Wolf Gnards

Scientific Illustration of Tachyon Particle

By far my favorite bit of Sci-fi voodoo… a little deus ex tachyon particles. Meaning when in doubt throw in some tachyons. Are you a screen writer, and have you written yourself into a corner? No need to fear, tachyon particles are here. Call it a MacGuffin, call it technobabble, call it anything you want, the tachyon is your way out. What can a tachyon do, you ask? What can’t they do? Spilled some red wine? Tachyons and club soda will get that right out. Killer shark off the coast? Explode some tachyons in its jaws. Have a friend trapped behind enemy lines? Give that tachyon a gun?

What is a Tachyon?

A tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that move faster than the speed of light. Unlike ordinary particles (bread crumbs, Legos, and such), a tachyon’s speed increases when energy decreases, which means once set in motion the tachyon particle would keep moving on and on, faster and faster. Being a subatomic particle also means it’s much smaller than your average Lego, making a tachyon not particularly useful for travel. In science fiction and hypothetical theory, tachyons are used for transporting not people, but data, mostly for interstellar communication. However, if tachyons are used to “phone home” you run into a slight dilemma known as the “Tachyon Telephone Paradox.”

The Tachyon Telephone Paradox

Faster than light communication sounds awfully cool, but there’s a hitch: the tachyon telephone paradox. If you use tachyon particles to place a phone call (sometimes called the tachyonic anti-telephone), you’ll end up sending the call before you actually make the call. This is home it works, as an object approaches the speed of light, time actually slows down, and once a object actually passes the speed of light (which a Tachyon would eventually do), time moves backwards. So, your call would actually arrive to your outpost or destroyer fleet before you actually even made the call. Is this why my iPhone drops so many calls?

A nice disembodied head represent all that mankind hopes to aspire to. This is life everlasting. For a head. A giant head harkens back to birth as in an oversized baby’s head—big and full of life—but simultaneously it represents all that can be known for surely a living head is filled with knowledge. Innocence and wisdom, magic and science. And severed heads are just fun for the whole family.

Here are some the top disembodied heads, be they floating or giant or both.

Chesire Cat

Alice in Wonderland’s Chesire Cat possesses undefined and potentially unlimited powers that include invisibility, transmogrification, and teleportation. He’s kind of like Firestorm or Houdini, but more kittenish. In fact, like most kittens the Chesire Cat has evil running through his veins, but the adorable kind of evil. Chesire Cat’s greatest ability though is his complete immunity to head offing, because how can you off with his head someone without a body?

King of the Moon

Combine Terry Gilliam’s native strangeness with an unlimited bloated budget and Robin Williams with an unlimited supply of cocaine and what you have is the King of the Moon. The King of the Moon from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a gigantic head that attaches to a body through matching plates and can fly off into space like a pop top. The King of the Moon separated himself from his body to keep his intellect away from the body’s baser more sexual needs.

Wilson

Wilson is perhaps the greatest actor of our time. Wilson is one of the biggest grossing volleyballs of all time. I liked that Wilson had actual lines written for him in the script fro Cast Away, but I hated hearing that Robert Zemeckis read the lines out as they shot. Can’t you just let Wilson do it himself? I think it takes away from what Wilson was able to do on screen. That’s like hearing that Gollum or Yoda wasn’t real.

The Head of Richard Nixon

Of all of Futurama’s heads in jars (God bless you Ron Popeil), Nixon is perhaps the greatest head of all. Not only had Nixon not been in office for 40 plus years when Fururama was made, but he had been dead for nearly 10 years when it first ran. Originally just another head in the illustrious Hall of Presidents, Nixon’s head would go on to become President of the Earth and start intergalactic wars with just about every alien race available. Billy West described the voice he used as not an imitation of Nixon, but of Anthony Hopkins’s imitation of Nixon with “a little bit of werewolf,” thrown in.

Sinistar

Tons of video games have featured various floating heads in space be it floating Medusa head or some sort of alien zombie super being. Perhaps, heads in video games started with the classic goomba, which are little more than walking mushroom heads just waiting to be stomped on by Mario’s heavy work boots. Or way back to Pac-man himself—a pizza shaped head that eats cherries and ghosts. Sinistar, though, is the standard in video game heads. Sinistar is a giant robot skeleton head that eats spaceships and shouts about Ron Howard. Beware, I live!

How do you judge a man? By the awesomeness of his business cards, of course. My new promo cards just came in and just in time for San Diego Comic Con. I’m no Patrick Bateman, but these are some fine cards: truly the business cards of a scholar and gentleman. Notice the Gnard craftsman.

If you’re going to be in San Diego this week, you just might be able to get your hands on one of these bad boys yourself. If you do manage to get yourself a Wolf Gnards card, I suggest you put it in a safety deposit box immediately because it can only go up in value… like my Star Trek collectible plates. Try to collect all the Wolf Gnards cards, it shouldn’t be too hard because there’s only the one.

