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Feed me father
FATHER? Wait, what?!
How did this happen?!
Yes, thank you, Minion! I don't actually need you to answer! I am extremely aware of how biology works! Supergenius, remember?!
So... this is... Ah... This is very unexpected...
Roxanne? Sweetie? You know how you said you think you might want another child?
I have a surprise for you. A really, really big surprise.
Ollo Megamind!
I'm big fan of both you and baseball so I'm curious about something. What would happen if someone could pitch a fastball at the speed of light? As an alien genius, I'm betting you have an answer?
Ollo back!
Let me start off with a little shout-out. Believe it or not, I’m not the first scientific mind to be asked such a thing. (Sometimes I worry about humans.) Randall Munroe has an extremely entertaining book called What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Lots of fun and physics; great for a little light reading. Especially when you’ve had a hard day because the Doom Syndicate is being spectacularly annoying and the teleportation device you’ve been working on simply won’t function like the math says it should.
And you’ve just discovered that all the apples you’ve been throwing through it have been hurtling out of (seemingly) midair into your fishy sidekick’s sewing room with enough force to turn them into applesauce explosions.
So now he’s threatening to change the wifi password again. (Honestly, Minion! Be reasonable!)
Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you swam in a nuclear reactor pool (surprisingly little) or if you launched a mole of moles into space (it’s not good) then… well, firstly, I have some questions. But secondly, you might enjoy that book, (and it might save you from performing some unwise experiments yourself.) So purchase it from your favorite independent bookstore (support small businesses!) or check it out from your local library (support those, too!)
Moving on…
Whoever you're betting against, tell them to pay up, because your favorite Heroic Genius and Master of All Sciences does, indeed, have an answer!
A lightspeed fastball might sound pretty amazing, but it would absolutely ruin the day for more people than the batter. Oh, the batter would certainly hate it. But so would the catcher. And all the rest of the players. And the fans. And SO many others.
It would be just plain bad.
How bad is bad? Even if the ball isn’t quite traveling at the speed of light, (let’s say it’s going 99 percent of that speed, much like the Helical Engine NASA recently designed,) the results would be catastrophic. And the problem starts with a seemingly unassuming culprit: the air we breathe.
You see, air molecules are fast, vibrating at hundreds of miles per second, but they’re nowhere near lightspeed fast. And that’s an issue. Because the ball, which is now traveling at over 180,000 miles per second, or 600 million miles per hour, breaks the laws of aerodynamics. Like Sunday afternoon drivers on US Highway 2 when I’m called to duty, the poor air molecules are simply too slow to get out of the way in time. (I’m just kidding. About the drivers. Not about the molecules.) That means that the atoms of those molecules hit the ball so hard they become one with the atoms of the ball. Which is not nearly as romantic as it sounds. Basically, they create constant fusion in front of the hurdling object. And if you know anything about how A-bombs work, you know that uncontrolled atom fusion fits quite nicely into the Nope Not Good category.
The force of that fusion would slow the ball down very slightly, but not nearly enough. What it would do is cause bits of the ball to fly off in every direction, also at near-lightspeed, like tiny little fragments of destructive doom. These would also create fusion. Three or four reactions in all. Meaning that everyone’s life just got A LOT worse. And a lot shorter.
Because one thing is certain: sudden, uncontrolled fusion in a crowded baseball stadium would make a lot of people very, very unhappy.
It pretty much goes downhill from there.
A fraction of a second after the ball is thrown—a little less than 0.7 seconds, to be more accurate—the catcher will still see the pitcher holding the ball. But he’s not. It’s just that the light carrying the information “ball incoming” will arrive at almost the same time as the ball itself.
Except it’s NOT a ball anymore. Interactions with air molecules will have transformed it into a bullet-shaped mass of plasma hurtling through the air with extremely deadly speed. So don’t worry. The catcher doesn’t need to worry about being hit by a stray super-fastball. Nor does anyone else.
They just need to worry about the explosion.
Remember when I said the ball is plasma now? Yes, well, uncontrolled plasma rapidly expands. Which is a nice way of saying it pretty much goes boom. (You would not BELIEVE the years of calculations and extremely precise engineering necessary to safely create the plasma laser Death setting on my De-Gun.) Anyway, the plasma cloud bullet, made mainly of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and, of course, carbon left over from the destroyed matter, is expanding so fast that it creates (guess what?!) more fusion!
Houston, we have a chain reaction!
