The Best Job To Dream Of Having When You Get A Little Tired Of Having Your Own Job (Me, Annotated)

Here's a post I wrote on The Best Of Everything back on August 8, 2008.  The stuff that's in red is what I think now about what I thought then.

The Best Job To Dream Of Having When You Get A Little Tired Of Having Your Own Job

Sometimes, I have to take a break from blogging and writing and watching "The Airborne Toxic Event" acoustic videos on Youtube and wondering if they took their name from M. Night Shymalan's crummy movie The Happening, or if he took his "ideas" for that terrible movie from the band's name, or if there was some actual "airborne toxic event" that inspired both the awful movie and the pretty good band...

Sometimes, I have to stop doing all that and "work." Yesterday was one of those days, when, wearing a tie and looking sharp, I had to attend a court hearing on behalf of a client, driving 1 and 1/2 hours one way to get there, only to meet with the judge and learn that due to a busy calendar, the judge was not prepared to issue a ruling that day and needed a few more months.

The judge, a very nice guy, sighed and mentioned that his workload was so overwhelming that if it didn't get better, he might give it up and just drive a truck.

That's a pretty drastic shift-- go from sentencing criminals and ruling on divorces to sitting in a semi, hauling cheese or nuclear weapons across the US -- but one that I understand, because who doesn't get tired, occasionally (or more than occasionally) of their job and dream of switching to a new job, one that doesn't have all the crummy features of the job we are (at least temporarily) sick of, and has all sorts of imagined great features. In the Judge's case, he mentioned that truck driving had its appeal because he "likes to read." I gathered that he felt that driving a big rig would give him plenty of time to get caught up on books and magazines.

It only just occurred to me that you could read that sentence as meaning "get caught up... while driving," but that's obviously not what the judge meant, or so I hope.  I think what he was really getting after was that truck driving, like many jobs, has a definite beginning and end point of each day, whereas jobs like lawyer and judge do not.  As I say often to my younger employees, there is no point of the day at which I am done.  Instead, there is just a time at which I stop working and go do something else.  And that is every day of your life if you are a lawyer: even when you finish one thing, there are other things to finish.  I suppose it's like that for every job.  Truck drivers finish a route and then start the next.  But it seems different, and so what I suppose the judge really meant was that at the end of a  day of truck driving he could pull the truck over and read a good book without feeling like he was hurting someone by not ruling on their case or doing a bit more research into something. 

I could sympathize; who couldn't? There's almost always something we don't like about our jobs, and some days, a job is made up entirely of things that we don't like about our jobs. It's on those days that we dream about switching, and we dream about switching to whatever job that day seems to have only good stuff associated with it, or at least to completely lack all the bad stuff associated with the day we're having.

The jobs we imagine we'd like when we don't like our current jobs offer a sort of peripheral glimpse into our minds, showing not just what we don't like about our own job, but how little we know about any other job and what it is we'd rather be doing. Here are a sampling of the actual jobs that I've, at times, thought that I would rather have than my current "actual" job of lawyer:

Bartender.
Sitcom writer.
Ice cream shop owner.
Janitor.
Sports talk radio guy.
Shark scientist.

That latter one first came up only recently, when I was watching a bit of a shark documentary on cable and noticed that the shark scientists dressed like beach bums and spent a lot of their days on the beach talking about sharks. That seemed to me to be a pretty good life, although it would have its downside, that being that they also went swimming at night in water that had been prebaited with rotten fish and was swarming with tiger sharks.

Still beats talking to other lawyers.*
*Note: Not a joke. I'm serious.

I think it's telling that, under pressure when I don't like something about my current job, I almost never fall back to those jobs I thought, growing up, that I might want. I never think Boy, I wish I was an astronaut, or Man, if only I could be President, or Cowboying, here I come.

Actually I don't think I ever wanted to be a cowboy. But I did want to be an astronaut and President. Maybe at the same time.  I bet if I had been an astronaut and President, after all that they'd let me be an honorary shark scientist if I wanted.

It's telling, but I'm not sure what it's telling, exactly. I'm pretty sure that it says something that my go-to-getaway job is almost never what I thought I wanted to be when I was a kid. (The exception: When I was a kid, I thought for a while that I would grow up to be an oceanographer-- yes, I was that fun of a kid -- and "shark scientist" is more or less in that field.)

