Where’s Nico?

I’m not one to watch super hero movies.  They’re just not my thing.  I’ve seen a few over the years and get the idea, but it all seems so unrealistic.  Kristen and I were discussing Spiderman this week, and if the guy was truly like a spider, we realized he should be shooting those webs out of his butt, not his wrists.

I always found it strange that these people had mutated to have some new skill and that made them a super hero – they could fly or shoot lasers out of their eyes or have big metal claws pop out of the back of their hands or whatever.  But in this super hero world where there’s that much variability in the ol’ DNA, where people are born with these capabilities that turned out pretty cool for them, wouldn’t there also be people born with really useless or impractical skills?  I mean, if someone evolved to shoot lasers out of their eyes, couldn’t someone else have been born with the ability to flatulate lasers?  Maybe these things happen in the Marvel Universe, but those kids don’t tend to last in the gene pool too long.  Anyway, I figured I’d list out some super powers that, well maybe they wouldn’t be the worst, but they would not be so great:

The ability to go through solid objects sometimes

It seems like there are some super heroes who can go through walls like a ghost – the wall isn’t damaged and they show up on the other side.  I think it would be bad to have that super power, but where it didn’t consistently work.  It worked sometimes, so you’d definitely be tempted to try it, but then you’d get overconfident and then all the sudden when it fails, you’re going to knock yourself silly against an I-beam.  For that matter, what if it wasn’t just walls – what if sometimes you could pass through floors unexpectedly?  You’d walk into a different room, and then suddenly find yourself falling down to the basement.  It would be chaos – you’d spend your whole life walking around like you were worried about landmines all around you.

Ability to briefly be invisible

A lot of my thoughts as I considered this topic were that it would be bad to have these super powers if they only worked for brief stints.  For example, it’d really be bad to be able to fly if your body pooped out after a few minutes and you just fell to the ground at that point.  Invisibility would have some similar challenges.  First off, I presume that your clothes wouldn’t magically be invisible just because you are, so you’d have to strip down to your birthday suit any time you tried to show this trick off at a party.  That would be super embarrassing if you didn’t know how long you could maintain your invisibility.  On top of that, what if you had say, some crowns on your teeth or an organ transplant or something, and those weren’t invisible?  So all the sudden you see a guy turn invisible, and drop all his clothes, only to see this floating lung.

The wrong wings

So some superheroes have these awesome huge angel wings, but what if instead, you were born with the wings of a flightless bird, like a penguin or an emu?  Then people would see these wings and ask if you could take them for a ride, and you’d have to say “uh, I’d really love to but… wrong wings”.  You’d constantly be seeing disappointment in everyone’s faces.  For that matter, what if you inherited an avian quality other than wings?  It would stink to not score the wings, but still be stuck with those awkward backwards-knee legs, or a tail in your way every time you tried to sit on the toilet.  Or, this would stink – what if all you got was the beak and that red floppy thing from a rooster and nothing else?

A poorly calibrated ability to teleport

I was also thinking about a poorly calibrated ability to time travel here – where you could go to a different time but had no idea where or when you were going.  Or where you could time travel, but only to the day where you had to go to school the morning after you got your braces. 

But that didn’t seem as disturbing as a poorly calibrated ability to teleport.  Teleporting would be where you are in one spot, and then poof, you appear somewhere else instead.  But if you weren’t very specific about where you’d show up next, you could have real problems.  You could teleport to somewhere without a floor right below you and constantly end up falling (falling seemed to be a common concern of mine in this exercise).  Or you could teleport a little too low and find your feet suddenly intermeshed with the floor, which would have to really hurt.

Ability to read minds, but only of cats

This would be awful.  I’m a dog person, so I’ll admit to some bias here.  Reading minds may be interesting on some levels, but I feel like if you could read a cat’s mind, it wouldn’t leave you any happier.  Basically, most cats seem to just radiate hatred a lot of the time.  You’d look over at a cat, and be bombarded by inner voices in your head pestering you, something like “What are you staring at?  Just be glad I don’t have opposable thumbs or I would find a steak knife and gut you in your sleep tonight.  By the way, you’re late bringing my dinner, dummy.”  It would be brutal on your self-esteem.  To be fair, being able to read a dog’s mind wouldn’t be much better.  We all pretty much already have that ability just looking at these goofy creatures, because they wear their emotions on their faces, ears and tails.  “Can I have food?  Oh, never mind – I’ll just lick my own butt.”  You’d be bombarded with super inane commentary in your head all day.

– Ken 5/5/2024