Bartender: New Hegemon movie’s coming out.

Catastrophe: I heard.

Bartender: …

Bartender: How much do they pay you to wear that?

Catastrophe: Not enough.

r. Berkeley: Something’s wrong with the sunscreen vat. I was wondering if you could explain a few things to me.

Jacob Mallow: Could I discuss this in the lab with you after-hours?

Berkeley: Sure…

That evening…

Berkeley: I’ve been doing some tests on the toxicity of the sunscreen…

Jacob: Those weren’t in your operational area.

Berkeley: The sunscreen would burn clean through flesh!

Jacob: I don’t think you understand how seriously we take our security procedures here, Dr. Berkeley. I see no alternative to summary termination.

Berkeley: You’re firing me?

Jacob pulls out a tranquilizer gun and shoots Berkeley twice, then pushing Berkeley into the vat.

Jacob: Something like that.

END

Agent Orange: Can you hotwire that car?

Lash: No, jackass. I’m a Harvard MBA. And there is no way you would ask a white…

Agent Orange: Just because you attended Harvard doesn’t necessarily mean you’re devoid of useful knowledge. Excuse me for giving you the benefit of the doubt.

Jacob Mallow: I’ve finally perfected the concoction. It will–

Paingod: No.

Jacob Mallow: What?

Paingod: I don’t want to know what it does, how it does it, or your vast and no doubt eminently disruptable deployment strategy. Telling me can only guarantee that your plan does not come to fruition.

Jacob: What? How would that matter?

Paingod: …

Paingod: You’re new here, aren’t you?

European defense consultant: “You don’t think our marketing campaign will work?”

Captain Carnage: “You sure as Houston heat can’t be American. I reckon you got a shot at truth in advertising.”

Consultant: “What would you recommend?”

Captain Carnage: “If y’all can’t make something of France naming its toughest fighter a Mirage, y’all’re not tryin’ hard enough.”

Gigas: The government admits it maintains a set of “breeder reactors,” reactors that make Chernobyl look like a Swiss clock. The government purposely exposes countless people to radiation to breed supersoldiers.”

Grim Trigger: I don’t think that’s what we meant by “breeder reactor.”

“Pass me down the shark repellent, Robin!”

Which classes are best for you?

For applicants who want to BS future interviewers: Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology, Computational Biophysics and Systems Biology

For applicants that don’t care what their interviewers will think: Hong Kong Action Cinema, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, Introduction to Excel

For applicants to counterterrorist think tanks that wouldn’t object to cutting out a clause to, uhh, “save space” on their resumes: Cultures of Fear: Analyzing Horror Films

For students that are either unusually uncreative or terrible at geography: The West of Ireland: An Imagined Space

For prospective OSI Human Resources agents: Human Resources in High Performing Organizations, Business Intelligence, or Mammology.

For students not too concerned about job-applicable learning: Directed Readings in Physical Education

For students that probably need to study less and get out more: Sociology of Sexual Behavior

For students that hopefully won’t design any structure that I ever set foot in: Archaeology of Gender

For either open-minded non-Catholics or (more likely) students that need to attend mass more regularly: What Catholics Believe

For students that are unoptimistic about management-employee relations: Slavery, Captivity, and the Company Store in American History

For morbidly depressed students: Nuclear Warfare or Abnormal Psychology.

For students that want to be morbidly depressed: Reading “Ulysses”

For prospective entertainers: Game Theory. (Wait…)

********************************************************

I’m now reading through the course catalog for the third time, trying to find classes that will fit into gaps in my schedule.

I was sitting there, disappointed by our security offerings, when I caught a glimpse of Homeland Security: Surveillance, Terror… and I got excited.

Then I look through its catalog entry.

ENGLISH 40728 – Homeland Security: Surveillance, Terror and Citizenship in America

Close readings of various 20th-century African-American literatures, with foci on how “black subjectivity” is created; the relationship between literature, history, and cultural mythology; the dialectic of freedom and slavery in American rhetoric; the American obsession with race; and the sexual ideology and competing representations of domesticity.

I’ll admit that when I think of Homeland Security surveillance and American citizenship, sexual ideology/domesticity, black subjectivity and the dialectic of slavery are not the first things that come to mind. I find it hilarious that it mentions the “American obsession with race” when the professor has turned a class about homeland security into a discussion of slavery and black subjectivity.

