Hello, eagerly awaiting world:
With many signs and omens pointing towards the distinct possibility of a Mayan-style apocalypse (and remember, as far as doomsday predictions go, what’s Mayan is Mayan and what’s yours is yours), the time could hardly be better to clue you all in to an ongoing battle in the war between Good and Evil…or, in this case, between Occasionally-Slightly-Better-Than-Average and Evil. If you’re one of those cut-to-the-chase types who don’t care for preliminaries, click on the blue link to hear the first dispatch from the protracted theatre of conflict known as (drum roll please)...
For those of you who need a little background before diving headfirst into this saga, here’s what you need (and might even conceivably want) to know…
The origins of that defender of truth, justice, and the periodic table of elements, Science Boy, are shrouded in mystery.
Some say that he is a mysterious visitor from a future world or another planet, one whose knowledge far outstrips us in many respects, but which lags woefully behind in most matters of practicality and common sense. This view is given credence by Science Boy’s persistent inability to comprehend the necessity of getting a transfer when paying by cash on public transit.
According to another theory, Science Boy is the result of experiments employing ultra-advanced techniques of genetic engineering, but somewhat less-than-ultra-advanced techniques of choosing test subjects. Wherever he came from, Science Boy felt ill-enough-equipped to cope with this world of ours that one of the first things he did was to create his own mentor, Doctor von Sciencestein, from spare bits and pieces he happened to find strewn about the laboratory after yet another near-fatal explosion. Amazingly (or perhaps not so much so), the newly-created von Sciencestein instantly possessed a wealth of learning and wisdom far beyond that of his creator/protégé. This includes the secret of using transfers on public transit; legend has it that he once circumnavigated the globe on a single off-peak-hours fare paid for with a discarded token he found on the platform of the J train near Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn.
Spurred on by a combination of duty, gratitude and guilt towards his adopted world, Science Boy wages a never-ending crusade to make the human race safe for all forms of technology, now and in the future. Or maybe that’s “make all forms of technology safe for the human race”…to be honest, I don’t think he’s too sure, either.
It doesn’t matter—for, before he can even begin to accomplish this goal, Science Boy must rid the world of its single greatest threat to date (not counting door-to-door utility bill scams and hidden service charges on supposedly ‘no fee’ bank accounts)…the evil Professor Proteus.
Like his sworn enemy Science Boy, Professor Proteus has a shadowy past. During his years as a respected member of academic circles, Professor Proteus performed numerous services to humankind (as long as payment in advance was remitted to a numbered account in Switzerland). One of these was the perfection of the Random Euphemistic Comment Generator, which has since proven invaluable to professors and teaching assistants while grading exams and term papers. With a few simple adjustments, markers can replace potentially inflammatory, if accurate, terms such as ‘numbskull’, ‘bubblehead’, ‘halfwit’, and the now-obscure yet highly descriptive eponyms ‘Jethro’ and ‘Gomer’ with subtler epithets when assessing the work of students who haven’t demonstrated the research skills necessary to look up the meaning of what they’ve just been called.
In a cruel stroke of irony, it was the good Professor’s greatest discovery that led him from the virtuous path of scientific moral ambiguity, and straight into a life of crime. Having discovered and subsequently inoculated himself with a serum for eternal life, Professor Proteus failed to discover a way to get any university to waive its standard mandatory retirement age for tenured faculty. Doomsday machines and death rays just don’t get built on the pension of a professor emeritus—shipping costs alone for some of the more intricate components are exorbitant, to say the least. The only course left open to him, if the human race’s store of knowledge was to increase—whether they wanted it to or not—was to study and adopt the practices and tactics of history’s most cold-hearted and ruthless individuals…infamous scourges of humanity such as Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Prince John, Margaret Thatcher and any one of a numberless host of broadcast executives and record company A & R men. Having embarked upon a highly lucrative campaign of plunder, whose first masterstroke was the construction of a private tollbooth for unattached women under the age of 25 entering and leaving the Kennedy compound, Professor Proteus continues to finance a dizzying array of not-entirely-legal experiments by any means available to him.
There—if you’ve sat through this tedious origin story, you deserve a break. Here’s a reprise of the link to Episode 1 of Science Boy versus Professor Proteus, so you don’t have to worry about scrolling back up to it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Uncle Fun
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