Oops. Just after flushing the toilet, I opened my Marvelâ„¢ The Amazing Spider-Manâ„¢ Complete chewable vitamins and accidentally dropped the lid and several vitamins down the drain. To my great surprise, this seemed to clear my toilet trap, though the sewer drain may be another matter entirely.

From this point forward I live each day in fear. I know that this incident will come back to haunt me. Which will strike first: an impassible child-proof pipe blockage or a vitamin-powered sewer crocodile? Only time will tell.

UPDATE 07/16/10: First strike goes to blockage. The top got stuck sideways in the toilet trap. So I've just dismantled the toilet, cleaned the trap, and put everything back together. Still I live in fear of the sewer monster powered up on Incredible Hulkâ„¢ multi-vitamins. I promise I will never watch Dreamcatcher again. (Though mainly because it is a terrible, terrible movie.)

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My brother has had a hard time finding friends to help him move. Says my brother between mouthfuls of barbecue at dinner, "I need more reliable friends like Superman's loyal pal Jimmy Olsen, not Rick Jones, who abandoned his pal the Hulk for Captain America." Verily, this is a universal truth.

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Yes, comic books can also be textbooks! Though it may not seem so at first, Reed Richards, the so-called "Mr. Fantastic" and self-described genius, is correctly using the word "myself" in the above panel.

According to my Unabridged Second Edition-Deluxe Color Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (which surprisingly has color on only 16 of 2,305 pages), the word "myself" is defined "a form of the first person singular pronoun, used: (a) as an intensive; as I went myself; (b) as a reflexive; as I hurt myself; (c) as a quasi-noun meaning 'my real, true, or actual self'; I am not myself when I rage like that." While the Quicksilver may use the first example sentence and the Incredible Hulk the third, Mr. Fantastic is clearly interested in hurting himself, so to speak.

In Reed's sentence, "myself" is an intensive pronoun referring to the sentence subject, "person." If Reed had said "I have that qualification myself," there would be less confusion, but super geniuses just don't talk like common people. For the sake of clarification, consider the following sentence diagram (don't look at me like that; sentence diagramming is way more fun than Sudoku):

So there you have it: proof that repeating anything that Mr. Fantastic says is not only melodramatic fun, it's also grammatically correct. It really gives us all something to think about, doesn't it?

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If your knowledge of super hero comic books is limited to what you've seen at the movies, then you've never heard of the Grey Gargoyle. And your life is probably the better for it. The Grey Gargoyle is a middling Marvel Comics villain with the "uncanny" ability to turn anything he touches into stone. For an hour. Unless it's magical. (Which would make his foe of choice, Thor, a piss-poor choice for a nemesis. But then, the Grey Gargoyle is a piss-poor villain.)

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It's no wonder the guy has an identity crisis. (There's a reason he always uses the word "the" before his name even though no one else would be caught dead impersonating a loser like him.) The Grey Gargoyle is French, so he'd probably refer to himself as "Le Gargouille Grise." However, Gargoyle spends almost all of his time in American comic books fighting American heroes, where you'd expect that he'd be referenced as "The Gray Gargoyle." But for some reason he inexplicably prefers the Queen's English to American. Usually.

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Like I said, the guy has an identity crisis. Even the writers and editors at Marvel Comics apparently don't care enough to consistently get his name right. They can't even keep his name straight for an entire issue. Sometimes they don't even try at all. (And why should they? I don't think the schmuck has ever won a fight. In the comic above right, he is defeated when the loose end of a chain accidentally gets wrapped around his foot. Unfortunately for him, the chain was attached to a rocket. What fool would wrap a chain around a rocket in the first place? He did. Fail to plan, plan to fail.)

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And when they do get it right, they tend to over-compensate a bit. His name appears on the cover above twice. In all caps. And he's shown holding his own against the entire Avenger's team! If you've never seen him before, you'd be thinking that he must be a bad-ass, right? That is, until you learn that he's French.

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While it's one thing to disrespect a villain enough to forget his name, it's another thing entirely to forget his powers. Notice on that cover above left, it looks like Gargoyle is turning someone to stone, yes? That's his power, right? Turns out, no, not when he's using the wrong hand, it isn't. Gargoyle is only able to turn someone to stone with his right hand, not his left. And last time I checked, things made of granite fly about as well as a..., well, as well as a stone.