Although, this guy thinks they’re crap…

27b/6 is probably one of the funniest blogs I’ve ever come across. Which begs the question, why are you still here when you could be there? I could not stop laughing at his lost kitten posters.

I’m jealous of his 27b/6’s charts, but as always Dee Dee Supreme was there to cheer me up. She said, “Of course, his are better, he’s a professional graphic designer. I like yours, your graphs are charming like a sweetly retarded boy.”

Elsewhere on the Internet

19 Things You Don’t Know About Star Wars. You can gauge your geek by how many you knew. Me: 17.

Your Jacket is Now Dry.

An even Cooler Jacket (if cooler means geekier [and on this website it does]).

Or Don’t Mess with Small Asians

I’ve already talked at lengths about Data and Rufio, so I feel I must compete the trinity with Mr. Ernest Reyes, Jr. Together they form Voltron: Defen… no, that’s not right, though it would be awesome. Of the Asian actors of the 80’s and 90’s these three were always at the top of the list. If you needed bad gadgets and baseball cap wearing, it was Jonathan Ke Quan. If you needed a little bangarang, look no further than Danté Basco. But if you needed someone who was small and could kick ass, there was only one choice: Ernie Reyes, Jr. For the younger generation, Ernie Reyes, Jr. is probably best known for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. Reyes also starred in Red Sonja, Sidekicks (TV series), and Surf Ninjas, which also costarred Rob Schneider who is neither believable as A) a surfer, B) a ninja, or C) a human being. He more recently hosted MTV’s Final Fu and performed stunts in movies like The Rundown and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. However, those of us with sense and good taste will best remember Ernie from The Last Dragon. Sho’Nuff!

Let us go back to a simpler time when DeBarge was topping the Billboard charts (Who’s DeBarge?) and Berry Gordy produced bad martial arts flicks. Let us bow our heads and remember The Last Dragon. As you recall, Bruce Leeroy was ambushed by cartoonish mercenaries (there’s, at least, one Mongolian warrior) at a disco while trying to rescue his veejay girlfriend. I wish I was making this up, but this is in fact the plot of the movie. When all seems lost his Kung Fu students suddenly come to the rescue (about 50 more than were in his actual class), and before this scene none of them actually knew Kung Fu (Bruce Leeroy only taught poorly acted Confucius sayings)–since his students are mostly Asian, however, it’s assumed that karate is in their DNA. Then Ernie Reyes, Jr. happens and the whole movie gets better. Other things not to overlook in the scene: Bruce Leeroy’s brother using break dancing to escape ropes and fat, albino Mr. T (the very worst kind of Mr. T). Enjoy…

The greatest thing about Ernie Reyes, Jr. was he could actually fight; he has trained in Taekwondo since he was four. Which in turned saved me from ever having to actually fight myself growing up because of the off chance that I would suddenly unleash insane martial arts moves. Nobody wants to get beat up by a small Asian kid, so it’s best to stay away from them unless you know for sure that they are not finely tuned killing machines.

5 Problems with the Comic Industry

I’ve been a lifetime fan of comic books, and while I do believe comic books are one of the most under appreciated art forms, they are not without their problems. The reason comic books do not have a higher place in society are largely because of errors of their own accord. These are just a few of the problems that keep comic books from reaching their full potential.

The Multiverse

I’m just not a fan, I guess I’m a one universe kind of guy. The multiverse to me is the ultimate example of covering bad writing with more bad writing. The overuse of the mulitverse is a big problem with DC Comics in particular. Just thinking about Crisis on Infinite Earths, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Crisis Crisis, Crisis of the Stars, Crisis in the Crisis: The Final Infinitude, all make me want to tear my eyes out. The problem with DC is that they give their writers almost free reign over their titles (Marvel writers are kept on very short leash), the results are some great comics and many continuity errors. After a while so many continuity errors start to pile up that the DC universe becomes unmanageable, and time for a little spring cleaning, which brings us to the multiverse. Instead of correcting problems with good story telling, they choose a convenient magic wand approach. Basically, every comic book is part of some multiple DC universe, and after a nice convoluted miniseries, all these universes get parred down into one universe. Poof, story fixed. But, of course, a couple of years later they always have to wave the magic wand again.

Variant Covers

Specialty variant covers and gimmicks represent a time in comic books when the corporate machine was at its peak, it’s the decadence of Rome combined with 80’s consumerism. The 70’s and 80’s brought countless comic book tie-in’s: comic books that created toys and toys that created comic books. However, merchandising was one thing, but the idea of the variant cover was to create a market value for comics. This is when comic books stopped being for kids, or even 30-year-old fanboys, or readers in general, but for an investor. Oh no, these comic books weren’t meant to be read, they were an investment for the future. Rare comics have values, not simply just because of limited editions and hologram covers, but because a story resonated with readers that coincided with that particular comics availability. Just making it rare doesn’t matter, it has to be worth reading, too.