The Best Man

I came up with a group of supervillains the other day.

The idea is a companion piece to my group of heroes, The Bike Brigade.

I like to think the two groups are linked because they are both supremely impressive works of a keen imaginative artist. But there's a possibility that their similarity is due to them being mainly puns on a single idea. But who's to say whether a derivative trunk will lead to derivative branches? No-one is to say that. The most original of leaves can spring from a lame-ass oak.

So, here it is.

The main villain is The Matrimoniac.

She's an insane woman, who is obsessed with marrying people. She wears a veil to hide her identity, throws explosive bouquets and ties tin cans to the backs of her prospective victims.

She also sends invitations warning her "fiancé" that their time is running out.

With all of these ideas, it's worth asking whether I am a sexist. Why is The Matrimoniac a woman? I could just have easily have made her a man. Isn't a wedding-obsessed female villain (explicitly presented as "crazy") terribly reductive?

Those are worthy questions. And having asked them makes me one of the most enlightened men you're likely to meet.

Keep in mind that three of the Bike Brigade are female, which accounts for nearly half. So, if anything, women are over-represented (as we all know they only make up 29% of the world population).

Also, The Matrimoniac will pursue men, women and transgender people. That makes me very open-minded. I also tried to look up the most up-to-date politically correct term for a transgender person (Are they transgendered? Can I use the abbreviation 'trans'?). This makes me even more open-minded, even though I didn't really find a definitive answer and just gave up after thirty seconds of research.

Admittedly, The Matrimoniac would never consider an inter-racial marriage. So in that sense, I am being conservative. But - and this is key - I haven't yet established which race The Matrimoniac belongs to! She wears a veil!

All in all, this is pretty watertight.

The Matrimoniac's gang includes:

The Bridal Party

Horrific, shrieking hen party: drunk, wearing angel wings and nurses' outfits, drunk, staggering, carrying shoes, urinating in the street.

Like all women do.

Ahaha! Not really! That was just some Gervaisian ironic prejudice! Remember all the stuff I wrote about earlier? I'm not sexist. I've proved it by raising sexism as a possibility and then immediately dismissing it.

Also - and this is key - The Bridal Party are made up of actual, human-sized hens. The birds, I mean.

So you can't be sexist against hens. Chickens don't have the same kind of social structure we have. The only pressure for hens is to lay eggs, and I fight against that pressure every day. A hen should control what goes into and what comes out of her own body. It's not up to some (largely rooster-filled) legislature to tell them what to do.

I've been doing my part by eating hens before they've had a chance to lay eggs. I've also eaten some eggs.

An Ordained Minister

The Matrimoniac will need someone who has marrying powers, otherwise each forced wedding will require a lot of admin. I haven't come up with a good name for the minister yet. Maybe The Great Ordain (like 'Great Dane'), or Vicarus (he or she can have wax wings).

The Witnesses

Two staring, mouthless apparitions, who must be present for the ceremony to be legitimate. They just stand there and stare. They're also there for the wedding night.

The Organist

Accompaniment, both musical and inside-out.


Basically, you can just pick any element of a wedding, and make a pun out of it. That's how these kinds of ideas work (wring-bearer = strangles people; page boy = is made of paper; usher = Usher (the singer); rice = poisoned rice).

Each attempt at forcible marriage will be thwarted, so as to take bigamy off the table. I'm not sick.

I'll sketch out some costume ideas.

***

I dropped my water bottle lid on the floor, so I had to get rid of it.

Not the floor, obviously. I meant the water bottle. If I'd have got rid of the floor, it would have caused a number of problems.

It's a communal office floor. To get rid of it would require a majority vote in favour. Organising the vote and counting the ballots would take a lot of time. So that's one mark against it.

Another consideration is the carpet. If we got rid of the floor, we'd have quite a large section of carpet to move. You can't recycle carpet. The council won't let me anymore. So we'd have to find somewhere to store it. It wouldn't fit in a filing cabinet. So we'd probably end up with rolls of carpet lining the walls. And that could be a fire hazard.

The third, and most salient, objection to removing the floor is that it would set a dangerous precedent. If we removed our floor, soon people in other offices would talk about doing the same. Mass floor removal would be a headache for the people in facilities.

All in all, I think removing the floor is a non-starter.

Where was I?

Oh yes: I bought a new water bottle.