by Red Green
Joe Shuster
Credit 64
Joe Shuster was born in Toronto on July 10, 1914. Cousin to Frank Shuster of the comedy team of Wayne and Shuster, Joe grew up in Toronto, which is the model he used for Superman’s fictional city, Metropolis. Later, Joe moved to Cleveland and met Jerry Siegel. The two guys worked together to create the Superman character. So Superman is (kind of) Canadian, which explains why he’s so polite. On the other hand, Wonder Woman is American. Somebody should do a movie where they get married and argue about which side of Niagara Falls to spend their honeymoon on. Or not.
I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but I gotta believe Superman is the most famous superhero in North America. As a kid, I used to read Superman comics written and illustrated by Shuster and Siegel. I can remember seeing their names on the cover. Comics were popular with kids way back then. They were in colour when TV was still black and white. In fact, our first TV was green and white. But even so, my strongest memories of the character are from watching the original Superman television series starring George Reeves.
I don’t know if it was because I was a kid or because society was different back then, but we never questioned anything. We just accepted whatever anyone did or said. Looking back at it now, I see a lot of problems with Superman’s character and habits.
Let’s start with his glasses. Everybody who worked at the Daily Planet knew that Clark Kent was a good friend of Superman’s, but it never occurred to them that he was Superman. Yes, it was partly the suit, but the main way he disguised himself was by putting on glasses. And nobody ever caught on. He had the same build as Superman, the same head, the same hair, the same face, but once those glasses went on, it was a whole new ball game.
Wanted criminals spend thousands of dollars on plastic surgery and hair transplants and who knows what, all so that nobody will ever recognize them. Apparently, all they had to do was put on a pair of glasses.
The next black hole of logic was the phone-booth change room. Whenever there was trouble, Clark Kent would zip into a phone booth and change into Superman. He’d step in as Clark, wearing glasses and a suit and tie, and come out as Superman, with no glasses but with blue tights highlighting his big S. Some of you out there may have never seen a phone booth, but I can tell you they had windows, top to bottom, on all four sides. If there was a guy in there taking his pants off, somebody’s gonna be calling the cops.
Next issue, what did Superman do with Clark’s clothes? He never came out of the phone booth with them. Were they just piled on the floor in the corner? His suit? His shoes? His socks? His keys? What about his wallet? Superman never came out with a wallet—everybody would have noticed the bulge in his tights. What happened to that stuff? Did Superman go back for it? I doubt it. Nobody paid attention when Clark stepped into a phone booth and came out as Superman, but the other way around would have drawn a crowd for sure.
My guess is that Superman just abandoned those clothes. That means Clark Kent was going through at least one suit a week. Pretty tough on a newspaper reporter’s salary. One more lingering question for me: Where was the red cape? When Clark was dressed in his suit with the Superman outfit underneath, where was the cape? Tucked down into the back of his pants? Sitting in a roll on top of his shoulders? Wouldn’t that give him a hump? It had to be in there somewhere, but where? So many mysteries.
Then there were his superpowers. “Faster than a speeding bullet.” “Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.” Now hang on a minute. If a guy is faster than a speeding bullet, why would he ever need to leap tall buildings? Way faster to just run around them. And why would he have to bound at all? Flying, sure, I can see the value in that, but bounding is pretty useless.
And of course, Superman was bulletproof. Every show, some bad guy would shoot at him. (Always in the chest, for some reason. If I was a bad guy, I would see if a bullet would bounce off Supe’s forehead.) Then, after all six bullets had bounced off him, the bad guy would throw the gun at Superman. Hey buddy, if the bullets didn’t work…Just saying.
And then there’s the X-ray vision. That was a pretty edgy superpower. Every teenaged boy in America would have some fun with that one. I don’t think too many women wear lead underwear. Although in the ’50s, they came close.
I have to say, though, that the addition of kryptonite was brilliant. Superman having an Achilles heel was a stroke of genius that allowed the bad guys to temporarily get the upper hand. I’m not exactly sure how they got their hands on kryptonite. I’ve never seen it on eBay. But it was another one of those things we just accepted.
And there’s the whole role model issue—“fighting for truth, justice and the American way.” Superman was presented as having a moral code as high as the buildings he could bound over. The kind of person every boy would want to grow up to be like. Well, let’s take a closer look. You’ve got a guy in his mid-thirties who’s not married, no kids, doesn’t have a girlfriend, makes hardly any money and lives alone in some apartment that was so bad they never showed it on TV. If it wasn’t for the flying, bounding and citizen’s arrests, this guy would just be another loser with X-ray vision.
The other characters didn’t come off much better. Lois Lane was in love with Superman. Where did she think that relationship was going? Was she hoping to marry him one day and have a houseful of superkids? It’s hard to find a house with a lead-lined bathroom. But Lois never smartened up. And neither did we.
And over and over again, Jimmy Olsen sent out the message that you can be breathtakingly stupid, but as long as you’re affable you will always have a job. In my experience, the only other guy who’s been able to pull that one off is me.
