You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  Not to mention the fact that every single conversation and interaction with his parents will be based on a history he has utterly no memory of. How long until they push to have Marty institutionalized, since every memory from his childhood is from some bizarre alternate reality that no one else shares?

  On top of all that, while the movie wants us to cheer Biff becoming a menial laborer for the McFlys as a nice bit of karmic comeuppance, we can’t help but think that it’s a bad idea to give a house key to the guy who once tried to rape your wife.

  But hey, at least Marty got a cool truck out of the deal.

  5. RETURN OF THE JEDI

  The “happy” ending

  The evil emperor Palpatine hatches a plan to defeat the Rebel Alliance once and for all by giving them the location of his unfinished superweapon and detailing how to defeat it. This plan goes about as well as you would expect. Our heroes destroy the weapon and kill the Galactic Empire’s two leaders with the help of some genocidal teddy bears called Ewoks.

  Wait a minute …

  That epic battle at the end? That only destroyed one base and a fraction of the troops the empire had at its disposal. The Death Star was taken out, just like it was two films before, but that didn’t exactly stop them last time. Sure, Vader and the emperor were both blown up, but that wouldn’t destroy the empire any more than blowing up the Pentagon would dissolve the United States.

  What it does create is what’s known in international politics as a power vacuum. Return of the Jedi leaves the galaxy with fleets of star destroyers and no coherent power structure to control them. Throw in roving gangs of pissed-off troops desperate for money after their paychecks went up in flames with the Death Star, and you start to realize how bad shit’s about to get.

  Soon these power-hungry military officers would form factions and destroy entire planets in their brutal attempts to seize power. Eventually, Palpatine would simply be replaced by a new emperor, possibly even one competent enough to devise a plan that can’t be foiled by developmentally stunted bears throwing rocks.

  4. SUPERMAN RETURNS

  The “happy” ending

  Lex Luthor fails to kill Superman by stabbing him with kryptonite and leaving him in a shallow pool of water, and Superman stops Luthor’s evil plan in a thrilling action scene that consists of Superman holding stuff over his head.

  Having saved the world again, Superman says good-bye to his son and flies into space.

  Wait a minute …

  And by “says good-bye to his son,” we mean he abandons his crippled, illegitimate son for the second time.

  The whole setup of Superman Returns centers on earth’s greatest hero knocking up his girlfriend and then skipping town for five years. While he was gone, the combination of human and alien DNA resulted in the child becoming weak and sickly, with Lois mentioning that the child was failing gym class. (What kind of PE teacher fails a five-year-old for having asthma?)

  So how does our hero respond when he returns and learns about his son? By breaking into the kid’s bedroom, telling him “good luck with the whole outcast thing, kiddo,” and leaving him alone. Again. So we’re left with a kid with:

  1. superpowers,

  2. gross genetic defects,

  3. good reason to hate Superman.

  It doesn’t take an evil genius to see the supervillain potential, and you know what? If he takes on Superman, we’re rooting for the kid.

  3. JACK

  The “happy” ending

  Robin Williams plays the titular character, an elementary school child trapped in the body of a middle-age man. By the film’s end, Jack’s formerly intolerant classmates learn to love and accept him for the horrifying genetic aberration he is.

  Wait a minute …

  All this just makes it even sadder that Jack won’t live to see college.

  There’s a reason why in other “kid becomes an adult” films the transformation is brought on by some fantasy element. In Jack, the main character is instead said to have a rare genetic condition that causes him to age four times faster than normal.

  Now, the problem with this is that it strongly resembles an actual medical condition known as progeria. And, sadly, most people afflicted by this disease don’t live past age thirteen, as you’d expect for a disease that makes you age really, really fast.

  Jack won’t get the ending Tom Hanks got in Big, where he magically shrinks back into a child and gets to live out his life as the only twelve-year-old who knows how to make love to a grown woman. Jack, meanwhile, will be walking with a cane by high school. The only way he’s getting laid is if he lives long enough to see the invention of Viagra.