Instead, I pick jobs that seem to me, like I said, to feature only good things or lack bad things. Bartender, for example-- that seems like a "no pressure" job to me, one that never features me having to go back to the office after a day of trial, to spend my night returning phone calls and researching some esoteric point of law that came up during the day. "Bartender" and "Janitor" are jobs that end when the bar closes or the building is clean; no bartender, I imagine, ever has to stay late to look up new drinks. There are definite beginnings and endings to those jobs, unlike most of my daily tasks that involve rewrites and responses and appeals and reconsiderations.

The appeal of "Ice Cream Shop owner" is similar -- the job begins and ends at a set time and doesn't feature unexpected curve balls thrown at me during the day. Plus, "Ice Cream Shop Owners" would deal with people who are happy to pay. Lawyers' clients are never happy to pay; win and they think you've overcharged them anyway or they could have done it themselves. Lose, and they blame you for it and don't feel they should have to pay for you screwing up.

Nobody ever wants to pay for the privilege of leaving their ex-wife; it's an expensive kind of sadness. But nobody ever complains about paying for an ice cream cone; they're buying a couple of scoops of happy from you.

From that, you can see what it is I don't like about my current "job." I spend a lot of time mucking around in people's miseries, miseries that begin but never seem to end - -and then have to try to get them to pay me for making them (hopefully) a little less miserable.

That was then, this is now.  My practice has evolved a lot in the last six years, and I now spend my day doing things that I find incredibly meaningful.  I've helped people save their houses, get their kids back, recover money, and otherwise work through their problems.  Most of my clients end up far from miserable.  I must have been terribly down that day to write what I did, because I don't think I felt that way all the time back in 2008. 

The other end of the spectrum -- sitcom writers, sports talk radio guys -- hold different kinds of appeal. I imagine they're more freeform; as a sitcom writer, I could sit in a room with a computer and TV and iPod and toss a tennis ball in the air,

I don't know what that in particular appeals to me but I now have  in my office a small, spiky yellow ball that lights up when you throw it and I frequently toss it in the air and catch it as I talk on the phone or have conferences with my staff.  Chase your dreams!

listen to music, wear my cool t-shirts and shorts and sandals to work,

I wear a tie every day to work and I like it. Almost every day. Today I have a polo shirt and slacks and I feel underdressed. 

 type up some scripts full of funny jokes, and be done by noon. As a sports-talk-radio guy, all I'd have to do is have opinions on sports, plus I'd probably get to go to the Superbowl. I like to write. I like wearing t-shirts. I like talking about sports.

I have completely drifted away from sports.  I am right now only vaguely aware of what's going on in any sporting league.  Somewhere along the line it just stopped appealing to me very much.  I still kind of know the big stories, but if I watch even 1 NFL game this year, I would be surprised.  And while I'd go to the Super Bowl if you sent me and paid for it, it wouldn't be even in my top 20 choices of things to do. 

 Most of my daily life involves zero amounts of that, so when I'm driving into work wearing a tie and knowing that I'll have to spend the day dealing with an unpleasant lawyer (and all lawyers except me are unpleasant)

Still true.

and listening to a sports talk guy go on and on about how great Superbowl week is,

I never listen to talk radio anymore, espeically not inane sports talk radio.  This week, my commute to and from work saw me listening to Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son short story collection on audio book. 

I like to imagine chucking my briefcase (which actually looks like it's made out of a football and has an NFL logo on it)

I still have that briefcase but I don't use it anymore.  Instead, I use old backpacks that Mr F and Mr Bunches don't use for school.  So I have backpacks that have Sponge Bob, the Avengers, Star Wars, and Angry Birds.  People love them, and so do I.  

out the window and putting on my Buffalo Bills' Bruce Smith jersey

I do still have that, but my new go-to shirt is my Superman shirt with actual cape.


 and spending the day getting paid to talk about football.

pleh.

So I suppose that given all of that, The Best Job To Dream Of Having When You Get A Little Tired Of Having Your Own Job would be a subjective thing; it would, it would be reasonable to assume, depend on your own tastes and whims and whatever it is that's getting you down about your life at that given moment.

