 1952 with Bwana Devil, the first color full-length feature. The 50’s were the decade that had full-blown 3D fever; much like the Pac-Man fever of the 80’s. This was so much the case that familiar red/ blue cardboard glasses are now seen as an iconic image of the period along with the pompadour, poodle skirts, and “whites only” signs. The most notable 3D movies of the time were Columbia’s, Man in the Dark, a noir drama that abused the medium with stuff thrown at the audience for no reason, and Warner Bros.’ House of Wax, the first 3D movie to feature stereophonic sound. House of Wax starred the great Vincent Price. This was the movie that typecast his ass to a lifetime of playing horror roles. Vincent Price was also the “King of 3D”, the actor to star in the most 3D films.

1970 a new company called Stereovision created a new 35mm 3D format. This new process was much cheaper to produce than previous 3D films. Their first movie was, of course, softcore porn. All new technology must pass the porn test, otherwise people won’t care. The Stewardess is a fun sex comedy romp released in 1969 that was was a simple skin flick shown only in adult theaters. It did so well in the dark confines of the jerk-off house in opening months that filmmakers Louis Sher and Silliphant decided they could sell this movie to a wider audience as a rated R movie. The Stewardess was made for just over $100,000 and grossed over $27 million — making it the most profitable 3D movie ever.

The success of Stereovision brought back a short lived revival in the 80’s with such cash-in movies as Amityville 3D, Friday the 13^th Part 3D, and everyone’s favorite, Jaws 3D. Hollywood just can’t help themselves when they have an opportunity for a punny title and moneymaking stunts.

People may notice that 3D movies do not have the red and blue channels offset to produce depth anymore (and the major bonus – no skull-pounding headache!) To whom do we owe this revolution of cinema technology? The same guy who gave us The Terminator, The Abyss and unfortunately, Titanic, James Cameron. After winning an Oscar and having Titanic gross more money than China has tea you’d think he’d be done with the Titanic, but no. Apparently obsessed with Titanic madness, he decided we wanted to see the real thing when we saw boat disaster movies and invented a few new bits of technology to do it. James Cameron’s Ghost of the Abyss was the first full length IMAX to be filmed with the Reality Camera System, a system that uses HDTV video cameras.

New Digital 3D Systems use polarization to fool the eye instead of color channels. Polarization allows only light waves aligned in a specific direction to pass through and each lens on the glasses is polarized differently. Special digital projectors are used to create the double image we see on screen. Our brain does all the rest of the work by blending the images into one single, seamless, moving, three-dimensional image

With the development of Digital 3D Systems in theaters, the flood gates for 3D movies are open once again. The amazing thing about the new format is that films previously shot for 2D can be converted to 3D at reasonable cost. This will allow studios to make money on ticket prices for movies we have already seen and own on DVD and we are actually happy for it. You know damn well Lucas is going to dip back in the well and release Star Wars in digital 3D…and I will be the first in line (well, fifteenth).

As the system of stereoscopic movies improves, more and more movies are going to be 3D. It might even be possible to watch 3D movies without the need for glasses in the very near future. According to an article by Martin Moylan for Minnesota Public Radio, 3M is already working on it. Expect the first wave of small screen 3D devices in the next year or so. So where does that leave our beloved 2D movies? Will everything become something akin to holographic projections? It just might! And 2D movies might go the way of the BW pictures, but, as Enya would say, only time will tell.

Valentines Day is the day of love because Hallmark said so. So pickup your girlfriend, boyfriend, or tranny hooker and take her, him or it out to dinner. I hope somebody bought a Vermont Teddy Bear for that special someone, buying their way into that someone’s heart and access to their loved ones genitals! Valentine’ss Day serves to remind you that  love is just not enough; you have to also buy shit for the one you love. It serves to remind you that if you are not in a relationship that you are a loser and nobody will ever have sex with you — ever. I don’t make the rules. Well, this year I don’t think I’m the only one “Dancing With Myself”.  (Nerd Fact: Billy Idol’s song, “Dancing With Myself” is actually about masturbation. – Yay!) So if you are not going to be doing the good o’ in and out this Feb 14 maybe you could live vicariously through one of comics’ most Iconic lady killers, Batman. Or you could just watch a hot porno.

Julie Madison

In the very early days of Batman comics Bruce Wayne had a girl friend in the form of socialite/actress Julie Madison. People in the 30’s and 40’s universally agreed that anyone who was burdened a vagina were mentally incapable of staying out of trouble, and ultimately needed a man to keep them safe. Julie appeared in Detective Comics #31 in 1939, so she was often in peril. Bruce and Julie were actually engaged for a while until Julie broke it off because Bruce wouldn’t go get a fuckin’ job. Apparently being richer than God just wasn’t enough for her. She ended up moving to Europe and married into royalty, mirroring Grace Kelly who ended up becoming Princess Grace of Monaco. Incidentally, she donned the Robin costume in a story line to fool the original Clay Face, Basil Karlo, beating the female Robin, Carrie Kelly, in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns by fourty-five years.

