Unsought Input

A few months back we wrote about the comedic possibilities of super heroes confronting real life.  In the last few years there has been a flood of super hero comics, movies, and TV shows and many of them place people with extraordinary abilities in ordinary situations.  Witness the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, or heroes like Hiro from Heroes.

But beyond the world of fiction, what kind of super powers can we find in real life?  Sure, it’s fun to come up with speculative pseudoscience explanations for Superman’s heat vision, but that’s not likely to produce any results.  Even non-powered heroes like Batman rely too much on poor comic book physics and unrealistic survivability to produce real-life counterparts.

We’ll find our real-life super powers in less obvious places.  In the 1980s Marvel had a character named Cypher, or more properly Doug Ramsey.   Doug wasn’t known by his super hero name because his power wasn’t flashy or very useful in battle - Doug was genetically gifted with the ability to understand languages.

This amazing ability to learn languages (along with numbers, dates, etc.) is something you can find in real life, often linked with disabling autism.  Often, but not always.  Watch the video to see the life of Daniel Tammet, the boy with the incredible brain.

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So, a few years back when Lost first aired, I didn’t care. I am not much of a TV watcher and so I don’t believe that I even knew it existed until someone else (a friend) told me that it was possibly the “Best Show Ever”. Mind you, I am currently using that previous term in the most loosest and quote-like sense possible. I was told this “quote” back right before the second season was due to air and required upon my friendship with said quoter to watch the entire first season so that I could become a member of her “Lost Circle”.

What can a girl like me do? I gave into the peer pressure because I want to be socially accepted by my peers and I have no life. In the course of five grueling days, I had watched all 26 forty-one minute long episodes of the first season. Five days. Get that through your head. Five days of nothing but watching Lost. Let’s calculate the amount of time i spent on watching Lost in five days:

-the entire watching period covered 1066 minutes

-that means it was 17.76 hours of pure entertainment pleasure

-I watched (on average) 5.2 confusing and beguiling episodes a day

That’s a lot of Lost. And, honestly, I loved it. I hate sitcomy shit. I don’t like the generic comedy shows. I like me some cartoons and some funny weird stuff and I loved me some Lost. Please note the past-tenseness of the last statement.

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In case you’ve been living under a rock or are one of those annoying people who say they don’t watch TV because its a waste of time (by the way pop culture just called and said fuck you), you’ve heard about the new TV show on NBC Heroes. So far it is only 3 episodes into its season and already it is the highest rated new show on network TV. This goes to show that interesting shows with creative plots and characters can be successful in today mass media society wheren people are constantly bombarded by different types of entertainment. This also goes to show that NBC’s new policy to only have reality shows and game shows in the 8 pm time slot is stupid. True Heroes is in the 9pm time slot but will people really be tuning in earlier to watch some shitty game show where people pick yes or no. Maybe NBC should focus on making for good TV shows then putting out cheap crap to get people to watch their network. Unless the game show is a real life Running Man, I don’t think that the world needs another game show brought over from Europe. So be sure and watch Heroes, unless your one of those lame people who would rather do something outside in which case go fuck a tree.