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Superman Season - Part 2:
Superman was an Asshole
Neal O'Carroll

It's that time of year again, when all over the world governments are taking the unilateral decision to mess with the things they don't understand.

Take the space-time continuum, for example. This time two weeks ago, it was four pm . Now it's three pm . An hour of my life was taken away from me six months ago, and is only now being returned. Presumably the interest earned on the hour taken away during that period is being used to pay for new roads and things. By the way, we're big into road-building in my part of world at the moment. As I write this a tiny bulldozer, just like the ones that those little guys in the helmets used to drive on "Fraggle Rock", is making it's way across my carpet and pushing the mushrooms out of the way, ironically to clear the way for a new "high" way.

I'm sorry about that but when you're maintaining or planning several websites at the same time, you can't afford to waste valuable material just because there's a crap pun involved. And besides, you're too drunk / high / buzzed up on caffeine / stupid (delete as appropriate), to have any hope of reading this stuff at all properly and deriving benefit from it. I could be calling you a stupid shit-faced watcher of daytime television, and you wouldn't notice. Right now, you're probably trying to delete three of those options with a pen, and wondering why the nib keeps getting bent. You're also wondering why Judge Judy is never available to preside over your increasingly frequent court appearances.

Anyway, I wouldn't mind the government spending money on new infrastructure, but I don't have a car. There just isn't any space in my life for one at the moment, not with my four cats and my new MP3 player which I'm trying to house-train. And when I try to make use of these public roads which I've paid for, I get arrested for jaywalking, and flung into a prison cell in the basement of Dublin Castle .

Last time I was there, they'd started an experimental series of new initiatives to raise the morale of the inmates. Instead of the usual bread and water for breakfast, we were given a bowl of frosted corn cereal, packed with sugar but no doubt spiked with several sedatives to cancel it out. The whole world today is obsessed with doing things that cancel other things out. You pig out on chocolate and cat food, then next day you go on an oxygen-only diet to alleviate the effect. You have a coffee to wake yourself up, eight hours after the warm milk and sleeping pill which you gulped down to put yourself into dreamland. You're drunkenly dowsing* your cat with petrol to see if it will burn, then twelve hours later you're desperately soaking it in soapy water to get rid of the smell, because suddenly you've decided that you very much want your cat not to burn.

(*See that? – That's alliteration, that's what that is. This is quality shit you're getting here, from the land of James Joyce and Enya)

Can you imagine if our world leaders were like that? I for one am glad that my country's leader doesn't waste valuable time prevaricating over whether or not he should burn his cat. These are serious times we're living in, and I need his eye on the ball. After all, while he's busy messing about with petrol and soap and all that, somebody could easily sneak into his office while he's not looking, change his screen saver to a fake video of George Bush warning him that aliens have landed and the only way to stop them is to launch nuclear missiles on every major city, then sneak out again without being noticed. Now that Superman is dead, it would be very difficult to see a happy resolution to that situation. And don't be fooled. You may think we're a small, harmless country. But remember, we built the Titanic. And we're damn proud of it.

Anyway, maybe my newly-reinvigorated web presence has brought out the cynical side in me, but I've always been deeply suspicious of that guy. Every time he rescued a kid from the raging torrent of Niagara Falls , or plucked a screaming woman from a burning match-factory, there always just happened to be a widescreen camera crew nearby, ready and willing to film the whole thing from beginning to end. I tested this on my first trip to Canada , when I plucked the wings off a passing wasp, and tossed it over the Falls. Superman didn't turn up. The tosspot. And that poor wasp has been lying dead at the bottom of the river for the last four year. I'll leave you all to draw your own conclusions.

Perhaps if poor Samuel (that's the name of the wasp) had been a cute twenty-something single woman, he might have had a better chance. That bamtard always rescued the hot chicks. I know because a friend of mine who runs an egg factory tried to pull off an insurance scam a few years ago, and the minute he set light to the hatchery, old Clarky turned up to rescue all the "hot chicks".

Sorry again.

I'll say one thing about Spiderman. He never pulls that kind of crap. He'd even rescue his old, ugly mom if she needed rescuing. Although if I was him I'd have to hesitate for a couple of minutes while the flame crept up on her, because she's the spitting image of that bitch from "Murder She Wrote", especially to those of us who are short-sighted and can't see than she is skinnier than Jessica Whatsherface. God I hate her. But the point is, I'm sure Spiderman would have leapt over the waterfall and caught my Sammy, had he been around at the time.

He wasn't, but unlike the other guy he had a damn good excuse. He was busy attending a very important seminar on how to create an antidote for kids who have eaten frosted cereal and are having an irritating burst of energy from the sugar hit. You may not think that's important, but next time you're on a six hour flight, and the little scamp behind you is bashing the back of your seat every three seconds while you try to watch "The Terminal", you'll be glad to have Spiderman on your side with a big syringe, some antiseptic, and a few sugar-free lollipops to shut them up afterwards.

Till next time I'm Neal, and if you've been trawling the net, trying to find some half-decent comics featuring three cats and occassionally Mother Teresa, your journey is over.