I was hoping I was the Evil Me, but I failed on almost every one of these points.
I had some hope on one question: I do have one scar on my face, won in battle. Does it still count that I got it when I was two, battling a coffee table, and that I lost?
For the record, Blue Jays are vicious nasty monsters, and Lions and Grizzly Bears would do well to flee them as well.
That virtual duck had a family! A family that depended on him!
This chart doesn’t suit me at all.
I prefer to do evil deeds through representatives, minions, underlings and, if need be, even goons. It creates employment, widens the scope of my evil machinations and allows me to actively work on multiple ventures at the same time, all from the comfort of my moon-base.*
But apparently I’m not good enough for the author of this chart because I haven’t had my face shredded by some incompetent would-be hero or spend hours at the firing range. Time I’d much rather spend hatching even more evil schemes.
Anyhow, if I ever meet my evil alter ego we shall be the best of friends. Well, allies. While convenient.
*Good luck guessing which moon!
I have a scar on my scalp from when I was five. I battled gravity and lost, Gravity was ably assisted by a staircase, three kittens and a metal-edged doormat recess. I had a partial revenge on my nemeses: my Grandma gave the kittens away.
I have many scars from battling the insidious monster Ack-Ni.
I outlasted the bastard in the end.
Maybe I’m mixing up parallel universes with mirror universes, but shouldn’t those scars be on opposite cheeks?
Yeah, also not Evil Parallel Universe me. I suppose I will always be one of those people who dress like vampires but are actually vegetarians.
But it wasn’t a blue jay! It was a hawk!
Coffee tables are ghastly enemies. You’re lucky to be alive.
I have those scars where I crashed into a house riding a bike with no breaks downhill towards the busy main road. Yes, I crashed on purpose, because it looked better than the alternative.
Then I beat my arch nemesis* into pulp.
*My cousin who had lent me his bike without telling me he had disabled the brakes.
Scars? I stopped a speeding pickup truck with my face.
Well, that and my pelvis and abdomen and such…
” I do have one scar on my face, won in battle. Does it still count that I got it when I was two, battling a coffee table, and that I lost?”
Did you go back & destroy the table? If not then you’re not evil.
I’m the guy who gave him the axe scar.
Hawk, pah! Seagulls are the real mobsters of the avian world! I’ve been pecked on the foot by one trying to extort a sandwich, and dive-bombed by a pair nesting on the roof of my workplace.
This kind of silliness is all well and good. If you enjoy it you might like Stanley Bing’s “Sun Tzu was a Sissy”. It has some giggle-worthy charts and useful recommendations for how to maintain a proper level of surliness.
I am known to say “Bwahahahaha” on occasion. Does that count?
I got a nice precise circular scar on the center of my ass cheek. Got it when I backed into the (very toasty) heater in our bathroom looking for my glasses when I was ten.
Still visible in a good light.
Haven’t we all had it with allen wrenches? (Really, Ikea, do better.)
Having had it with allen wrenches is for sissies! I’ve had it with vise-grips (never could get one to work).
I have a scar on my forehead from a gun butt. It was from my five-year-old brother with a cap pistol.
I cried during Duck Hunt because the game was obviously based on pheasant hunting, but it showed a duck. And it used a pistol.
You don’t need all those questions, you just need the single definitive diagnostic:
Do you have a goatee?
I was once followed for a city block by a Pileated woodpecker. (I was biking and my black jersey with broad white stripe and scarlet trim painted me as a rival).
Needy snuggling with the cat, eh? What else are you not telling us, PZ?
It’s not so much the Hot Wheels, though, as the random Lego.
Oh! I read it as “alien wenches”!
I would cheat in Duck Hunt on some of the harder levels after I got frustrated by standing about 3 inches from the TV.
I once had a pigeon fly into my head while walking outside in broad daylight. Clearly my evil twin is coming after me with his bird powers. Or the pigeon wanted to get bird-revenge for my blatant Duck Hunt cheating.
Everybody knows your evil twin always wears a goatee. Of course, PZ has a full beard, which could harbor a hidden goatee, or could just mean he is trying to hide his endearing shyness.
One of my nephews went through a phase of saying “I’ll see you in hell,” instead of “goodbye,” when he was about 10 years old.
The scar on my forehead was caused by the sharp and pointed business end of a half-eaten lollipop when I was about 5.
The scar on my left shoulder was inflicted when, aged 16 and playing after-dinner volleyball on a college campus where I was attending a post-junior-year-of-high-school enrichment program for Smart Boys (on its home campus, the original branch of the program had both Smart Boys and Smart Girls, but this branch was all-boy and 100% wonk—as I’m sure all the other branches were too), I ran into an elm tree that was receiving a transfusion (for, I suppose, Dutch Elm Disease) from a bottle that was attached to the tree with metal tape which had sharp edges. On a theory of antisepsis that I had somehow acquired, I treated it immediately by washing it and then rubbing table salt from the dining hall into it. Several hours later, after nightfall, it was still hurting (amazingly!); I wandered downhill from the Graduate College dorms where we were stationed to the College Gothic university infirmary at the far edge of the undergraduate campus. It was closed for the night, but there were a few lights, and I eventually managed to squeeze my way in through one casement window without breaking any of the leaded panes. I found my way to a nursing station, where I got strange looks, a modicum of care, and a talking-to, but (neither then nor later) no stitches—though the gash was a couple of inches long, it was shallow. Fifty-one years later the scar’s mostly gone. (I ended up going to that university, and each spring for four years I spent about a week in that very infirmary, with a fever that they never managed to diagnose. The first year, before I had really caught on to the “mild delirium” thing, I got quite excited by my well-ordering of the real numbers. The following years I just read mystery stories and slept a lot.)
