Unbelievable

Nury Vittachi is bitten by the superhero bug

MY WIFE and her friends were discussing the topic ‘What is the deepest question ever?’ so I gave them my choice: ‘What Superhero Would You Be?’ The women sneered that my favoured issue was not clever or existential, but the guys in the room agreed that choosing a superpower was an important subject deserving serious consideration.

I know two lads who have been having a passionate TWO-YEAR debate over whether it would be better to be a Beetleman or a Lizardman.

The guys initially supported Lizardman, as lizards can move each eye independently, can detach their tails, and have tongues that strike faster than the eye can see.

But after much heart-searching, many of us switched to Beetleman, as beetles generate their own body

armour, appeared before dinosaurs and have outlived them, and will likely inherit the Earth, possibly some time this year, if trends in global politics are anything to go by.

Superhero fans of either sex struggling with this crucial issue will be interested to hear that there’s a new candidate for best new origin concept: Tardigrade Man or Woman. I learned about this from a writer friend who reads incredibly boring scientific papers as a source of inspiration.

A tardigrade is a very small bug with astonishing superpowers, such as these three. 1) It can survive at minus 272° Kelvin, an unbelievably cold temperature found only in deep-space ice planets and the heart cavities of inner-city residential landlords. 2) You can more or less kill a tardigrade and dry it out and then bring it back to life, months later – an ability hitherto seen only in this writer’s hard-drinking great-uncles. 3) Tardigrades can stay alive on foodfree diets for up to 30 years, a trait that reminds me of my wife and her friends, many of whom have forsworn food, living for decades only on herbal tea and frosted lipstick.

Using bugs as a source of power is a classic tradition, although the recent fashion in superhero literature is to have regular human characters inside large machines, as seen in Gundam and Transformers. It frankly astonishes me that science today is focused on useless things such as travelling to the stars instead of making the world a better place by developing cool machines that we can climb inside and use to hit each other with.

When I mentioned this, a friend told me about two machine-using brothers in the United States who recently had an argument. Stanley Emanuel was in a crane and his brother Peter was in a front-end loader when the row escalated and turned into a battle.

Who won? Peter’s front-end loader eventually tipped the crane over, but Stanley jumped out and had his brother arrested, according to news reports.

The wives thought having fisticuffs from inside machines was dangerous and irresponsible, but the image prompted one of the guys to raise a new philosophical question ‘What Construction Vehicle Would You Be?’

Oh, that’s deep. We’ll get back to you in a couple of years, maybe.

It frankly astonishes me that science today is focused on useless things such as travelling to the stars