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He wears blue socks with claws, a cape made of stone, and has a pencil mustache. Once you get to know him, you begin to understand why a man made of stone would wear a domino mask to hide his identity. The more you learn about this guy, the more you suspect that Darwin was full of shit: "natural selection" would never let something this retarded live long enough to learn to learn to walk. Ah, but the world of super villains needs janitors, too. Therefore, I present to you... The Gray Grey Gargoyle!

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Sam Elliott has probably played probably more bikers and cowboys than any other actor alive. He's the bouncers' bouncer in Roadhouse, the only soldier tough enough to hunt the Hulk in Ang Lee's Hulk, and the prototypical Marlboro Man in Thank You for Smoking. In his latest role, Sam Elliott IS Smokey Bear.

It would seem that Elliott has been The Bear for a few months now, since the Ad Council launched it's latest (and incredibly poorly named) "Get Your Smokey On" campaign last summer. I just now noticed because I encountered the ads between Dragnet 1967 episodes on hulu.com. One minute I'm being lectured about the disastrous side-effects of LSD by Sgt. Joe Friday, and the next I'm being told to douse my campfire by the narrator of The Big Lebowski. (Coincidence?)

Sam Elliott has one of the most distinctive voices in Hollywood history. His throat is lined with gravel and broken glass. As his words emerge from his mouth, they take on the appearance of weary, hard-traveled, hard-won experience. Now when I hear Smokey's New Millennium catchphrase, "Only You Can Prevent Wildfires," I don't think of some cartoon bear, I think of Sam Elliott. While that certainly prevents me from starting wildfires, it's because I'm afraid to piss off Sam Elliott, not because I don't want to let down some cartoon bear.

This is the equivalent of my fear of CNN because Darth Vader was their pitchman. I guess the "kid-friendly" approach wasn't working, so the U.S. Forest Service is trying "hard-ass" now. Is it the right thing to make Smokey sound like he's smoking 10 packs a day? And does the giant talking bear have to loom over me with a shovel? Maybe that isn't supposed to be threatening, but I've seen Sam Elliott go to town on someone with a pool cue before, and I don't want him coming at me with a shovel in his hand.

So remember kids, next time you're gallivanting carefree through nature, remember that if you drop a cigarette butt, a hot match, or a gallon of kerosene, Sam Elliott is going to appear and kick you ass back to the stone age. Be afraid. So speaketh Smokey.

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In the original Marvel Comics' Tales to Astonish stories featuring Ant-Man, bio-chemist Henry "Hank" Pym discovers a way to shrink himself to the size of an ant. In an attempt to keep real ants from killing him, Pym next invents a helmet that allows him to communicate telepathically with ants. What does he do with these two amazing bits of technology? He becomes a superhero, of course! Pym knows that shrinking to the size of an insect is a technology "far too dangerous to ever be used by a human again," so he keeps it to himself and immediately launches a crusade against Soviet spies.

I'd never really realized it before, but most of the signature characters of the Marvel Age were all grounded in the Cold War struggle against the U.S.S.R. The Fantastic Four had to beat the Soviets into space. A Soviet spy triggered the bomb test that birthed the Hulk. Iron Man was a casualty of the escalating "limited conflict" in southeast Asia that would become the Vietnam War. Spider-Man and Thor are notable exceptions: their careers triggered respectively by an accidental spider-bite and an alien invasion -- another common Marvel adventure even to this day. (In hindsight, it's probably not much of a coincidence that I lost interest in Marvel Comics about the time the Soviet Union collapsed.) For Pym, the battle against the Reds was personal: they killed his wife, an Hungarian freedom fighter. Sure, she'd given up fighting for freedom when well-to-do American biochemist Hank Pym came along, but she was really serious about it in college.

However, don't expect to see any of this lunacy in the long-rumored Ant-Man movie. If the thing is even made, they'll no doubt ignore the fact that Pym changes his superhero moniker from Ant-Man to Giant-Man mid-conversation if he changes his size. (Freud would have a field day with that.) Or the fact that he grafted biological wings and antenna into his female partner, the Wasp, but neglected to give her the ability to change her size without the aid of his size-changing gas or pills. (Pym kept for himself the cybernetic helmet that allowed him to change size at will. Dick.) Not to mention the fact that when Pym is ant-sized, he inexplicably maintains his full-size strength while growing stronger when he gets larger-than-life size. Or that his rogues' gallery consists primarily of such forgettable nutcases as Egghead, Human Top, Magician, Porcupine, or the scientist Garrett, who mixes eagle blood with horse blood to create a flying horse in order to exact revenge on Giant-Man. (They market these books to children and they wonder why Americans lag behind in science.)