Now, the pitcher doesn’t know about the horror they’ve unleashed on the world; they’ve already disintegrated. The batter and the catcher aren’t far behind. Gamma rays, x-rays, and white-hot plasma will reach them in milliseconds and they’ll vanish into dust at about the same time they’re hurled backward at incredible speeds.
Basically, the same thing will happen to the other players, the fans, and the ballpark itself. With a flash of light so blinding it outshines the sun, a skyward fireball, and a pretty impressive mushroom cloud, it will be Game Over for everyone involved.
That’s when things will get really messy.
Because we’ve still got the blast wave and the firestorm to deal with. All that displaced air will have to go somewhere, and it will be under a lot of pressure. I mean A LOT of pressure. It will roar across the landscape for about a mile in every direction at speeds nearly twice as fast as the most powerful hurricane winds ever recorded. (More specifically, the shock wave will travel at about 440 miles per hour, faster than the speed of sound.) Trees and buildings will be ripped into kindling as it goes. And the people caught in the path of all that super-fast debris? Well, like I said… It will get messy.
Even beyond that point, the sonic boom will shatter glass for an impressive distance, making this the most epic example of breaking windows with a baseball in human history. Homeowners will be livid. But not for long because soon afterward most of the city will be a flambé. So, in the end, the baseball stadium is a crater, an entire mile-wide radius around it is as flat as a pancake, and everybody else is on fire. A bad day all around.
In short, if you’re thinking about asking my predecessor, Metroman, to join your baseball team, I would VERY strongly advise against it.
—Megamind, Defender of Metrocity
Unicorn Pigeons. (Yes, You Read That Right.)
People of Metrocity,
One thing being a hero and being a parent have in common is that both will make you highly distrustful of prolonged silences.
Don't get me wrong. You want it to be quiet. Sometimes you wish everyone would just behave one time, for the love of science! But when it actually happens... You worry. You wonder.
Because you know that something is really, really wrong.
That one whiny wanna-be villain hasn't been a pain in your neck for a couple of weeks? They're probably planning something big. Better get that new heroic battle mech up and running before the... ah... excrement hits the circular mechanical cooling device.
When on the other hand, your little girl is quiet for more than fifteen minutes at a time... Well, apparently THAT means she's gluing rainbow-colored cardboard "unicorn horns" to your brainbots. And painting them. With turquoise glitter. That you very strongly suspect your henchfish probably provided even though he claims that nooo of course not, he would never!
(Minion, you're my best friend and I love you, but you're a terrible liar.)
It's a good thing I'm a patient man. And that both my favorite fish and my little princess have both perfected adorable big-eyed sad looks. I really couldn't be angry.
In other news, guess who surprised us all by actually managing to finally escape prison?!
Remember Time Warp. Yep. He's back. This time with a new persona. Which is possibly worse than the first. And that is saying so, SO much.
He's now calling himself The Orthodontist. I wasted three entire hours trying to figure out exactly what in the word-I-can't-say-anymore was supposed to be villainous about dental surgery... AAAAND then I found out he had trained pigeons.
Yes. PIGEONS.
Apparently, he'd gotten a little confused and had meant to call himself The Ornithologist.
Which is honestly no better.
It's a little like the anticlimatic (pun intended) names they insist on giving hurricanes. (Note to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: have you ever considered naming major storms things like Attilla, Draco, or Baba Yaga? It might encourage people to obey evacuation orders more readily. Because, seriously, nobody feels an urge to run from something named Bill or Edna.)
But that's not the point. The point is that The Orthodontist actually meant to call himself The Ornithologist. On purpose. And somehow failed. Really! I happen to know very well there are dictionaries in the prison library! It never occurred to you to look it up?! Not that it would have mattered because your blasted name is the blasted ORNITHOLOGIST!!!
I mean, at least dentists have drills! That's something!
Ornithologists? They've got birds. That's it. Birds. In this case, not even scary birds. I mean, come on! You couldn't build some giant robot raptors or smuggle in some particularly angry Cassowaries like a NORMAL PERSON? You had to go with Columba livia?! Literally the most boring and commonplace avians in the country?!
Which were NOT well-trained, by the way. The Ornithologist Orthodontist, dressed in footie pajamas (again) loudly proclaimed on Zoom (again) that he planned to have his "army of feathered friends" carry off the statue of Metrocity's first mayor, Robert Lars Dziedzic, which was (somehow?!) going to make him the new ruler of the city. (I'm still trying to untangle the logic in that one.) What actually happened was that Feather-Brained Federation did... Ah... Exactly what pigeons do to old statues. Only more. Because there were over four-thousand of them.
