Overheard yesterday: “It was like a romance co-authored by Caligula and H.P. Lovecraft.  Thank God I escaped!”

“Heroes is like looking at an ex-girlfriend. You know there was so much potential there, and you want to believe in it, but you can’t look past the scathing flaws that make you wrong for one another.”

–Jeremy Alonzo

“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

Nor can you sell a publisher a manuscript you haven’t written yet.* Get writing!

*Unless your past books have sold notably well, in which case I hate you.

I don’t trust anyone that calls himself a “superhero.” The only difference between a “superhero” and a “supervillain” is that the villain’s been caught.

–Paingod

Agent Orange: Greetings, Mammal-Black! I require your expertise.

Agent Black: Tax trouble again?

Agent Orange: Indeed. Your former colleagues at the IRS persist in their shameless schemes to extort me.

Agent Black: And did this vendetta against you begin before or after you insisted on paying your income taxes in pennies?

Agent Orange: That wouldn’t have seemed unreasonable if they hadn’t demanded so much money!

“Ulysses is a totally incomprehensible book. Understanding it is like machine-gunning a pack of unicorns. Anyone that claims to have done either is lying, but should be institutionalized anyway.”

–Cadet Davis

“When you kill one person, it’s a tragedy. When you kill a thousand people, it’s a statistic. When you kill a million people, you’re in.” – The Supervillain Hall of Fame

“When I was a third grader, I wanted to be a President, a pilot or a ninja. Unfortunately, I’m too clumsy to be a ninja, too blind to be a pilot, and too moral to run for President.”

–B. Mac

Catastrophe: “I don’t have a gambling problem. I win.”

Picture courtesy of the US War Dogs Association.

“Truth is the glue that holds government together.” — Gerald Ford

“If you want to live under something held together by glue, you probably wouldn’t make much of an architect.” — Mike, Director of the Office of Special Investigation’s RETCON branch.

Picture c/o simplydumb.com, caption courtesy of me (inserted with the help of ICanHas Cheezburger.com

Agent Orange: Greetings, Mammal-Black! I have an excellent costume for our upcoming office Halloween party. It makes full use of my mammal-frightening teeth and reptilian horror factor and this pleases me.

Agent Black: Godzilla?

Agent Orange: IRS agent.

Agent Black: That’s a terrible costume.

Agent Orange: Don’t make me take 28% of your candy!

Dr. Darpa: I heard that Russia is now patrolling its nuclear-armed bombers 24 hours a day now.

Captain Carnage: That’s right.

Dr. Darpa: That could destabilize US-Russian relations, if we thought there were any conceivable chance Russian bombers could get close enough to attack Chicago or Seattle.

Captain Carnage: I’d say at least 50%.

Dr. Darpa: 50%, hah! Not after you see what I’ve been working on: Project Unmutually Assured Destruction. It’s the largest surface-to-air missile site ever built. It was so colossal that I could only fit it in Yosemite National Park.

Captain Carnage: An antiballistic missile site in a national park?

Dr. Darpa: Now, the only remaining task is to name it. I present to you: the Yosemite SAM Site.

Agent Orange: Kids today are so hard to please.

Agent Black: I don’t even want to think about how you might know that.

Agent Orange: Yesterday…

Teacher: Class, today our guest speaker is Agent Orange.

Agent Orange: I’m a Special Investi-Gator.

Teacher: Could you explain what it is you do?

Agent Orange: Are you sure? There are kids here.

Student 1: Have you ever killed anyone?

Agent Orange: Laws need claws or they’d just be words.

Student 2: How many people have you killed?

Agent Orange: The confirmed score or a rough estimate?

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: Suddenly I have questions of my own.

The biggest suckers in football are the Jets. In basketball, the refs. In soccer, the spectators.

– Agent Orange

Agent Black and everybody’s favorite mutated alligator, Agent Orange, have a strange conversation about killing terrorists with sponge-cake. And other questions you never thought to ask!

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Soccer can teach us a lot about Europe. There’s a lot of running but precious little action, and violence is always liable to break out at any moment.

– Agent Orange

Agent Black and everybody’s favorite mutated alligator, Agent Orange, have a heated argument about one of America’s most popular daily comic-strips, Don Gato.

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Superheroes should never ask “are you thinking what I’m thinking?” The answer is never helpful.

But where could you find that much nitroglycerin at this hour?

–Dr. Darpa

Unless your IQ has tripled since we’ve last spoken, probably not.

–Catastrophe

You are now.

–Mr. Mental

Don’t flatter yourself.

–Paingod

Science plays heavily in many superhero stories. So, today, instead of coming up with some pithy quote about science, we’ve used others to do so for us.

What is science?

Hocus pocus, but with less hand-waving.

– Agent Orange

Always being within a carton of baking soda of a doomsday device.

– Dr. Darpa

Like Hollywood, except without the beautiful women, oversized budgets and snappy outfits. Actually, it’s not like Hollywood at all, besides the explosions.

–Dr. Savant

A series of triumphs over unpleasant realities.

– Jacob Mallow

Pretty awful. Stick to game theory.

– Catastrophe

Agent Orange: I have learned something important about mammals. Two quasi-mystical words will put a mammal into a hypnotic stupor that will force him to believe anything.

Agent Black: You’re crazy.

Agent Orange: I am prepared to demonstrate my new-found learning of mammalian psychology. First, I will greet a victim-mammal of your selection. Then you will make an outlandish statement. And I will administer the two word hypnotic spell.

Agent Black: Let’s see it.

Five minutes later.

