Legal Advice 4: Justice League in the White House

Good afternoon friends and neighbors, its time again for another “Legal Advice”.  Wow, we've done four of these?  Sheesh.  Well, since we are in the throes of the presidential race, let’s take a look at one of the most popular superhero teams ever assembled, the Justice League, and find out if ANY of the qualify for President of the United States.

For this, we’re going to look at the most common line up for the Justice League, that of Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Superman, Cyborg, Aquaman, and Batman.  Well this will be short: Martian Manhunter, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman are not natural born citizens of the United States.

In the Twelfth Amendment, Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the Constitution of the United States, it dictates that in order to run for the office, you must be a natural born citizen of the United States.  That immediately knocks out the above three, almost half our contenders, right there.

So we are left with Green Lantern, Batman, the Flash, Cyborg and Superman.  But wait, I hear you already, Superman was born on Krypton, not Earth, he can’t run either.

Well, that greatly depends on your definition of his origin story.  The generally accepted version is that he was born on Krypton and rocketed as a baby to Earth where he crashed and yada yada yada.  Frankly if you’ve been following this blog, or looked at one of my previous Legal Advice posts, you know the origin.

Generally accepted, but not entirely accurate.  After the “Crisis on Infinite Earth” storyline revamped DC Comics continuity, it was written that Superman’s fetus was placed inside a “birthing matrix” and that was shot to Earth.  So, by that definition, he was actually born on Earth, since that is where he emerged as a fully formed newborn.  Which is ultimately their way of justifying not shoving a newborn into a rocket.  This has been glossed over since then because the wildly popular Superman film starring Christopher Reeve presented the golden age telling of the origin so that because what everyone accepted at the tale, however for the majority of the 80’s, 90’s and into the 2000’s, the birthing matrix is what stood as the official, in canon, version.

Now things get trickier from there, because left or right, baby in a rocket or birthing matrix, it doesn’t matter because now you need PROOF of birth.  Now, we established early on, back in another posting, that legally speaking Superman does not exist as a person.  He doesn’t own property, there is no social security numbered issued to one “Man, Super”, he does not exist as a citizen.  Clark Joseph Kent, on the other hand, does and he has a birth certificate, generated at the time he was a foundling and adopted by ma and pa Kent, and it’s readily available through archives in whatever county Smallville resides in Kansas.

Birth certificates are not that hard to find, folks.  Don’t let the media fool you.

ANYWAY, legally speaking, Superman, or at least Clark Kent, is a natural born American citizen.  So he’s still in the running.

Know who isn’t?

Cyborg.  Cyborg, or Victor Stone, is formerly of the Teen Titans and graduated, literally, to the big leagues to fight alongside Batman and company.  As he’s the youngest of the team, he’s roughly in his early to middle twenties.  Ray Fisher, who portrays him in the cinematic universe is only around 27-28.  This is problem because, again, according to the constitution a candidate for President must be no younger than 35.  Sorry Cy, you’re going to sit this one out.

That gives us Flash, Green Lantern, Batman AND Superman.

So what could possibly whittle this list down?  First let’s admit it…Batman isn’t going to win this election.  Because he’s Batman.

The very second Bruce Wayne puts his hat into the ring for President, one of the dozen supervillains who know his secret identity is going to announce it to the world, and he will immediately be arrested for the countless felonies he’s committed as the caped crusader.  The FBI takes a dim view to that sort of thing.  Further, he’s not likely to even try to run for public office because he has a very strong psychological need to be Batman.  So for the Dark Knight, the race never started.

Now we have Superman, Green Lantern, and Flash…but this is going to get cut down pretty fast.  Green Lantern spends most of his time in space, which is decidedly not the United States.  Whether this is Hal Jordon, Guy Gardner, or John Stewart, the Green Lantern’s obligations to daring do in space requires he spend the majority of his time off world, which kind of makes it difficult to hold down a job and pay for residence.  You must be a resident of the United States, for 14 years before you can be president.  You can have your American citizenship and go all over the world, live in France or Canada if you want, but in order to get the job you must actually hold residence inside the borders of the United States.  This also trips up Superman because technically he splits his time between the Fortress of Solitude AND Metropolis, calling both homes.  So which has been his residence for 14 consecutive years?

That brings us down to just one candidate: The Flash.  For the sake of this we’re using Barry Allen since he’s the name we all know.  He’s got a job, forensic scientist for the Central City Police Department and is therefore a resident of said city for over 14 years.  In the comics Barry is in his mid 30’s, which meets our next qualifier.  He’s a natural born American citizen.  You can probably find the actual doctor who delivered him.  Outside of a sense of responsibility to his fellow man with his powers and probably no political background, there is nothing to stop Barry from being the President of the United States.