But it's not. It's an objective thing, because there is one job that, above all others, everyone in the world would want to have whenever they get a little tired of their own job. There is one occupation that, while very few people hold it now, everyone of us, when our own job gets tedious or annoying or hectic or just not good, everyone of us would or should be dreaming of having.

That job is: World Record Confirmer.

There could not be anything bad about that job. I've thought about this a lot today -- this being one of those days when I'm tired of my "job" and want to do something else -- and being the person who confirms for Guiness that a world record was or was not set could not possibly have any negatives.

Time pressures? Wrong-- none. People say they want to set a world record and you go confirm it. Neverending days at the office? Again, wrong; while you might sit for 72 hours watching someone balance an egg on their nose, when they drop that egg or hit 72 hours, it's over. Annoying competitors or counterparts? There's only one Guiness Book of World Records, so it's not like you'll have to deal with opponents contesting things with you.

As the World Record Confirmer, I would spend most of my time traveling the world and watching people achieve something they felt was amazing and fun, and confirming for them that they've achieved a personal best; what could be better than that? And if they fail, well, it's not like I'm telling them they have cancer or they're losing their house-- I just have to tell them, You just keep building that statue of Christopher Walken made out of discarded gumball machine toy-containing bubbles, and I'll be back in a few months to see if you've qualified, so even that aspect contains not sadness, but hope and the promise of better, greater things to come.

So days like today, when I'm sitting at my desk looking at the mountain of paper I've got to read before 5 p.m. -- or more likely 6 p.m. -- and I've taken a bunch of phone calls already and have more piled up, and the emails are crowding my inbox and outside it's 77 degrees and sunny but I'm wearing dress shoes and a tie, and glancing more and more at the pictures on my wall that I took on vacations that seem a long time ago, and replaying over and over "Wishing Well," on days like that, I like to kick back and imagine life as a shorts-wearing, t-shirt donning, world-traveling World Record Confirmer, shaking a kid's hand and telling him Awesome, Johnny, that is far and away the World's Fuzziest Guinea Pig, you're in the Book.

Then we all go buy a couple of scoops of happiness at my ice cream shop.

This post was written back when the celebrities were adopting all the babies in the world. Remember that fad? If you bought this t-shirt, you do.  

Celebrity Adoption:

Choose Me
by

brianefp
Get this custom shirt
at Zazzle

So I must have been having a really bad day back then.  Six years later, I'm sitting in my office, surrounded by pictures of past vacations and a suit of armor and a pirate ship and a giant stuffed snake, and it's 77 degrees out again, but my attitude is entirely different; I'm about to go sue some debt collectors and then later on this afternoon I'll argue about property with someone and I got to lecture a lawyer today on what it means to be a parent (on behalf of my client, not me) and I can't imagine doing any other job than this, right now.
I mean, unless there's an opening for 'shark scientist.'  

The Best Worst Villain Parts 1 and 2 (Me, Annotated)

Back in October, 2009, when I obviously had much more time on my hands, I wrote a 5-part (YES, 5 PART!) series on The Best Worst Villain, a phrase which makes sense if you think about, provided you don't think about it.  These are parts 1 and 2.  As always, with Me, Annotated posts, my comments from NOW are in red.
____________________________________________________________________


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

Raise your hand if you know who Richard Heene is.For those who don't, here is a clue: Balloon Dad.

Not to downgrade either Richard Heene -- whose true crime is giving his kids stupid names -

One kid, I believe I remember, was named "Falcon". Now, granted, I suggested to a coworker that she name her baby "Eisenhower," as a first name but "Eisenhower" grows on you.  "Falcon"? Seriously?

or the seriousness of the actions that get someone placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, but I felt, as I watched the news story about the new guys on the list, a little let down, a little like, well, there should be something more to the 10 Most Wanted List than just... a bunch of murderous drug dealers.

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

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

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

Unlike some so-called "thinkers" (Aristotle, Colonel Mustard), I don't just sit around and ponder things like some latter-day Thoreau mulling over my thumb in my ethereal blog-cabin.

I have always felt that phrase was underappreciated by the none people who commented on the original post.

I do something about things, taking the time to explain how lame things can be cool, and what rock-and-roll really is, and now I'm going to do it again, via a series of posts that makes the world a better place by focusing on people who want to make the world a worse place. (Worse-r place? Why not?) By focusing on people who want to make the world a worser place.