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Superman didn’t really become Superman until Joe Shuster went to the States and teamed up with Jerry Siegel. Superman feels to me more like an American than a Canadian.
Makes you wonder how the character would have been different if Shuster had stayed in Canada and made his character more Canadian. For starters, he’d probably be called Averageman—a little shy, a good guy who just wanted a normal life and was really, really polite in both official languages. The iconic image would be of him standing in line at a Tim Hortons with his hands in the pockets of an off-the-rack snowmobile suit with a lower case a (pronounced “eh”) embroidered on the chest.
Instead of taking his glasses off before a fight, he’d put them on so nobody would take a swing at him. He would have X-ray vision, but would never use it because it’s none of his business. His other superpowers would have been humility, empathy and the ability to apologize faster than the Avro Arrow.
Even though he was pretty strong and smart in reality, Averageman would pretend to be weaker and dumber so as not to make the other guy feel bad. That would be his default position for dealing with confrontation and negotiating international trade deals. His only weakness would be the Canadian dollar, and even when he had to beat the bad guys, there was always the risk that he would get killed on the exchange rate.
To find out how you married guys can be superheroes, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Superhero.”
Television was invented by a whole whack of people in the early twentieth century. They all knew there’d be a zillion advantages to anything that could transmit both sound and moving pictures. What a great way to share news, sports, entertainment—and reality shows. Up until the invention of television, families gathered on their couches in the evening, staring at a blank wall. Television been called a “vast wasteland,” but today it provides a huge range of things to watch. It’s up to the viewer to decide.
People like choice. There’s a reason Baskin and Robbins has thirty-one flavours. Some television is an important eye on the world. Some is just filler. You choose. I’m not exactly sure where my show fit in, but we used to promote it by saying, “When you’ve already wasted most of your life, what’s another half-hour?”
RATING: Nope. Ha ha, fooled ya. But the real deal is coming up.
Last chance to take a guess.
AND THE WINNER IS (on this page) Credit 65
SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING
Synchronized Swimming
Peggy Seller, First Lady of Synchronized Swimming Credit 66
Peggy Seller was the driving force behind the creation of synchronized swimming as the sport we know today. Or at least some of us know today. Or at least some of you know today.
A really good swimmer herself and a respected member of the Royal Life Saving Society, Peggy not only wrote the rules for the first provincial championship, but she also won the event easily. I’m sure that’s a coincidence. It was held in 1924 at the YWCA in Montreal. The very next year, it became a national event, and Peg went on to win four straight national championships. Four more coincidences.
Over the next fifty years she worked really hard to see the small sport grow in Canada and worldwide, writing and rewriting rule books (when she lost?), standardizing methods of judging competitions, forming various governing bodies and organizing demonstrations of the sport. She was really into this thing. This work culminated in 1984, when synchronized swimming was adopted as an official Olympic event. Peg was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1966. Some of the swimmers were late arriving to the ceremony, as they had synchronized their routines but not their watches.
Something’s not quite right about the above description. I’m sure it’s factual and accurate and all that, but it just seems odd to me that Ms. Seller is reported to be the winner of all of those events. It’s synchronized swimming. How can you win that on your own? Shouldn’t there be at least one other winner? Your partner, for example?
Or did Peggy leave a little loophole when she wrote the rules? A loophole that said if you had created the sport, you were allowed to compete alone? Peggy would be the only qualifier and would have a pretty good chance of winning. You can’t get more synchronized than that. I’m sure there’s a logical and correct explanation, but I like mine better.
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I guess the biggest challenge is the synchronization part. I can’t think of an animal less likely than human beings to do things exactly the same way. Bees, sure. Ants, yes. Lemmings, no doubt. But humans? We hardly ever do anything the same way twice on our own, much less do it the same way somebody else does. So when we do things exactly together, we are fighting our own nature. We gotta overcome our own unpredictability.
That’s a big ask. Unpredictability has always worked well for us. It makes it harder for wild animals to track us, and more important, it makes us more interesting to women. And for those of us who got cheated on the handsomeness quotient, more interesting is all we got. There’s also a tinge of redundancy to copying others. If I’m just gonna do what you do, why am I here? You don’t need two people to get the mail. And you sure don’t need two people in perfect step with matching arm motions to go and get the mail. That’ll just freak out the neighbours.
So the wonder of synchronized swimming—and for me there are plenty—is that these people have focused their skill and their training on becoming less human and more robotic. A living testament to the idea that “we’re all in this together.”
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The concept of synchronized swimming is kind of like a university study on what it’s like to live in a society. There are leaders and there are followers. The leaders see themselves as smart. They don’t pay attention to what the other people are doing. They set their own paths, make their own rules, march to the beat of a different drummer. The followers see themselves as stupid. They’re not smart enough to make any decision. They look for a leader and then do what they’re told. The leaders have power and fame and dignity.