So…I’m voting for the Flash.  How about you?

The Easter Egg they Didn't Need.

So on September 26^th Entertainment Weekly ran a quick blurb online about a Batman v Superman Easter Egg almost nobody noticed.  The question got raise, apparently, as to why Superman didn’t use his x-ray vision to see the kryptonite in Batman’s canisters.  Inspection of Batman’s prep work shows the canisters are marked with “Pb”, which is the elemental symbol for “lead”.  Most folks know that Superman can’t see through lead.  A neat little nod to explain the “why”.  Except it actually makes things a little more convoluted than that.

Namely, how would Batman know that Superman can’t see through lead?  On screen we don’t see Superman use his x-ray vision that much.  To my knowledge he doesn’t use it at all in Dawn of Justice, and he used it twice in Man of Steel, once as a kid, once after he turned himself over to the army.  In neither of those instances did it show Superman discovering his lead weakness.  Presumably there aren’t a lot of actual interviews where Superman divulges his weaknesses in this world.  Yes, Christopher Reeve’s Superman spilled the beans to a woman he’d known approximately 1 week, knowing she was going to publish literally everything he said, which shows a tremendous lapse in judgement on his part.  But that’s not the movie we’re talking about here.

No, in this one there is literally nothing in the context of the films we see that indicate that anyone knows he can’t see through lead, or if that weakness even made it into the films at all.  So there is no reason for Batman to use lead canisters to hold kryptonite.

Furthermore, Superman has no idea what kryptonite is.  He doesn’t encounter it until Batman gases him with it early in the fight.  Let’s say the canisters weren’t lead lined and he did look into them.  He would see a glowing green substance and that’s it.  He’d have no idea that this is the one thing that can totally wreck him.

EVEN FURTHER more, in the context of the fight itself it would be MORE beneficial for Batman to not have lead lined canisters, as lead negates kryptonite’s effect on Superman and if it was in, say, a leather pouch, literally anytime Superman got near him he would be physically weakened.

Now it’s entirely likely that Batman had the lead lined canisters not because of Superman’s weakness against lead, but because kryptonite is RADIOACTIVE, meaning that prolonged exposure to it will physically affect Batman himself and he doesn’t want to suffer radiation poisoning while fighting a living titan.

Basically there is a very good reason for Batman to use lead canisters, but it’s not the one everyone is apparently leaping to.

Dr. Who and the Birthday Paradox...

So today I thought I’d just jump off the ledge of sanity and take a look at one of my personal favorite shows…Dr. Who.  Obviously there is a lot going on in that show and if you have never seen it before, I highly recommend you stop reading right now and give it a chance.  When you get back we can begin.

Or are we ending?  Or are we somewhere in the middle?  See, that’s something that happens when you watch Dr. Who…you lose a little bit of your sense of reality as we know it.  So what, in all of space and time, could we possibly talk about in reference to Dr. Who? Well let’s talk about how old he is.

Depending on where you are at in the series, he’s either around 900, over 4.5 billion, or just over 950.  The problem with any of those numbers is, they aren’t in chronological order within the series itself.

Let’s take a beat here and explain something.  The Doctor is a time traveling alien from the planet Gallifrey.  Occasionally he dies and regenerates into a new incarnation.  That’s a plot device the show uses to justify changing out actors every so often and allowing the series to move forward with new storylines.  Now, the Doctor’s 7^th incarnation states in an episode that he’s 953 years old, but his 9^th incarnation explicitly states that he’s just 900 years old.  Now if you follow the Doctor’s incarnations, the years should follow suit.  The higher the numbers in incarnation, the higher numbers in age, right?  Oh to be young and old again.

So let’s look at exactly what I’m talking about:  The 1^st Doctor quotes his age as being somewhere in the range of 236 years old towards the beginning of his adventures, and when he regenerates into his second incarnation, he’s 450.  That’s pretty straight forward.  That implies that during the course of his adventures he lived about 226 years on and off screen.  Okay, cool.

The second incarnation says towards the end of his run that he’s 500 years old which is also fine.  That means during the course of his adventures he lived 50 years.  It’s the 3^rd incarnation where things get a little sticky, he states that his life has covered many thousands of years.  We’re going to come back to that because that language is very important.

The Fourth incarnation, and fan favorite, says his age is 748, but then throughout the run of this incarnation he claims to be anywhere between 400 and 1000.  Another Time Lord mentions in the series that after the first 200 years most tend to loose count.

Later the 6^th incarnation says he’s 953, then the 9^th incarnation says he’s 900.  You really see how it all jumps around, but why does it jump around?  Is this just evidence of bad writing, a lack of continuity within the series itself?