  2. THE MATRIX TRILOGY

  The “happy” ending

  Thanks to the triumph of human will and several baffling plot contrivances, Neo sacrifices himself and convinces the machines who are enslaving humanity to not enslave humanity quite so much.

  The machines send their Colonel Sanders avatar to announce that any humans who want to be freed from the Matrix will be allowed to do so.

  Wait a minute …

  Hey, remember in the first movie where they said they don’t pull adults out of the Matrix? Because finding out that every experience they ever had was false and that the real world is a frozen wasteland destroys their mind?

  Well, in this new world the whole “all of society is a computer-generated hoax” thing isn’t going to stay a secret for long. How do you think society would react to finding that out? How would major religions react?

  Why would anyone go to work after that? How do you think starving third-world nations would regard their machine masters, knowing that their misery is purely the invention of the machines and that the Matrix could have rained food down from the sky any time it wanted?

  The world would descend into utter chaos. Luckily, the people can escape the madness anytime they want by exiting the Matrix!

  Oh, wait, they can’t. In the real world outside the Matrix, the one city where people could live has been devastated by the robot attack, and there is nothing close to enough housing, food, clothing, fresh water, or anything else to accommodate even a small country.

  Hey, thanks for waking us up, asshole!

  1. TOY STORY 3

  The “happy” ending

  Woody, Buzz, and most of our favorites from Toy Story 1 and 2 narrowly escape a freaky daycare full of creepy, manipulative toys and dangerous, thoughtless brats. Our heroes return home and Andy, before leaving for college, donates the gang to a little girl named Bonnie, ensuring the toys a carefree future of playing with a sweet and lovable girl forever and ever!

  Wait a minute …

  Until Bonnie throws them away.

  The toys don’t age along with their human owners. Sure, Andy was kind enough to donate them to a little girl, but who knows what’ll happen when she grows up? The best-case scenario is that Bonnie keeps them around long enough for them to watch her die of old age.

  Of course, unless Bonnie suffers some sort of head trauma, she’ll be interested for another few years max. Hell, Little Bo Peep never even made it to Toy Story 3. It’s far more likely that they’ll eventually wind up at the bottom of a rotting compost heap, sandwiched between an empty pizza box and a copy of ASS! Magazine. At least the hellish trash incinerator we see in Toy Story 3 offers a quick way out.

  With a fate like that in store, it’s no wonder 90 percent of all fiction involving sentient dolls ends with them trying to kill their owners.

  FIVE FAMOUS INVENTORS WHO STOLE THEIR BIG IDEA

  LUCKILY, we slept through high school, but we’ve got some bad news for those of you unfortunate enough to have stayed awake: Every brilliant inventor you’ve ever loved is a huge thieving asshole.

  5. GALILEO GALILEI

  If you asked the average high schooler what Galileo’s lasting contribution to science was, they would most likely reply, “The telescope,” before going off to smoke some grass and listen to Bon Jovi records (hey, we were in
high school once too, you know). Well, imaginary high school student, put down that Atari and prepare to have your mind blown: Galileo did not invent the telescope. (Also, if you start Slippery When Wet and The Wizard of Oz at the same time, it sort of looks like the Tin Man is lip-synching for about two seconds of “Livin’ on a Prayer.”)

  Who actually invented it?

  Lots of scientists were looking up at the stars back then, but no one was doing it quite as hard as Dutchman Hans Lippershey. In 1608, Lippershey completed construction of the first telescope and attempted to receive a patent for it but was denied.

  A few countries over, when Galileo heard about Lippershey’s work in 1609, he quickly built his own telescope, one that could see just a little bit farther than Lippershey’s. Necessary? Not particularly. Emasculating? Oh, you betcha. While Galileo never registered a patent, the fact remains that his name is synonymous with telescopes, while Lippershey’s name was quickly forgotten.