No, they'll put Ant-Man in a black costume and pit him against the evil robot Ultron. Because mark my words, nothing ruins a computer like a bug. (Don't blame the messenger: it's just how Hollywood thinks.)

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I know the Hulk is a few cucumbers short of a salad, but I'd certainly expect the Leader to know better.

"Without limit"? The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. The speed at which electrical impulses travel along the brain's neurons tops out at .075 miles per second when you're drinking Red Bull. Therefore it would take a month for a thought to travel as far as light does in one second.

But what should I expect from two fellows who think that bathing in highly-lethal gamma radition is a sure path to fun and profit? No doubt, the Leader also thinks he uses the "unused" 90% of his brain that the averge human doesn't and that if he sneezed with his eyes open, they would pop out of his head.

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Bad news for the latest season of the new American Gladiators series: terrible ratings. While this could be due to a myriad of tangled reasons, something has to be done soon to salvage the show or NBC may pull it from the lineup. My solution? Mt. T.

Mr. T turns 56 today, and a trip to the American Gladiators set would do us all some good, I think. We'll prove to the world that T can still be physical in his old age. We'll reunite T with his one-time WrestleMania partner, Hulk Hogan, restoring both to the spotlight they deserve. And we'll reclaim Monday nights for MMA combatants and steroid users everywhere!

But why stop there? Once we've got T in our pocket, so-to-speak, we can tweak the show to take full advantage of T's talents. Combine montages of engineering, gymnastics, and detective work with extraneous explosions. Top it all off with empty threats and inspirational rapping. It's a formula that's historically proven, I tell you. "Not TV. Mr. TV."

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I was watching Kojak (with Telly Savalas, not Ving Rhames), and the first thing that struck me was just how many shots of Kojak driving down a street are in one hour of a Kojak episode. The NYPD apparently couldn't afford to paint Kojack's office, but he could drive his land yacht around greater New York all day without batting an eye. That's why we watch old tv, I guess: the nostalgia of the good old days of heroes who smoked, monochromatic cities, and 75¢ gallons of gasoline.

Then I noticed that Kojak was investigating a crime in a very familiar location. I'd seen the street that Kojak was cruising in about a dozen episodes of The Incredible Hulk. (If you've ever seen David thrown through a stack of empty boxes before being mysteriously replaced with Lou Ferrigno, you've probably seen these streets, too.) Apparently, this episode of Kojak was filmed on the back lot of Universal Studios in LA and not in New York City where the story was set. Imagine my surprise when Kojak's informant turns out to be Jack Colvin, better known as that pesky National Register reporter Jack McGee. Clearly, this is David's town, Kojak, you're just driving through it.

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In the late 80s, I watched Marc Summers as the host of Nickelodeon's Double Dare. By the turn of the millennium, I was watching Marc Summers as the host of the History Channel's History IQ. Now I watch Marc Summers as the host of Food Network's Unwrapped. This progression pretty much sums up the aging process: messy childhood, know-it-all teenager, forced-to-cook-for-yourself adulthood.

(Note that I never watched Marc Summers as the co-host of Lifetime's Biggers and Summers. I simply refuse to watch anything on Lifetime. It's a channel devoted to the equivalent of after-school specials for housewives.)

You watch most television personalities play characters. Usually poorly. I enjoyed David Hasselhoff for his "portrayals" of Michael Knight and Mitch Buchannon. I'm fond of William Shatner for playing Captain Kirk and about one hundred guest star appearances, all of them equally way over-the-top. And don't get me started on My Favorite Martian / The Magician / The Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby. (I'd recognize Bix before some members of my family.) But Marc Summers always plays Marc Summers.

I'm pretty sure that in another 25 years, I'll be flipping channels and still see Marc Summers, looking none the worse for time, hosting a show deep into my cable dial (maybe hosting the show You've Fallen: Can You Get Up?). It's a comforting thought, really. Some things don't change.

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