Actually, no, when you take into count how we calculate age cannot work for the Doctor.  The Doctor spends a fair amount of time separated from the time stream, so his life is not aligned with ours.  Lets look at the situation from our perspective.  We are born, we live so many years, then we die.  It’s a very straight line from cause to effect, beginning middle and end.  If you were born in 1979 and died in 2079, you lived exactly 100 years.  End of story.

Now let’s look at that from a time traveler’s point of view.  You are born in 1979.  In 2009 you get into the TARDIS and are taken back to 1879.  The way you calculate your age has effectively halted, and you are stuck at 30 years old.  You cannot go in reverse; you can’t suddenly be negative 100 or 130 year old.  You’re measuring tool for time has literally come to a screeching halt.  Now the TARDIS takes you to 2179.  Are you 30 or 200 years old now?  Technically speaking you are both.  If you measure your age by when you were born to what year it is right now for you, then you are in fact 200 years old.  But you are also only 30 years old because you haven’t aged a year since 2009, you weren’t present in the time stream for all 200 years.  So you’re sitting there in a little café in 2179 and someone comes up to you and asks how old you are, what is your answer? If you answered “Somewhere between 30 and 200…” you now look like a lunatic.

If we try to track the Doctor’s back and forth movement through time from the point of his birth, then we might be able to get some sense of how old he actually is, but we can never nail it down because he spends different lengths of time in different years.  The 12^th Doctor spends 4.5 billion years stuck in a box at one point.  Or does he?  That too is a little difficult to gauge because that takes place on Gallifrey which has a different sense of time than Earth does.  Time is a mutable thing for Time Lords, and while the Doctor may have spent 4.5 billion years in the box, it may have only been a month for Gallifrey.  It might have only been a few minutes for that matter.  Or maybe he just got in the box right then and there.

So much about physics affects how we understand time.  The twin example is a good one, where one twin goes into space at light speed while the other stays on earth.  The twin in space is travels for 40 years but doesn’t age because time is halted for him, while the one on earth ages 40 years.  When space-twin gets back, he’s still the same age, while the one on earth is 40 years older…but they’re still twins, and still the same age.

Ultimately it’s the show’s producers who have the final say on how old the Doctor is supposed to be and they have a very interesting answer:

“The thing I keep banging on about is that he doesn't know what age he is. He's lying. How could he know, unless he's marking it on a wall? He could be 8,000 years old, he could be a million. He has no clue. The calendar will give him no clues.” Steven Moffatt

Hopefully you now have a better understanding of why that is.  Anyway, thanks for reading and we’ll see you next…time.

How Big Could Harry Potter's World Possibly Be?

Earlier today, Google + member Amy Wan posted the following:

“I know this is a slightly less approached topic but: why are the wizarding wars called wars? I think that this is very much overstepping the definition of war especially because in the second war there was like 12-30 people on each side. That puts world wars into perspective doesn't it? You can argue that there are the giants as well but that's still a tiny amount. So all in all I think "war" is a much to delicate term for a few scuffles here and there.” (Amy Wan, Google +, Fandoms United Sept. 20th, 2016)

There were some back and forths in the comments section and I had a few points to plug in here and there, then I got to thinking about the scope of what she was talking about.  Voldemort was a villain known to the entire wizarding world.  They said that, in the books and the films…entire wizarding world.  Just how big could the wizarding world be?  Of course I took it too far!

Well, I think we need to kind of peel back some layers.  Amy has a point in saying that a conflict that small shouldn't necessarily be considered a "war", however I did some math on the matter.  J.K. Rowling says that there are about 1000 students attending Hogwarts at any given time.  Her words, so I'm going to take her as the definitive authority on the matter.  Now breaking that down between 4 houses is about 250 per house.  Hogwarts is massive so that’s not that hard to believe.  We only see the world from Harry's point of view so we really don't know what everyone else is doing, we don't know exactly how many "sub" teachers there are attending to everyone else.  And this isn't counting ghosts or magical creatures.  So 250 per house, broken down by 7 years is 35 students per grade level.  Each year brings in roughly 140 new students (35 per house across 4 houses) and sends off into the wizarding world approximately 140 graduating.  So all of this checks out given the size of the school we are dealing with

If Hogwarts is considered our control, that means that each of those thousand students has to have approximately 2 parents each, a mother and father, compensating for students who have multiple generations looking after them (grandparents, uncles and such living in the home) and those having no magical parents (muggle born) who may or may not be lumped into the wizarding community.  That gives us so far a population of 3000 just on parents and students currently attending Hogwarts, not counting the recently graduated, the childless, the unmarried, or those not yet old enough to attend Hogwarts.  Lets say that each family has roughly 2.5 kids, for kicks.  One graduated, one attending, and one not there yet.  So that compensates for the unmarried and the ones not in school, plus 2 parents.  2.5 also compensates for families like Draco's who only have one reported child (I don't think we ever heard of Draco having any siblings) because families like the Weasley's certainly make up the difference.  Remember nobody is shocked by the size of Ron's family so we can make a safe assumption that this isn't unusual.