  The lesson, as always, is that having an unwieldy, nonalliterative name that sounds like an STD is never good for your career.

  4. ALEXANDER FLEMING

  Sir Alexander Fleming is the name people think of when penicillin is brought up. There’s even a charming little story that accompanies it: Fleming’s father saved a little boy from drowning in Scotland, and the father of this boy vowed to fund the young Fleming’s education to repay the kindness. Eventually, Fleming graduated from med school and discovered the healing nature of penicillin, which eventually saved Winston Churchill’s life when he was stricken with pneumonia. And who was the boy that Fleming’s father saved? Winston goddamned Churchill.

  Two things. One, Churchill wasn’t treated with penicillin. Two, Fleming wasn’t the guy who discovered it. Just some asshole.

  Who actually discovered it?

  North African tribesmen had been using penicillin for thousands of years by the time Fleming was born. Also, in 1897 Ernest Duchesne used the mold Penicillum glaucoma to cure typhoid in guinea pigs, which was about the stupidest waste of time in the history of science but still proof that he understood the mold’s healing properties.

  Other scientists at the time didn’t take him seriously, due to his age and strange preoccupation with guinea pigs, so he never received a patent. He died about ten years later, from a disease that would have been completely treatable with penicillin, and he was survived by his healthy, yet totally indifferent, guinea pigs.

  Even when Fleming did accidentally discover penicillin years later, he didn’t think it could be used to help anyone, so he moved on. Meanwhile, scientists Howard Florey, Norman Heatley, Andrew Moyer, and Ernst Chain disagreed and worked with penicillin until they’d mastered it.

  So even though Fleming wasn’t the first person to discover penicillin and didn’t actually believe penicillin was useful, he will forever go down in history as a penicillin-inventing, Winston Churchill-saving genius.

  3. ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

  For being the man behind the telephone, Bell sure loved deaf people. His wife was deaf, his mother was deaf, and he was even Helen Keller’s favorite teacher. With this near obsession with deaf people, it’s amazing that Bell found time to invent the telephone. Wait, not amazing. Impossible. That’s the one.

  Who actually invented it?

  In 1860, an Italian named Antonio Meucci first demonstrated his working telephone (though he called it the teletrofono, because Italian is a ridiculous language). In 1871, he filed a temporary patent, but in 1874 he failed to send in the ten dollars necessary to renew his patent, because he was sick, poor, and Italian.

  Two years later, Bell registered his telephone patent. Meucci attempted to sue, of course, but when he tried to retrieve the original sketches and plans he sent to a lab at Western Union, the records, amazingly, had disappeared. Where was Bell working at this time? The very same Western Union lab where Meucci swore he sent his original sketches.

  Did Bell, given his convenient position at Western Union, destroy Meucci’s records and claim the telephone as his own invention? It’s difficult to say, though it has been argued fairly convincingly that, yes, of course he did. Absolutely. Most notably, by us just now. It makes sense, if you look at the facts: Bell already had a number of important inventions under his belt; it isn’t unreasonable to assume that he got greedy and didn’t want to see anyone else succeed. Further, who is Bell even calling? His deaf wife and mother? Bullshit.

  2. ALBERT EINSTEIN

  When you hear the name Einstein, you undoubtedly think, “He discovered relativity,” or “He came up with that E = mc2 equation,” or “He was a sex maniac.” Only one of those things is true. (It’s the sex maniac part.)

  Who actually invented it?

  Henri Poincare was the foremost expert on relativity in the late nineteenth century, having published thirty respected books and over five hundred papers on the subject, which is strange, because Einstein’s famous On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which contains his theories on relativity, doesn’t mention Poincare once. As a matter of fact, Einstein does not reference, footnote, or cite a single goddamn source in his entire paper.