Let that mental image sink in for a while.
The invisible car was not so invisible. The street was a disaster. And Bird-Brain the Dental Man? He was running and slipping all over the sidewalk in his jam-jams shrieking "EEEEWWWW!" at the top of his lungs like a little girl.
But wait! It gets better!
Remember what I said about the excrement hitting the circular mechanical cooling device?
Yeah. There's that big turbine outside the City Hall. And when the pigeons decided it was time for bombs away, things happened. Very, very bad things.
Thank heavens for the reflective energy forcefield generated by my spikes! But still! That was the most humiliating spectacle I've ever had to endure! I mean, I actually had to fight this guy! Talk about a waste of an evil laugh!
So, yeah. If you saw a bunch of sparkly brainbot unicorns frantically scrubbing Founders Square downtown today... Just know that that has been my week. I hope yours was less chaotic.
-Megamind, Defender of Metrocity
What They DON'T Tell You...
What they don't tell you about being a hero is how much of the job requires a lot of social tact. Don't get the wires crossed... I'm not talking about charm. I've got loads of charm, whole freighter ships full of it, just ask my wife. But tact? Well...
Shocking though this may be, the guy who was raised in a jail cell and goes around dressed in black leather and spikes while blaring heavy metal is maybe NOT the most adept at picking up on subtle social signals. In fact, my incredibly brilliant brain's Weird Nonverbal Communications Receptor is pretty dysfunctional. There, I said it.
What do I mean? Here's a recent example.
Apparently, it's football season. Has been for some time. At least I think so. I did not know this because I am just not a sports person. It's just never been my thing. And because football fans seem to wear jerseys year round so, really, how am I supposed to gauge when there is something actively happening? No idea.
Anyway, I was at one of those boring political meet-and-greets that Minion insists are absolutely necessary for a hero but that, as far as I can see, only take me away from building really cool, awe-inspiring devices. And I was trying to listen to some guy who is an aid to one of Michigan's senators or something drone on and on about, you guessed it, football. Specifically, he was talking at length about the Detroit Lions.
Of which he is apparently a fan.
And this apparently makes him a rarity.
Because, apparently, by whatever mysterious criteria footballers--is that a word?--are measured, this team is generally agreed to be terrible. I mean, really terrible. Like, some citizens of their own city are embarrassed to wear their team merchandise levels of terrible.
Now, as I said, I am not a sports fan. I am not good at picking up on social signals. So I had NO IDEA that there were all these incomprehensible unspoken rules regulating football-related conversations. There are some things you are simply not supposed to say, for example:
"DETROIT HAS A FOOTBALL TEAM?!"
When he asked me how I could have lived my entire life in Michigan without knowing that, it seems that "I don't know I guess I only know about the famous teams everybody likes" was not the correct answer.
Oops.
To be fair, though, at least I'm not biased. I care exactly 0% about ALL sports. I mean, I'm the guy who, when Minion insisted he wanted to go to a baseball game, sat in the bleachers shouting:
"Go, guy down there! Do basebally stuff! Go other guy! Go guy--Wait! No! You have the wrong colors on! DON'T! GO! GUY!"
So, yeah, if my complete lack of knowledge concerning sports offends you... Sorry. Your Incredibly Handsome Heroic Genius and Defender of All Metrocity really knows nothing about Cow Skin. Or Pig Skin. Or whatever bizarre name it is people call football sometimes.
But, hey, at least you've got a gorgeous blue alien rockstar genius keeping you safe, and you know I'll never be late to rescue you from a burning building because the Big Game is on. You can't have it all, am I right?
-Megamind, Defender of Metrocity
Hi, Megamind! Just curious, did you guys see "Encanto" yet? If so, did you like it?
Ollo!
I apologize for taking so long to respond... Defender duties, you know.
Now onwards to answering your question! (Which I very much appreciate, by the way!) At the time I originally received this message, I had not seen Encanto yet. (Again with the Defender duties.) But now I have. Because it's my little girl's current favorite movie. Meaning that, even though we don't let her watch much television, whenever she does, it's always this film.
Every. Single. Time.
By now, I practically know it by heart.