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

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

That part about the velociraptors is absolutely true. I mean, it's true that they did not exist. For proof of that, you'll have to read my book "Do Pizza Samples Really Exist? (And 117* Other Ways Of Looking At Things)(*More Or Less.)" That is the only place to find my scientific treatise on the subject, titled "Velociraptors, My Butt."

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

Here's what's amazing about ME. I remember, perfectly, "Balloon Dad," but I have no idea what this paragraph is talking about.  This is why I no longer blame my school for not educating me. It's clearly my own fault. 
Having gone and looked up "Fruitdens haagarorum," I now know it's a small dinosaur whose name means "Fruita Tooth," which isn't a cereal after all [but should be!!]; it's because the first fossil of this dinosaur was found in Fruita, Colorado.
Things you and I now both know include who Richard Heene is, that a dinosaur was discovered back in 2009, and that people in Colorado are bad at naming towns.  (Ex. B: "Boulder.")

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

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

That theory hasn't been debunked yet.

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

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

I'm a little unclear on the science THERE, too.

Whatever. The point still stands: Evil defines good as light defines dark.

I still like the pizza metaphor better.

 Some of humanity's greatest moments have come when good faced off against evil, and the greater the evil, the greater the good that overcame it.

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

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

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

Ha! That was a Mayan calendar joke WAY BEFORE everyone else started doing them. Past Me was so awesome.

Nowadays, though, nobody truly knows what evil is, what a villain is. Everything is Hitler this and Stalin that. People can be accused of horrible crimes and have half of Hollywood come to their defense, or their funeral. Public figures can shoot someone in the face and still hold office,

And then years later claim that Hillary Clinton has brain damage, and somehow continue to be televised.  How is that man even alive? 

 but a politician who suggests that perhaps the richest country in the world shouldn't, maybe, let people die in the streets for lack of insurance is a fascist. We imprison an old man, rightly, for ripping off people in a massive Ponzi scheme,

And then a few years later decide that a rich racist is, somehow, more hateful than the scammer and that a spoiled brat singer is almost as bad. USA USA US... never mind.

 but then hand out a trillion dollars in bailout money to the Wall Street bankers and insurance executives who ripped people off in a different massive Ponzi scheme, and then we hurl insults at the President because he got awarded a prize he didn't earn, but also didn't seek.

Remember when the worst thing Obama did was be black get elected win a Nobel Prize? Who knew that eventually he'd make the Republicans hate their own health care plan?  Now, all the gays are marryin' and gettin' free health care for their mandatory abortions and you can't even carry an AK-47 into the Chili's anymore.  MURIEL, UNLOCK THE BOMB SHELTER WE'RE GOING DOWN 'TIL JEB WINS IN 2016.

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

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

I will begin the way all endeavors must: with a bologna-salami-mozzarella sandwich and bowl of "Roast Beef" flavored Ramen noodles, which I had for lunch

This was pre-bees, pre-heart attack pre-brain scare. OH TO BE YOUNG AGAIN.

 while I came up with a preliminary list of all the Villains I could think of, from real life and comic books and books and movies and songs and "various" and "whatnot."

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

Yeah, all you people who didn't read this post.  Feel free to add it in the comments, back in 2009!

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

Saddam Hussein. Oh my God he was alive then! Guys, remember when Saddam was alive?
The Lizard.
Sauron
Marvin The Martian
Frankenstein
"The Rake," from the Decemberists song of the same name. Past Me is a pretentious jerk sometimes about music FYI.
The Red Baron (both the real one and the one from the Peanuts comic)
All the old guys who ran all the haunted amusement parks in all the episodes of Scooby-Doo.
The team that always plays the Harlem Globetrotters.
Doctor Octopus
Rob Lowe in Wayne's World
The T-1000.
Bowser (from Super Mario Brothers.)
Hitler
Walkin' Dude
Mangog
Klingons
Captain Hook
Mr Norrell (who I think turned out to kind of be a villain?)
Darth Vader
The Mariner (from The Mariner's Revenge Song by The Decemberists) SEE? I am surprised I didn't find a way to fit an "Okkervil River" reference in here. 
Lex Luthor
Master Control Program
The Joker
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Whatever happened to HIM? Apparently, nothing, according to Wikipedia.
Lex Luthor
Darth Vader (and absolutely nobody else from the Star Wars universe including especially not Boba Fett, so don't nominate him.) I don't remember why I took this stance, but it seems  fair.
Toth (from Raiders of the Lost Ark) Until you realize I let TOTH in but not Boba Fett?
the Qotile from Yar's Revenge.
Voldemort
Ivan Drago (suggested by The Boy)
Galactus
The Anti-Monitor
The guy from Country Death Song by The Violent Femmes (Just to prove that I can think of bad guys from songs by groups other than the Decemberists)
Space Invaders.
Binky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.
Snow White's Stepmother, The Queen.