  We don’t want to jump to any conclusions. Maybe Einstein’s paper didn’t contain any sources because he was so smart he didn’t need any other current physics texts. But according to Peter Galison’s Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time, Einstein and a small group of his fellow nerdlings had a group called the Olympia Academy, which would regularly gather to discuss their own works as well as the works of current scientists. The book goes on to mention specifically how Poincare was one of the scientists who Einstein and his battalion of nerds discussed.

  Shoots that whole “maybe Einstein didn’t read any other papers” theory right to shit, doesn’t it? It’s interesting that Einstein sat studying and discussing the work of Poincare for years, published a book that featured a theory that was startlingly similar to Poincare’s, and then didn’t reference Poincare once in his book. Wait, that isn’t interesting; it’s total bullshit. Good luck sexing your way out of this one, Einstein.

  1. THOMAS EDISON

  Edison has been described as one of the “world’s most prolific inventors,” with 1,093 patents to his name. You know, a guy could round up and kidnap a shitload of children and keep them forever, but would you call that guy the “world’s most prolific father”? No, of course not. A “soulless monster,” maybe. A “skilled thief,” if you’re being generous, but you wouldn’t call that guy “the world’s most prolific father,” because those aren’t his kids. He stole them. Such is the case with Thomas Edison.

  Edison is celebrated in schools across the country for inventing the lightbulb, the motion picture, electricity, and a bunch of other important crap he had very little to do with, and while all of those claims are spurious, we’re just going to focus on the lightbulb today (we’ve only got 320 pages, you understand).

  Who actually invented it?

  Plenty of people messed around with the idea of the lightbulb (Jean Foucault, Humphry Davy, J. W. Starr, some other guys you’ll never read about in school), but Heinrich Gobel was likely the first person to have actually created, back in 1854, a version of the lightbulb that resembled the one we have today. He tried selling it to Edison, who saw no practical use in it and refused. Soon after Gobel died, Edison bought Gobel’s “meritless” patent off Gobel’s impoverished widow at a cost much lower than its worth.

  Screwing over just one inventor might be all right for Galileo, but Edison was a dreamer. A year before Edison “invented” his lightbulb, Joseph Wilson Swan developed and patented a better bulb. When it became clear Edison’s “this guy Swan’s a lying asshole” defense wouldn’t hold up in court, he made Swan a partner, forming the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company (known as Ediswan), effectively buying Swan.

  Thomas Edison: Father of the goddamned lightbulb.

  Edison then used his incredible wealth to buy out Swan completely, leaving all records of the lightbu
lb under the care of the Edison Electric Light Company. Sure, Swan got rich in the end, but Edison purchased the right to claim he invented the lightbulb. Of course, there’s a whole laundry list of inventors Edison stepped on, bullied, exploited, or convinced to name their price. But what do textbooks say about him?

  THE FIVE MOST FREQUENTLY QUOTED BULLSHIT STATISTICS

  EVERY once in a while, we hear a statistic so startling we can’t believe it’s true. Our first impulse is to repeat it, because knowing interesting things tends to make people like us better. That’s why facts tend to survive based on how interesting they are, rather than whether they’re true.

  The five most quoted “too awesome to be true” stats that are as fake as they sound:

  5. YOU ONLY USE 10 PERCENT OF YOUR BRAIN

  You’ve heard it since you were a child: We only use 10 percent of our brain. Just think what we’d be capable of if we could tap into the rest! It’s appealing because it means that if we worked hard enough, we’d be able to set fires with the power of our minds.

  Why is it a load of crap?

  The parts of the brain are specialized, so trying to use all of it at once isn’t going to make you smarter, just more confused. That’s like trying to become a better writer by using every key on your keyboard all at once.

  A series of neurologists over the past few hundred years figured out that a human can survive when parts of the brain are removed, which over time was misinterpreted to mean that the brain uses little of its potential, and the 10 percent statistic was born.

  Who was fooled?

  Not only do people still believe it, in 2006 Psychology Today even ran an article on how to access the lazy 90 percent of your gray matter.