Agent Orange: Greetings, Mammal-Darpa! We have learned something intriguing on our latest posting.

Dr. Darpa: What?

Agent Black: We were attacked by robotic, flesh-eating airplanes.

Agent Orange: IN JAPAN!

Agent Black: … !

Dr. Darpa: Egads! How did you survive?

Agent Black: …

Agent Black: NO!

[end] (If you’d be interested in reading a related article, “Stuff Mammals Like: Japan,” please see more.

Continue Reading »

Agent Black stumbles into the Special Investigations lunchroom, his face and suit covered with ashes, dust and blood.

Captain Carnage: You look like you done tried your IRS mojo on a Texas woman.

Agent Black: Would you rather have Agent Orange drive a car or handle a submachine gun?

Captain Carnage: Is that a trick question?

Agent Black: Do I look like I’m feeling tricky right now?

Captain Carnage: Well, is Agent Orange in a combat zone on another continent, or is he somewhere where a red light actually means something?

Agent Black: Washington, DC. In my car.

Captain Carnage: Hotdamn, kid. I wouldn’t get in a tank if I knew O.J. was driving it. Give him the submachine gun, I reckon it’s less likely to hurt nastylike when he gets you killed. Those damn reptiles, they drive like everyone’s limbs grow back.

Agent Black: So, I was driving Orange. He was late to a meeting on Capitol Hill.

Captain Carnage: Hooh boy. I like where this is going.

Agent Black: We got a red light and Agent Orange says something like “why are you stopped? Keep moving, keep moving, dummy.”

Captain Carnage: Alligators reckon green and red’re the same color. When they talk about traffic lights, y’just gotta take it like Congress talking about collateral. They’re talking, but they’re not really talking, y’reckon?

Agent Black: Well, uhh. I’d heard about the green-red colorblind thing before. So I said “shuddap, I know we’re late.” And then the back of our car exploded.

Captain Carnage: Rocket launcher ambush?

Agent Black: Ambushes.

Captain Carnage: Many?

Agent Black: Four cars.

Captain Carnage: Hot damn! So you had to pick between driving or shooting. Damn sure he ain’t doing the driving. He makes NASCAR look like bumper cars. You know he once managed 8 digits of damage with a golf-cart?

Agent Black: I believe it.

Captain Carnage: Since you survived, I reckon you gave him the gun. But how did he shoot it? His hands are big enough to palm a rifle.

Agent Black: I took the gun.

Captain Carnage: But that means…

Captain Carnage: !

Agent Black: I long for death’s sweet embrace.

Later that day:

Agent Orange: Greetings, mammal-Mike!

Mike: The Captain said you had an interesting day today.

Agent Orange: I met a wily mammal-gelatoier.

Mike: A gelatoier?

Agent Orange: A mammal that sells gelato. He introduced me to the seedy and sinister gelato underworld by tricking me with a gallon of orange-flavored gelato. That was very interesting. No doubt Mike-flavored gelato would interest you. But his alleged “orange” flavor was not even remotely similar to my real orange flavor, which proves that it was a foul ruse. I also seem to have lost feeling in my digestive tract. In retrospect, I have concluded that gallons of orange gelato are better-suited to mammals than cold-bloods.

Mike: I think Carnage was referring to an attempted assassination with rocket launchers.

Agent Orange: Oh, there was that, too.

Mike: …

Mike: Don’t you think that was a little bit more interesting than the gelato?

Agent Orange: (Mammals). Before today, I had not ever been offered gelato, let alone gelato that was (purportedly) in my flavor. But assassination attempts are a dime a dozen. In fact, perhaps the gelato was an assassination attempt.

Agent Orange, paraphrasing Groucho Marx: “Outside of an alligator, a rocket launcher is certainly your best friend. Inside of an alligator, I’d recommend a gun.”

Web Gumbo provides a great picture of his unit mascot. You might wonder what a Marine mascot does. Deliver pep talks? Rally the fans? Please.

Agent Orange, our mutated alligator, says that “it’s not surprising that they turned to an alligator when they needed someone to scare and bond with Marines. Here you can see the gator playing Marco Polo with a Marine that is obviously enjoying the gator’s friendly and sociable company.”

Lash retorts retorts that “if the guy’s actually enjoying anything, it’s probably the thought that he will soon not be dangling over a watery grave.”

“A leader who is poor is a poor leader.”

– Carlos Gonzalez

“If you were a good leader, you wouldn’t need any money.  Worshipers and soldiers–ones worth having, anyway– cannot be purchased.  If you think the difference between a real military force and a gang is shiny tanks and well-pressed uniforms, you might as well shoot yourself and spare us the trouble.”

–Paingod

My opponents have claimed that I’m an “evil, reptilian kitten-eater from another planet.” Well, I’m not evil. It attacked me.

–Agent Orange, mutated alligator and self-defending ailurophage

Our mutated alligator, Agent Orange, offers us these insights into misconceptions about alligators.

—

Fiction: “gators attack innocent animals.”

Fact: We gators defend ourselves when attacked. It’s not our fault we’re stronger, faster and bigger.

—

Fiction: alligators kiss.

Fact: John is actually attempting to defend his dubious claim that he had the biggest jaw in the swamp. Hah! I’ve seen bigger hatchlings.

—

Fiction: gators like to make mammals feel inadequate.

Fact: We aren’t just smiling to show off our stunningly white teeth. I mean, if we really wanted to humiliate you, we’d challenge you to a swimming race. Or football.

—

Fiction: Gators are nearly flawless.

Fact: “Nearly”?