I collided with a pigeon, once. Bicycling down Broadway in NYC, going fast, and he took off going away. I dropped my head and he bounced off the top of my helmet.
And I had a hawk dive on my truck one time. She was sitting on a phone pole, looked right at me, and stooped. I hit the brakes, and she went up the windshield. Bent my radio antenna, and I just left it like that.
Yes, I have a goatee. It’s pretty much how my hair grows. I can’t do a full beard, and this only takes a bit of trimming. (I dunno why – some Asian ancestry and some testicular damage, maybe.)
I have a scar on my knee from a bike spill when I was about 8. Does that count? About 40 years later, I lost a staring contest to a Canada goose daddy with goslings to protect. Those bastards are BIG and MEAN.
Bears flee from me because I am permanently drunk, and, as we’ve scientifically established, this drives all bears away.
I have four scars on one palm because my brother stabbed my hand with a fork when I was eight and he was six.
Lots of scars, most have faded so you would have to look really close: Coffee table, large wooden mallet swung with both hands, cross-point hunting arrow, fence post, swung mop handle … and not a hint of dain bramage. I thinks real good.
Um, PZ, did the Evil You turn up in Huntington Beach, California as Matt McLaughlin who is submitting a “Shoot the gays” ballot initiative?
I was once put to full retreat by a rooster, OK, so it wasn’t a chicken, it was a male chicken… So that’s something, I’m not sure what. It was how I discovered that mimicking a rooster’s crow was basically him saying “fuck you this is my territory!” and me saying “FZUCK YOO DIS MA TERRIBWARY” back in thickly accented chicken. And finally he couldn’t take it any more and snapped and came at me and I realized that a big chicken on max aggro is,,, big. So I have the distinction of having lost to a chicken.
I actually do have an axe-scar on my upper lip from my mediaeval reenactor group’s annual replay of Hastings, So I guess that makes my old self my evil alter-self. I think of that process as “growing up.” I wonder how many of ourselves, if we encountered our teenaged selves in the wild, would think “what a horrible, um, ugh.”
My only easily-visible scar I got trying to get the last few shoestring potatoes out of the can. That counts as dueling, right? I won…
(Girlfriend has numerous impressive scars widely scattered. I do not cross her, can I avoid it.)
Too many scars to count (or recount the stories). About half of them are from surgeries, though.
I have a scar on my knee from an encounter with a monstrous insectoid demon.
I was five. I saw a honeybee, freaked out, and crashed into a lawn chair while trying to run away.
My cool scar is from an incident that happened to me when I was nine years old. A friend and I were messing around with golf clubs in his back yard and my mouth caught the backswing of his pitching wedge. Broke four teeth and I had a nasty gash in my lip that went all the way through (probably bit it, but I don’t remember).
I stuck my finger in a lawn mower when I was 11 or 12. One of those push mowers; my brother had it upside down and was cutting the grass one blade at a time. (Well, why not?) I was providing motive power, turning the wheel, and the thing bit me. Cut the tip right off, and it had to be sewed back on.
I won that battle, because the scar has been useful all my life; I was born left-handed when that was not allowed, so I was “switched”, and ended up confused as to left or right. But the third finger on the left hand still has the scar and still aches on rainy days, so now I know.
As long as we are comparing scars…
My husband has one on his forehead that he swears he got “fighting evil”. We’d been married 18 years before he admitted he had crashed into the fridge when he was 6. He also has one on his hand from being attacked by a caged lab rabbit…
Mine was caused by being headbutted in the mouth by my 2 y.o. son, and needing oral surgery to fix a broken crown.
Instead of an ax scar on my cheek, I have a machete scar on my foot (the story’s much less impressive than anything you might imagine).
As for birds, I was chased around the yard by a wild turkey when I was a kid. Now Thanksgiving doesn’t just feel like tradition – it’s vengeance.
I gots a scar on the back of my wrist that looks exactly as if I had a nail driven through it to hold me to a “tree”. Where is that on the {Good<——–>Evil} metric? Is my “Jesus scar” the evil mockery, or a sincere good stigmata?
bwahaha, you’ll never know {twirling mustache}
Yeah yeah, they say that every offseason, then they finish in 3rd or 4th in the AL East. ;)
Marcus Ranem @ 34 – that is hands down now my favorite chicken/rooster story ever.
@42: I have a “stigma” on the palm of my left hand, from surgery to correct trigger finger (actually, it’s in totally the wrong place for crucifixion — up near the base of the middle finger). I may be getting another one next to it soon, depending on whether the cortisone shot I had last week fixes the problem.
Hey, I’m not messing around with any blue jays! saw one nearly peck my neighbour to death for getting too close to her nest.
Is my evil self happy or disappointed by this? If evil me is attracted to a woman, is she ensaddened that the intense gaze isn’t working, or is the evil me all heteronormative?
Never mind. I think I just answered my own question.
Marcus Ranem #34, citation for reckless endangerment of keyboards. I just looked back upthread and if anything it’s somehow got even funnier.
Yeah, I know I’d think, “Dude, seriously, get over yourself.”