I recommend, as a more honestly marketed alternative, the African Studies Department’s Slavery, Captivity and the Company Store in American History. I still have no idea what the Company Store allusion means, but that’s why you should take the course, obviously. J

Doctor Savant: “Do you know what the difference between you and I is?”

Lash: “I make this look good?”

Doctor Savant: “A Ph. D and 200 I.Q. points.”

Agent Orange: “If journalism is really the first draft of history, we need some keen editors.”

Office of Special Investigation’s Retroactive Continuity branch mission statement: “Fixing history, one day at a time.”

The Refrigerator of DOOM

Doctor Savant: “Before we open my refrigerator, you better take this.”

Lash: “What the hell, a flame thrower?”

Doctor Savant: “Just in case.”

Lash: “Just in case of what?”

Doctor Savant: “Exactly.”

Captain Carnage: “I reckon I’d be plum crazy if I didn’t say Texas is the doggoned smartest place in South America.”

Captain Carnage: “We have a Department of Defense. We need a Department of Offense.”

Hello. Today, I started running a Quote of the Day. I’ve already got the next two weeks covered.

The Washington Post described a meeting between two Congressmen, Jim Moran (D-Va.) and John Porter (R-Nev.), and the Iraqi national security advisor.

the three were trying to discuss the state of Iraqi security forces with [the NSA], but the large, flat-panel television set facing the official proved to be a distraction. [The NSA] was watching children’s cartoons.

When Moran asked him to turn it off, [he] protested with a laugh and said, “But this is my favorite television show,” Moran recalled.

Porter confirmed the incident, although he tried to paint the scene in the best light, noting that at least they had electricity.

It would be easy to criticize the NSA for prioritizing cartoons over two Congressmen. All things considered, it was probably a shrewd assessment. At least cartoons end.

That must be horribly awkward for both Congressmen. The Democrat has to act multilateral with an ally that obviously isn’t interested; the Republican has to make it look like supporting Maliki’s government advances US interests.

To commemorate this fine moment of US-Iraqi relations, I’ve slapped something together.

Inquiring minds want to know:

• Supervillain prisons. Why have them?
• How does Superman keep getting movie deals?
• Why don’t Superman’s movie deals stipulate the presence of a supervillain?
• Lex Luthor: brilliant mastermind or government plant? His most brilliant schemes endanger fewer people than a fully loaded Yugo. And he gets pardoned FAR too often for it to be a coincidence.
• Who is Captain America working for? He couldn’t cover the security deposit on that cavernous NYC apartment with an Army paycheck.
• WWII time-travel. Aren’t any WWII time-travelers gunning for Hitler? Would assassinating Hitler doom the Allies by letting someone sane lead German forces? (Hitler: Allied plant?)
• Time travel. “Dr. Demented escaped into the time-space continuum. He could be anywhere.” “No problem. I’ll start at 1939, you start at 1945 and we’ll catch him somewhere in the middle.”
• Supervillains have attempted to influence WWII at least twenty different times in the past fifty years. Presumably, supervillains will keep trying. Wouldn’t superheroes from our present cross paths with superheroes from our future that are pursuing their own supervillains in WWII?
• The Hulk: why does he still get published?
• Invisible Woman: dumbest Ph. D. ever?
• Beast. Reptile. Catastrophe. Donatello. Aren’t there any animals/monstrosities that are less intelligent than the Invisible Woman? Why do said animals typically wear more clothes than the Invisible Woman?

• Lois Lane: “How many F’s are there in catastrophe?” How did she win a Pulitzer?
• Static Shock’s sidekick, the white gadgeteer (AKA Gear, AKA Whitey, AKA Chunky McGee). What, a black person can’t be smart enough to make gadgets?
• What is the fascination with supervillains (and sometimes heroes) running for president?
• Did Savage Dragon run for VP because he realized how useless he was?
• How could Lex Luthor POSSIBLY win the presidency? Voters regularly write candidates off because they’re Mormon, divorced or inexperienced. But, you know…a supervillain… I guess I could give him another chance…
• What was the reasoning behind making an Ant-Man movie?
• Dr. Hank Pym, Ant-Man, Shrinking Violet. Why haven’t they learned that intelligent people don’t shrink themselves? That’s why supervillains build shrink rays.
• What the hell is going on in NYC? Judging from comic books, at least 90% of the world’s supernatural events happen there, including regular influxes of tan New Yorkers from alternate dimensions where NYC is apparently devoid of black people (the Friends Effect).