The followers originally had none of those. Then slowly, over time, the followers began to add order to their following. Armies started marching in step, jet fighters started flying in formation, pipers and drummers began playing the same notes and rhythms while doing the same things with their hands and feet. Not to mention Riverdance. Synchronized swimming is just another form of the same behaviour. An activity that adds dignity and skill to the lowly art of being a follower.
It’s easy to just follow willy-nilly with no set pattern or boundaries. To follow by exactly mirroring what the leader is doing is really, really hard. Probably harder than leading. But still not difficult enough for Peggy, so she made people do it underwater.
In the early days, she probably should have called it synchronized drowning. So thank you, Peggy, for giving all of us followers something to be proud of. You have proven to the world that it’s better to be a perfect follower than an imperfect leader. But I still think you should have shared the trophy.
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No Possum Lodge member has ever participated in synchronized swimming, although Buster Hadfield says he dated twins one time.
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Local swimming enthusiast Becky Morecki won three Port Asbestos city championships before it was discovered that her partner was actually a strategically placed full-length mirror.
Rebecca Morecki Credit 67
THE THEORY OF NOTHING
Cecil Hodgkiss, Part-Time Philosopher/Full-Time Distributor of Advertising Flyers Credit 68
Historically, the Possum Lake area has always had a shortage of intellectuals. I blame a combination of heredity and logic. People aren’t usually smarter than their parents, and even by some fluke of nature when we did get a smart person, they tended to move away. So it made us all proud when the community labelled Cecil Hodgkiss as “the smart guy with the funny suits who handed out coupons at the liquor store.”
Cecil pretty much had an opinion on everything and came across as superior. A lot of it was his accent, which was either British or Australian or German—or maybe he was just always eating a hard candy when he spoke. He also talked really fast, like a car speeding down a bumpy road so that maybe it’d help him over the rough spots.
He usually was the centre of any discussion, because he could talk far longer than any normal person could listen. He had a lot of theories about science and history and women and had experienced quite a bit of all of them, except for women. He did
claim to have dated a sasquatch, but we all think it was Moose Thompson’s sister.
His big party-piece speech was what he called the Theory of Nothing. He started by separating the four categories of things—something, anything, everything and nothing. He had noticed that most people want something, some will settle for anything, a few had to have everything, and a very, very small number of people wanted nothing.
Cecil also noticed that this last group, the ones who wanted nothing, were the happiest and generally most satisfied with life. That got him to focus on the power of nothing and to make it the centrepiece of his argument. He said the world needed to have a reversal in definitions. The normal thinking was that the concept of nothing was seen as the absence of anything, just like darkness was seen as the absence of light.
Cecil wanted to switch those around. Light was the absence of darkness, and anything was the absence of nothing. He said it made “nothing” sound more important because it was saying the absence of it was a bad thing.
Cecil became a huge fan of nothing, and his income backed that up. He said that things wear out and break. Nothing doesn’t. “Nothing ever changes,” he would say and then give that wink that made people want to smack him into the middle of next week. He believed that nothing was important—or, as he put it, “Nothing matters,” but no wink this time. When people questioned his knowledge on the topic, Cecil would get mad and shout, “I know nothing!” And for anyone who was still listening—or still reading, in this case—Cecil would take his theory into the ionosphere. Beyond the ionosphere. Outer space, actually.
That was the head office of nothing. Space is made up mostly of nothing, and here’s the kicker: it’s infinite. Nothing is the only resource in the universe that we will never run out of. Shouldn’t we be working with that? Shouldn’t we be finding things to do with nothing?
> Let’s examine its properties. It has no atoms, no molecules, no gravity, no gases, no energy of any kind. That may seem hopeless to us, but not to Cecil, who also seems hopeless to us. Cecil decided what outer space—and, by definition, nothing—was best suited for: storage. A place to keep something or anything, or in fact, big enough to store everything. And it would never rot, spoil, age, rust, evaporate, fall over or roll away. It would all be frozen in time because, as Cecil would remind us, “Nothing lasts forever.”
At this point in his presentation, Cecil tried to expand the application to use the nothingness of outer space to quarantine diseases and keep his wife’s shoes, but by then the authorities had arrived and most of his speech was muffled by the straitjacket.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT AND BALDERDASH
Chris Haney and Scott Abbott
Credit 69
Chris Haney was born in Welland, Ontario, on August 9, 1950. He had an unusual career plan, dropping out of high school to work with his father at the Canadian Press. I’m guessing their paper routes were side by side, but I’m probably wrong.
Years went by, and in 1975 Chris met another journalist guy named Scott Abbott. The two of them had been assigned to work together on the upcoming Summer Olympics in Montreal in 1976. They became buddies. Drinking buddies.
That’s how they invented the Trivial Pursuit game, apparently. They were having a couple of beer and were trying to play Scrabble, even though a bunch of the letters were missing. They found out that alcohol doesn’t increase your vocabulary, it only amplifies it. And somehow out of the chaos came a friendly competition about which of them had the largest bank of useless information.