The Legend
Like every single human being on the planet with an e-mail account, I get lots and lots and lots of e-mails full of vague advice on how I can make my penis larger and please "her" more. No idea who this woman might be, but whatever. I also get an occasional e-mail advising me that my breasts could be larger and containing a link that (of course) I never click; I can only assume that there is some spammer in the world who thinks the entire population of the world consists of underwhelmingly-endowed, small-chested hermaphrodites.
Which, considering the quantities of agricultural hormones and hormone-simulating pollutants that end up in the water supply, may actually prove to eventually be the case. Yet another thing few, if any, Golden Age SF authors got right--no flying cars, no Mars colonies, no city-sized supercomputers, no vestigial hermaphrodites; nice call, Heinlein and Asimov.
But this post isn't about that. Nor, frankly, is it about my penis or man-boobs. You're welcome.
No, this post is about the wonderful caption that appeared in my junkmail folder the other day:
Which, considering the quantities of agricultural hormones and hormone-simulating pollutants that end up in the water supply, may actually prove to eventually be the case. Yet another thing few, if any, Golden Age SF authors got right--no flying cars, no Mars colonies, no city-sized supercomputers, no vestigial hermaphrodites; nice call, Heinlein and Asimov.
But this post isn't about that. Nor, frankly, is it about my penis or man-boobs. You're welcome.
No, this post is about the wonderful caption that appeared in my junkmail folder the other day:
RE: You will be the Legend of the 10inch manhood...
"The Legend Of The 10-inch Manhood." This amuses me, I think because usually that's a phrasing you see in the English titles of Asian martial arts movies like The Legend Of Drunken Master or The Legend of Musashi. Is "The Legend Of The 10-inch Manhood" a mighty warrior who fights with... well, you get the idea. Or perhaps it's an object found in a remote, exotic temple, much like the idol Indiana Jones has to recover with a sandbag in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. (Great, now I'm imagining Alfred Molina yelling, "Throw me the schlong!" That's going to be a mental scene that's easy to get rid of.)
Among the more obscure usages of the word "manhood" is "men collectively," i.e. mankind, and I think this is the best mental scene of all: a Gulliver-esque visitor to a land full of 10" men would probably be a martial arts legend, indeed; he wouldn't even have to be particularly good at any martial art more sophisticated than stomping around a lot. I write this with the caveat that I remember Stephen King's "Battleground," a short story about a man getting his ass whipped by toy soldiers. So I'll acknowledge that, yes, our normal-dude-in-a-land-of-little-men needs to be careful if the minimen are armed.
On a tangent: in writing the above, I also seem to recall a television show in the 1980s blatantly ripping off the King story (which apparently was adapted by Richard Christian Matheson for the Nightmares And Dreamscapes miniseries which I haven't seen and, no, isn't what I'm thinking of). As best as I can tell, the "man-attacked-by-toy-soldiers" show I'm thinking of almost has to be an episode of a short-lived ABC anthology series from 1981 called Darkroom, "Siege Of 31 August". I think that has to be it from the scant plot summaries available online; the only clip I could find had been taken down, and who's to say I'd recognize it after, oh crap, twenty-nine years anyway? Indeed, I'd forgotten the TV show Darkroom ever existed in the first place (and seems to have been a possible long-lost inspiration for Garth Marenghi's Darkplace).
Can anyone confirm my elderly memory?
Anyway, assuming the ten-inch men are armed with... well, nothing (they could be armed with toothpicks and it would hurt like a bitch), the Legend Of The 10-inch Manhood would indeed be a fearsome... well, legend. A nice hard punt and one of those poor petite bastards would fly. The Legend would be revered as a god, which I suppose is what the spam is trying to promise in the first place, though I expect with the great power of being nearly seven times taller than anybody else in the world would come great loneliness. It's hard not to set yourself above everybody you know when... you're above everyone you know.
I have to confess I don't know how to end this post, so we'll leave it at that--there's no end to what you might do with this unoriginal premise, or what's been done already. May the Legend live on, etc.
Among the more obscure usages of the word "manhood" is "men collectively," i.e. mankind, and I think this is the best mental scene of all: a Gulliver-esque visitor to a land full of 10" men would probably be a martial arts legend, indeed; he wouldn't even have to be particularly good at any martial art more sophisticated than stomping around a lot. I write this with the caveat that I remember Stephen King's "Battleground," a short story about a man getting his ass whipped by toy soldiers. So I'll acknowledge that, yes, our normal-dude-in-a-land-of-little-men needs to be careful if the minimen are armed.
On a tangent: in writing the above, I also seem to recall a television show in the 1980s blatantly ripping off the King story (which apparently was adapted by Richard Christian Matheson for the Nightmares And Dreamscapes miniseries which I haven't seen and, no, isn't what I'm thinking of). As best as I can tell, the "man-attacked-by-toy-soldiers" show I'm thinking of almost has to be an episode of a short-lived ABC anthology series from 1981 called Darkroom, "Siege Of 31 August". I think that has to be it from the scant plot summaries available online; the only clip I could find had been taken down, and who's to say I'd recognize it after, oh crap, twenty-nine years anyway? Indeed, I'd forgotten the TV show Darkroom ever existed in the first place (and seems to have been a possible long-lost inspiration for Garth Marenghi's Darkplace).
Can anyone confirm my elderly memory?
Anyway, assuming the ten-inch men are armed with... well, nothing (they could be armed with toothpicks and it would hurt like a bitch), the Legend Of The 10-inch Manhood would indeed be a fearsome... well, legend. A nice hard punt and one of those poor petite bastards would fly. The Legend would be revered as a god, which I suppose is what the spam is trying to promise in the first place, though I expect with the great power of being nearly seven times taller than anybody else in the world would come great loneliness. It's hard not to set yourself above everybody you know when... you're above everyone you know.
I have to confess I don't know how to end this post, so we'll leave it at that--there's no end to what you might do with this unoriginal premise, or what's been done already. May the Legend live on, etc.
Comments
(I've been an Alfred Molina fan since I saw him in Art, a Tony-award winning three man play. The other two actors? Alan Alda and Victor Garber [both of whom I was already a fan of]. Yeah, it was pretty cool. And Molina managed to steal scenes from those two. That's amazing.)
I'm a little envious you got to see him on stage, CE!