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

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

PART TWO: Let's Lose The Chicks.

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

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

To the List of Villains, I will add:

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

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

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

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

I mean, other than Star Wars.  And Rocky movies.  And the original Star Trek movies. And Rambo, The Godfather movies, Led Zeppelin albums, Halloween, Friday the 13th, PORKY'S... Past Me was kind of dumb, too.  Except, apparently, about Decemberist's albums.

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

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

Ahem. FOCUS.

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

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

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

Still don't know if she did. Did she?

He finished up with: "How about Daryl Hannah from Kill Bill?" which made me proud of The Boy because he's finally given in and agreed with me that Kill Bill is one movie. That's a huge pet peeve of mine:

Seriously. It's like I have brain damage. FOCUS. Now I know how the rest of you feel.

 People who refer to Kill Bill as two different movies. It's ONE movie. It was released in halves because it is one long movie. I've run into people time and again, though, who say "I liked Kill Bill One but not Kill Bill Two." Do you realize, you people, how idiotic that sounds? It's like saying "I liked the first half of The Godfather but not the second half," if in saying that you meant to imply that the first half of The Godfather was an entirely different movie than the second half.

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

Oh! Three things that use roman numerals!

I HATE ME.

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

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

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

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

I even just watched that movie again recently (MAN IT'S GOOD) and I still don't know her name. 

As most women villains are. Desperate to pad out the list, I considered my options: Make up a villain? I thought about that, seriously thought about it. Reverse Wonder Woman, I figured I could make up, adding Reverse Wonder Woman to the list and figuring that nobody would figure it out because nobody really cares about female villains, and because Wonder Woman was a lame superhero, anyway, with no good villains of her own, so far as I know. She was always fighting Flash castoffs, or maybe Greek goods, or just palling around with the rest of the Superfriends.

That is why it's so mystifyng to me that occasionally there is a flap about whether it's sexist for Hollywood to not make a big budget Wonder Woman movie. She was a terrible superhero. So far as I know. I never really read any of her comics or saw the TV show, so I'm just sort of making things up here, and the odds are that I am confusing Wonder Woman with "Electra Woman and Dyna Girl." Carry on!

Reverse Wonder Woman, I bet, could easily have passed for a real supervillain. I could invent a backstory that ripped off Bizarro and Reverse Flash (did he run backwards? Go really slowly? DC Comics, you really have a problem with understanding opposites) 

I was going to put a quote here from Wikipedia about how "Reverse Flash" is a guy with superspeed, which makes him REGULAR FLASH, only in reading the article I came across this, about a character named "Zoom" who tried to use the Flash's time-traveling treadmill to avoid becoming paralyzed and blew up the Flash Museum, and messed up the time stream and the result of it all was that

He could now alter his personal timeline, giving the effect of super-speed.

Which, WHAT? That's the worst use of time travel since Looper.  "I can alter time, but I will only do so in a way that makes me appear superfast." GOD I HATE PEOPLE.

PS: Speaking of time travel, have you submitted your story for the IWM Anthology yet? Are you even still reading? This? Because if you are, you should submit a story for the IWM Time Travel Anthology and maybe win money.  Details here. 

and move on, eventually dropping Reverse Wonder Woman off the list at some stage of this process.

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

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

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

And that was BEFORE I learned that Obama wants to take our guns away to give them to lesbian doctors via Amazon drones.  Imagine how confused I am now.

