One Eyed Jack

If you get tired from recording data, and need to sleep so that your brain can sort through the stuff you've seen and move junk from short-term to long-term memory, then a guy with one eye ought to be able to stay up later than a guy with two eyes.

Hiro's

My favorite character on Heroes is Claire Bennet's brother.

The one who is hardly ever in camera focus.

Seriously, if you can remember what that guy looks like, you probably have some kinda super power heh.

And all that dude ever has to do is run down the stairs halfway and start to say something before Claire tells him to shut up.

And sometimes he has to stand with the rest of the Muggles and carry Claire's mom's dog around in outdoor scenes.

I'm fascinated with the way they keep him hanging around in the background.

Waiting to sacrifice his job on the show in some eventual subplot that'll give Claire a chance to say something like "you killed my family!" and be more interesting for a few minutes.

See, so that job is actually a lot more heroic than it seems.

They should give him his own spin-off show heh.

Something for regular people who are sick to death of listening to people with super powers complain about how hard their lives are ahaha.

"You don't understand! You don't know what its like to be an invulnerable cheerleader who lives forever!"

"Tell me about it! This whole 'being able to fly' thing is the worst!"

The Style of No Style

You could do a Harry Potter Encyclopedia.

Even if you screw it all up 'cause you ain't even seen all of them Harry Potter movies let alone read any of them books, heck, it'd prolly be better for you in the long run, if the encyclopedia was totally screwed up and wrong in a million places, 'cause it'd create a "furor of controversy" among the Harry Potter fans and stuff.

"Frogbeard is not the name of the guy in charge of the Frogwarts!"

And then that chick that writes those books would prolly sue you to protect her intellectual property.

And that'd make you famous.

And then you could use the media attention to do something useful.

Heck, if your encyclopedia was totally wrong about Harry Potter in every way, you could just change the title, y'know, after saying there was some sort of mistake at the printers or something.

And then the Hairy Walter Encyclopedia (or whatever) would be your intellectual property, and you could use the whole Harry Potter Hubbub to have your encyclopedia turned in a series of motion pictures and stupid books and stuff.

See, that's like taking lemons and converting 'em into gold, right there.

I'm surprised more people haven't done that already ahaha.

The Price

It's one thing to be mad at me if I don't pay you for something that you did for me.

Its quite another thing to be mad at me for not falling for some trick you tried to pull on me.

Especially if you were really lazy and half-hearted about it.

I mean, I'm willing to pretend I fell for yer shit, a little, to encourage you to keep practicing, but I gotta see you putting some serious effort into it next time.

Or, y'know, you could try to do something for me, insteada to me, and then just be mad that I didn't pay you for it.

Either way.

S'up to you, really ahaha.

No Seriously

There's a good reason to try to be ethical.

You can fool more people that way.

And you can string your friends and your family and everybody in your neighborhood and countless amounts of faceless strangers along with your benevolent behavior while you wait for a really good pay off to cash in on.

And you can even sell everybody out more than once.

You can sell everybody out every day, multiple times a day, you could even run a commercial between each of your benevolent gestures.

And since you are selling yourself out anyways, you might as well ask everybody to buy some Delicious Ramen Pride Noodles while they're at it.

And the better you are at doing that, the better the offers to sell out will be, and the more offers you will get.

But, and here's the important part, you can also ask everybody not to buy some Delicious Ramen Pride Noodles.

Yah.

Insteada working malevolently toward your friends and your family and everybody in your neighborhood and all of the faceless strangers on the internet, you could share whatever powers you have to help them.

You can try to protect your friends, and your family, and everybody in your neighborhood, and even all of the faceless strangers on the internet.

Or teach them to protect themselves, in a certain way.

And then, for a certain fee, you could hand over your keys and look the other way, when a group of corporate barbarians showed up at the gate, wanting to plunder your town.

That's where the real money is baby ahaha.

Plus you don't have to put any serious effort into doing that shit AHAHA.

But still, you don't wanna do that too much.

'Cause of supply and demand, y'know.

The more restricted the access, the more presitigious and noble the plunder, the higher the pay-off for selling 'em out.

So even then, its good to hold out longer and maintain your integrity and be patient.

And there's only one thing that you really have to worry about.

And that's that people are gonna figure you out.

Yah, they have a way of figuring things out eventually.

Most of the time its the ones like us, who helped us get to the top, that start harboring resentment when we don't share the pay-offs with 'em.

They get all "dude you are treating me like one of the suckers! you're selling me out along with everybody else!"

So you got to watch out for those ones, they can be a real problem.

Especially if the pay-offs are so small that they're hard to divvy up amongst your goons without feeling like you ain't getting nothing for your troubles.

And there's some other types you need to be prepared for.