It could be worse, however, because it at least does have a relatively interesting plot for an animated movie. (Nothing compared to my own film, you understand, but not everything can be that fantastic.) Anyway, I certainly can identify with some of the elements.
Before I talk about those, however, this is an Official Announcement from your Favorite Defender! I am about to describe some details about this film, so if anyone reading this hasn't seen it, proceed at your own risk! You've been warned, Metrocity! Hahaha!
(And NO, if you ignore that caution and read past this point, I will not whack you with the forget me stick just so that you can see the movie without knowing what's about to happen! Honestly! It's your own fault!)
It's not easy being the only one--or even one of a few--without special powers. Trust me, I know. Most superheroes have some sort of unusual in-born ability. Or, you know, one caused by a lab freak accident. Or a military experiment. Or a strange asteroid that in retrospect probably should have been left alone. Like the case of Professor Electron. I feel sort of sorry for that guy; you can't even shake his hand without getting zapped. It makes him pretty unpopular at parties. But then he was the one who, on a dare from a fellow graduate research assistant, willingly licked an unclassified space rock interacting at an abnormally high rate with neutrinos, so...
That's not important right now.
My point is that I get it. I feel for Mirabel. Both because of the lack of ability and because she finds the courage to try to save the day anyway. Well, that and because I know too well what it's like to be sidelined while someone with special abilities is praised.
Honestly, though, the song Surface Pressure hit home pretty hard, too. We're talking bismuth bowling ball levels of heavy-hitting here. It gave me unexpected insight into what my former nemesis, Metro Man, must have been feeling before he retired. I actually empathized with the guy even if he did frame me for his murder. But don't tell him I said that.
So, yes, I find the movie Encanto to be unexpectedly enjoyable. The fact that watching it usually means I have my wife snuggled up to my side and my baby girl in my lap helps a lot.
~Megamind, Defender of Metrocity
hey, megamind! i'm curious would you call yourself more a goth or a punk? love your style either way!
Ollo!
Honestly, I would say my style is Gothic Punk, an alloy of the two. I don't really believe in boxing myself in with labels.
If I had to choose, however, I would say I belong more to the Punk subculture than any others. Being Punk is all about raging against and drawing attention to political corruption and social injustice, using everything from extreme dress to misbehavior and even vandalism in order to make the point. That fairly accurately describes me during my villainous days.
Where my style specifically is concerned, though, there's definitely both Gothic and Punk influence. (I was inspired by Alice Cooper among other things.) The spikes are very Punk while the all-black outfits and makeup lean more toward Goth. My love for art and for metal music is fundamentally Gothic as well. (The modern subculture grew out of the dark metal scene and old Gothic literature, you know.) My love for the eerie and atmospheric, the dark and somewhat macabre, and the tragically sentimental are all part of my Goth side. For that matter so is my dark sense of humor. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and I have an entire collection of fantastically BAD B-rated horror movies. I even read Gothic romances.
So, really, I'm both Gothic and Punk. Among other things. Because honestly I'm just me. That's the important thing: embrace different subcultures that draw you, but don't let them define you. Be your own person.
What's your favorite food?
Ollo!
What's my favorite food? Sugar. Literally anything containing sugar.
Well, I mean, not anything... Sugar-coated sushi, for instance, sounds completely revolting. Sugary tacos would honestly be just as bad.
But I like anything that's supposed to have sugar in it. And some things that possibly aren't. Fried chicken? Pair it with waffles and cover it all in maple syrup. Salsa? Give me the pineapple-mango variety any day. Goat cheese? Combine it with blueberry compote and serve it on ginger snap cookies. (See, Minion? Compote! I used a cool-in-ary term! I do listen to you!)
The fact is that I need more glucose than a human would, so it really shouldn't surprise anyone that I crave a lot of sweets. I also have a special place in my heart (and belly) for coffee, of course. Coffee and sugary deliciousness. Preferably together.
Hi Megamind, what would you do if I stealth attack hugged you? Cause I kinda wanna do it but I'm also not trying to get dehydrated.
*Yelps, drops a wrench to clang on the Lair's floor, jumps three feet in the air, and lands facing you with the degun drawn.*
*Relaxes suddenly upon seeing that you're NOT a villain and makes an inhuman noise of rolling syllables and hissing S's that may or may not be a relieved swear word in an alien language.*
Oh. Ollo. Thank heavens it's not somebody evil! Really! Did you have to sneak up on me like that? You're like the Hug-Ninja!
...And how did you find my Hideout, anyway?!