Moving forward, that’s a population of 4500 wizards in Great Britain alone.

There are eight wizarding schools across the world, so that’s a very, very rough estimate of 36,000 living wizards across the world, probably a lot more than that if you factor in self-taught, and the undocumented and those in hiding.  Like I said, that’s not counting the magical creature community, which is probably at least that or higher.  Now we're not talking WWII level numbers here, but still nothing to sneeze at, especially if you considered parts of the non-wizarding world that got caught in the crossfire.  Remember the war spilled over and we are dealing with some serious power levels here.

A very special thanks to Amy Wan for inspiring this post, and to J.K. Rowling for giving us such a wealth of material to compulsively obsess over.

Comprehensive Study of Giant Fictional Worms...because science?

 

Good afternoon and welcome back.  Wow it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here.  So while I dust off a few things let me tell you why I’ve opened this treasure trove of nonsense up again.  Yesterday my best friend posted this picture to his Facebook page.

 

Immediately I saw more than a few things wrong with it.  After all a size chart should have everything to scale, which any sci-fi fan will tell you this is not, and more importantly, it doesn’t tell you how big anything is.  Of course I could just let it go and move on with my life.

No I couldn’t and I know that’s what he was plotting, the devious little devil.

No, I had to step back and really get into what the hell we were looking at here.  I’ve got a lot to say about each of these creature so I’m going to start off with the most controversial…the Sarlacc.

Why, you may ask, is the Sarlacc so controversial?  Because technically it shouldn’t even be on this list.  The critter shown in the picture isn’t actually the Sarlacc, but the creature’s tongue.  Yes, in Return of the Jedi, they are fighting above a giant open mouth, and the weird hand-puppet thing is actually the creature’s tongue.  However, since the creature is here, lets determine how big this part of the creature should be.

 

Yep, that’s it.  That thing is probably no more than six to eight feet across, with a mouth about six to eight feet deep.  How do we know that?  Glad you asked.  For reference we use the tentecles that are extending from around the tongue, which don’t appear to get more than a foot in diameter the further down you get.  There isn’t much taper from the base to the end, and its small enough to wrap around Han Solo’s foot.  Or in this case, Bob.

This is Bob, he’s our character stand in, and he is about 6 feet tall.  Why six feet you ask? Hold that thought.

Next we come to my personal favorite monster movie, Tremors, where we have the Graboids!  I could gush about the brilliance of these movie monsters in a blog unto itself, and I probably will now, but for right now, Bob, please stand next to the Graboid.  Don’t worry, it won’t bite.  Hard.

 

Using the film as our point of comparison, we know that the creature’s head isn’t more than about five to six feet long with a maw of about four or five feet wide, because we actually see the monster eat a human being whole and half his body is left dangling out.

Now remember how I said we made Bob six feet tall?  That’s because that is how tall Geena Davis is, and Geena Davis actually rides the sandworm in Beetlejuice.  If that isn’t imperical evidence of size, I don’t know what is.  Using that basis, the picture below shows the head is probably about ten to twelve feet long, basically about the size of your average 4 door sedan.

 

Of course if you looked at the “size chart” above, you’d be led to believe that the monsters were all about the same size and slightly smaller than the sand worms from the Dune series.

 

Wow, that couldn’t be more off if they’d tried.  I was limited on the amount of paper I had on my sketch pad and still wanted Bob here to be visible but the sand worms from Dune are about 148 feet in diameter.  So the creature looming over Bob here is smaller by comparison to those in the official canon of the Dune saga.

What it boils down to is that a sand worm from Dune towers over these other creatures, and the Sarlacc shouldn’t even be here.

Also, please check out Lake Haven Blues by William Dilbeck, available on Amazon.com  William Dilbeck, as you may have guessed, is my best friend who started this whole insane thing in the first place.  Thanks WILL!!!

And that’s what I do with my lunch breaks.  Have a great week everyone!

 

Sarlacc is owned by Disney and Lucasfilms

Tremors is owned by Stampede Entertainment and produced by Universal Pictures

Beetlejuice and all associated creatures were created by Tim Burton and owned by Warner Bros.

Dune the film was produced by Dino De Laurentiis Corporation

Size chart was created by danmeth.com

Additional art was drawn by Michael Bauch really quickly to put into production and he apologizes.