Which are detailed in chapter seven of my book, "Exploiting the Gray Areas for Dummies."

Hahaha I'm just kidding.

And that's just a small sample of the hilariousness you'll find in the "Bitch-a-Day Jokebook."

Don't forget to buy the t-shirt.

Or there might not be any left.

And then we won't be able to tell you apart from the suckers.

When it comes time to divvy up the loot.

Hahaha I'm just kidding.

No really I'm being serious this time.

Most people are predators.

But its pretty easy to see who is preying on who.

And who works together for mutual benefit.

And who doesn't.

And how much each of them are paid for doing it, or not doing it.

And what they're getting paid in.

Who takes advantage of who, how they do it, and how they profit from it.

And what tribe everybody is in.

And what tribes would fall for your shit.

And what tribes wouldn't fall for your shit, but might still put up with you anyways.

And what tribe you really need to be careful around.

Because they might be able to see right through shit that even you can't see through.

Even if they ain't saying nothing about it.

'Cause it ain't worth the time and energy for them to bother with it.

Yet.

Hahaha I'm just kidding.

No seriously.

A True Taste of Immortality

Agatha Christie was born in 1890, the year that Idaho and Wyoming became a state and Sitting Bull was killed, which was only thirty years after Abe Lincoln left the stage, eight years after New York got its first electric street lights, and four years after France gave us the Statue of Liberty.

Germany still had a king at that point, and Russia still had a Tsar (the end of those monarchy thingies and that whole communist dealie with Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and all them was actually about as far off into the future as Abe Lincoln was into the past).

She was twenty-four when World War I was starting up.

She died in 1976, which means she missed seeing Star Wars by one year.

But she probably saw the Planet of the Apes movies, and could've seen Jaws, so there's that heh.

Better yet, Jack Dempsey, the famous boxer guy, world heavyweight champ from 1919 to 1926, was born five years after Agatha, in 1895.

He died in 1983.

And it musta been pretty freaking weird for a tough guy like him to see Bruce Lee come (and go) eh?

And I can't imagine what musta been going through his mind when he had to watch David Hasselhoff strut around a talking car in his tight pants ahaha.

What did he think of Mr. T AHAHA.

Did Jack like Led Zeppelin?

He lived through the disco age.

And the 60s.

And the 50s.

And the 40s.

And the 30s.

And the roaring twenties.

The stuff you like musta been pretty different from the stuff he was listening to as a kid in the early 1900s heh.

And that's half a lifetime away from the sock hop crap that must've seemed like Heavy Metal to him ahaha.

Dude, Dempsey could've listened to Metallica back when they were good AHAHA.

And seen all the Star Wars movies that were worth seeing AHAHAHA.

Oh and Alien too!

Dempsey was twenty-five by the time that women got the right to vote, and the year he died was the same year that the first woman went into space.

That was also the same year that the first man-made object left the solar system (apparently the day when woman-made objects would leave the solar system was still way off in the distant future ahaha suckers).

Anyways putting yourself in Dempsey's shoes is like totally impossible, right?

He's like people from ten different time periods put together.

But now I'm gonna handshake back even farther.

Just a little.

Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn six years before Agatha Christie was born (he died when she was twenty).

Andrew Jackson was the 7th president when Mark Twain was born (he died when Mark Twain was ten) and Abe Lincoln was only 26.

Andrew Jackson was born in 1767, which was the year that Mozart completed his first opera, at the age of eleven.

He was thirty years older than Mary Shelley.

So Mozart was eleven years older than Jackson who was thirty years older than the chick who wrote Frankenstein who was twelve years older than Abe Lincoln who was 26 years older than Mark Twain who was 55 years older than Agatha Christie (and sixty years older than Dempsey, who mighta hated Knight Rider and probably felt that the Ewoks ruined the trilogy).

That shit is awesome.

Snake Oil Artist

My trick to maintaining my "journalistic integrity" or whatever is to not be a journalist.

Abstinence is the only thing that really works, trust me, I've tried everything.

Or I just go out there and steal stuff instead of taking bribes, that works pretty good.

Yah, see, 'cause that way its like you uh... earned it... or... something.

But then again, I'm not a whatever-you-are.

Yah, naw, see, my purpose is two-fold:

1. To "freak out the robots."

And the second one is something-something I forget.

Anyways you can't really maintain your artistic integrity by trying to present yourself as something that is better than you are, that's like the opposite of maintaining your artistic integrity, ain't it?

Holding yourself up to some weird ideal that ain't the real you?

Perpetuating some kinda illusion?

Yah, see, that's why you shouldn't try to be all "good" and not take bribes and stuff, 'cause fer one thing, its dishonest.

And fer the second thing, its something-something I forget.

Who cares really ahaha.