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

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

Seriously. That does make me ashamed to be an American. Prada sells a tote bag for $2,870. I just now checked on their website.  I hope whoever spends $2,870 on a #*#%& HANDBAG rots in Hell, right next to the person who sold it to them.  The only way -- the ONLY WAY -- I can tolerate someone wasting that kind of money is if they immediately give an equal amount to a charity.

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

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

17 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Nurse Ratched 
18 Manchurian Candidate, The - Mrs. Iselin22 Misery - Annie Wilkes
49 Double Indemnity - Phyllis Dietrichson

53 All About Eve - Eve Harrington54 Bad Seed, The - Rhoda 

57 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - The queen 

63 Basic Instinct - Catherine Trammell

66 Rosemary's Baby - Minnie Castevet69 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - Jane Hudson 

70 101 Dalmatians - Cruella De Vil 

71 Metropolis - The evil Maria -

75 Last Seduction, The - Wendy Kroy

82 Batman Returns - CatwomanBut there were also two villains who aren't even human

19 Jaws - The shark

28 Alien etc. - The alien

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

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

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

Female Villains Suck.

See how that looks better with capitals?

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

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

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

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

Anyway, before I get too distracted, back to the point: Chicks and clothes. It's always about the clothes. Hillary Clinton ran for president, and talked about her pantsuits along the way.

Well, she did. And before you get all down on me, I'm voting for Elizabeth Warren, so it's not like I'm COMPLETELY sexist. 

 Sarah Palin ran for (in her mind) Empress of a Talk Show Or Somethin' and began her run by going clothes shopping. Both women wanted to be leaders of the country, and couldn't get their minds off clothes.

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

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

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

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

OK I get it I sound like a total jerk there. That cat thing was out of line. In my defense, I was all hopped up on Roast Beef Flavored Ramen noodles. You know what that'll do a guy? Did I mention I'm voting for Elizabeth Warren? GO WOMEN YAY.

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

Both: true.

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

I will fight that battle 'til my death. 

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

Except Elizabeth Warren.

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

I may not have been totally accurate in my recounting of the plot of that movie.  

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

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

With that, the list is hereby narrowed down to:

The Token Female: Reverse Wonder Woman.

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

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

Next week: I go on to part THREE: GO It Alone.  And try to avoid the things women will be throwing at me all week.

Sexy Alien Ryan Gosling (Me, Annotated)

A little under a year ago -- last July -- Daniella Robin did a post about...

well, about something but I can't remember what it was about, as this link no longer leads to that post, so if you were thinking somehow things on the Internet were forever, well, they're not, except for that one photo of you at the afterparty.  That will NEVER go away.

Anyway, I have gathered that the post maybe had something to do with her writing a story, maybe, as judging from the comment I left there, which was this:

I heard this podcast thing where a scientist misunderstood the nature of infinity and said that in an infinite universe it becomes finitely likely that every single combination of atoms that CAN occur, HAS occurred, which means that in our own universe -- not even an alternate reality! -- there is (supposedly) a version of you that has already written that story, and in fact there is a version of you that wrote that story, got it published, had it optioned by George Clooney's production company, got it made into a movie, it won an Oscar, redefining along the way the very act of writing/moviemaking/Oscar winning, then STARTED A CIVIL WAR AMONG PEOPLE WHO LIKED/DIDN'T LIKE THE MOVIE, with that civil war being fought by four-armed men wielding lasers while riding dragons, and all the four-armed men looked like Ryan Gosling while all the women were bustier versions of Xena, and ultimately the civil war was won by the people who liked your story, resulting in you winning the First Inaugural Decimation Of Civilization Award For Writers, which is quite an honor.

In short: take the day off.

Also: I think that aptly demonstrates how "random" doesn't equal "probable" or even "possible." But scientists are prone to being dumb, because science is HARD.

The real point of that comment was that obviously, at the time, I was (and still am now, re-reading it) that a scientist confused possible with probable or likely or actually, and the absurdity of that scientist's position (infinite possibilities means infinite things-that-have-already-happened) is demonstrated by the example given.

If there's one thing that ticks me off, it's people misunderstanding stuff like that.  And people making a left turn in front of me.  But mostly misunderstanding (and then misstating for the general public) things like the way infinite possibility actually plays out in a universe with, you know, laws of physics and stuff like that.