Linda Page

Right after Julie Madison, Bruce dated another socialite, but the big twist this time was that she wasn’t a spoiled, lazy bitch. She even helped nurse the elderly part-time to stave off the guilt of being rich. Linda used like a wet-nap for a few issues and was quickly forgotten. The character did return in the first Batman serial in 1943. This could be seen as a death rattle because she was never heard of again.

Vickie Vale

By 1948, creators Bob Kane and Bill finger wanted to give Batman a Lois Lane, so they ripped of one and Vickie Vale was born. Like Lois, she was a reporter but this time for the Gotham Gazette. Like Lois, she had a thing for men in spandex that wore their under pants on the outside. Like Lois, she suspected that Bruce Wayne was really Batman. Unlike Lois she was expendable to the editor. Julie Schwartz was brought in to give Batman a modern polish in 1964 as he had done in the past with the Flash and Green Lantern. She was dropped during the house cleaning along with Ace the Bat Hound, and Batmite.

Katherine “Kathy” Kane: The Bat-Woman

In 1954 an asshole wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent. This tomb of unfounded facts and hate mongering blamed all forms of juvenile delinquency on comic books. Everything from violence, sex, drug use and homosexuality stemmed from reading comics. Maybe this was why I did a line of meth and killed a bus driver in Vegas after reading the ending of Final Crisis. The Bat-Woman was introduced as a love interest for Batman to combat Seduction of the Innocent‘s allegations of Batman love for the young cock (what with Robin and all). She appeared through the 1950’s and 60’s but also got the Julie Schwartz booting in 1964. In comics today there is a new incarnation of Katherine Kane as Batwoman. This Batwoman, however, is a out-of-the-closet lesbian serving as a hilarious fuck-you to The Seduction of the Innocent.

Patricia Powell  and Virginia “Ginny” Jinkins

He did Patricia in Batman #165 and Ginny in Detective Comics #380. Sex so forgettable
people forgot about it. But you know what they say, sex is like pizza…

Selina Kyle: Catwoman

Catwoman is the soul mate of Batman, anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong! She first  slinked the pages of Batman #1 in 1940 forever causing teenage boys to fantasize about
bad girls that could kick their asses.

Talia al Ghul

If normal guys had villains we would totally want to do their daughters as a weird sort of
payback. The Dark Knight would do no different; but especially if they looked like Talia. Talia al Ghul is the daughter of his arch enemy Ra’s al Ghul and first appeared in Detective Comics, May 1971. Batman would go on to knock her up in the 1987 graphic novel, Batman: Son of the Demon. Take that Ra’s!

Pamela Isley: Poison Ivy

Bruce just really like girls in spandex, but what guy doesn’t? He hates crimes, but loves the girls who commit them. In the earlier issues, Batman and Poison Ivy had sexual tension you could sink your penis into. (For those of you who don’t have a penis, you could use other things – get creative!) In the Gotham Knight series of 2000, their relationship moved from Batman and Poison Ivy to Bruce Wayne and Pamela Isley after he helps her return to normal. This was deemed boring and Poison Ivy returned to being green and evil. Thank God.

Silver St. Cloud

She appeared in Detective Comics #470 in 1977. Silver managed to figure out that Batman and Bruce Wayne were one and the same but couldn’t handle being with someone in such a dangerous line of work — or someone who was totally fuckin’ crazy. This was the start of the tradition of girls figuring out who Batman is and freaking out about it.

Rachel Caspian

The Caped Crusader was ready to hang up the cowl again for Rachel. Thankfully, she found out her father was evil, murderous vigilante which drove her to join a nunnery. She appeared in 1987 in Batman: Year 2.

Natalia Knight: Nocturna

Skin color doesn’t matter to the Dark Knight. Dark skinned, light or even green, Batman just can’t get enough. Natalia Knight had a skin disease making her sensitive to light, thus making her an albino. She was also a jewel thief – again with the criminals. She even adopted Jason Todd, the second Robin. Then she got stabbed in the back by her brother and died – sucks to be her.

Julia Pennyworth

Alfred Pennyworth is pretty much Bruce’s father figure. Well, Alfred had a daughter. Which kind of makes her Bruce’s sister. Which kind of makes their relationship really, really, really, creepy.

Jezebel Jet

What the hell happened in Batman: R.I.P? Batman finally did a black chick, and that is all I could figure out.

If you do not have a date for this year, don’t worry about it. All you have to do is open the pages of your favorite issues of Batman and take a few pointers from the Caped Crusader and you too could be swimming in hot and cold running faucets of poon! Happy Valentine’s Day, Geekscape!