My Batman Utility Belt

If you're like me, you too have a passive hobby building your own Batman utility belt. It isn't so much about weapons as it is items that you might want to have in your utility belt, if you were Batman. (And you never know.) Now, given that you are a normal person, like myself, this hobby usually boils down not so much to building things in your secret lab/walk in closet as it does to buying basically useless items from Sharper Image. Beyond the collection of useless and highly breakable items that were sent to you without batteries and then quickly forgotten, the creation of the Batman utility belt does have one other hidden drawback...

It puts you on the list.

The odd, impractical weapons as decorations list. This may be the single most useless object I have ever been offered. Nothing quite says 'Nitwit' like a flimsy, decorative battle axe. Imagine for a moment the various different and amusing ways that this can fall off the wall. It's like a live Christmas tree on a shag carpet: you will be vacuuming up bits of it forever. I am taking a pass on weapons until the retractable batarang becomes available, but that's just me. As for this thing, the only people who will ever be harmed by it are you and the garbage man. I only give it a 40/60 on surviving the wall hanging attempt.

By the way: not a chick magnet. Having bought at least one useless item of any kind, your post office will soon be presenting you with offers that make one's mind wander to places that it should not. Such as...

Remember, Batman only had to buy furniture once. As tempting as it may be to preserve your furniture the way you do your comic books, it is not, in point of fact, good form. I speak here from experience. Perhaps this is dating me, but I do know people who have done this to their living room sets. My own grandmother encased her 1949 white pit group and blue rotating chairs in tank armor gauge plastic. And there it stayed, through the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. They might as well have walled up the room for all of the use the pit group got. Hint: once enclosed, the covers do not come off. If you are tempted to do this, I suggest you forgo the expense and effort of actually buying furniture and instead commission a wall sized mural of a fashionable parlor out of Home & Garden. In the end, it's the same difference--and it won't have the ugly plastic wrap on it.

(Warning: all furnishing plastic wrap will turn yellow after 20 years.)

The only real use I can see for this system is to keep pets off of furniture. Even then, it seems extreme. Thanks to modern technology, this task has now been automated...
This is something along the lines of Batman's shark repel spray and thus worthy of consideration for your belt, but there are a few drawbacks. First, note the drawing of the dog. That is a greyhound. Greyhounds do not bark. Greyhounds do not bother people. Unless you are a rabbit or have decided to walk around wearing beef, a greyhound is going to ignore you. (In general.) The only real representation here is that a greyhound will run away if startled. This is because in the flight/fight program of the Greyhound, flight is always the preferred option. This is not true of all dogs. Some dogs, such as those prone to charging and growling and barking and tearing flesh (such as the poodle) will not run away at a startling sound. Instead, they will advance. And they will know, as only they can, that the source of their annoyance is IN YOUR HANDS. Moreover, the operational range of this 'weapon' is about as the picture represents. Making a sudden move for the zappy thing will actually inspire the attack that you are arguably out to avoid. As if these drawback weren't enough, aiming what appears to be a taser at your neighbor's beloved family pet is a world of bad mojo just on its own.

A weapon similar to this was once offered to bear hunters and other insane let's-go-camping-near-bears types with some tragic consequences. For those of you who are really out to scare away cats and gophers, clapping your hands above your head works just as well.

In truth, this is a bad guy weapon. Its only real use is premeditated. You bought this to annoy, not to prevent. You want to drive your cat nuts. You hate the neighbor's dog. You are just looking for an excuse to do something mean to one of God's little critters because your life is entirely without meaning and you have a pin cushion for a soul (an analog not of memories to be enjoyed but rather failed grudges to be played out over and over again.) You are headed for a one car funeral, or one of these...


Let's face some facts here: people have had sex or died nearly everywhere you are likely to be. Everywhere. Got it? If we start littering the world with logos every place either has occurred, we are going to run out of room for furniture to wrap in plastic. Just as it is entirely inappropriate to leave a marker in aisle six of the Winn-Dixie stating 'Joel Macomb was created here in a brief but passionate interlude on March 7th, 1999' it is also just as out of place to sprout markers at the intersections where drunks have died.

(And let's face it, that's who these roadside dead largely are. Every marker might as well read 'Car full of drunks dead here.')

Unless I am missing something, there is already a fairly well established process for remembering the dead. There's some kind of thing that happens involving a priest the deceased never met, some overpriced soil, an overpriced box, an overpriced cut stone and a dinner that takes place. And if you really want to go down memory lane for some reason, there are these parks full of dead people that you can visit. The necessity of marking the spot of death in the public way therefor escapes me.

If I were charitable, I would make an exception for victims of mass shootings or school bus accidents. That's really where this started. But enough, already. The practice is now entirely out of hand. Bury your dead and visit them where they are. Leave the roads alone.

Coda
Next I will tell you about the wonderful world of the Commuter Library, an obscure branch of the pulp fiction universe. The Alex Hillman feature will be on the website in a few weeks. In the mean time, I will be sharing some unusual findings about pulp magazine history. Because that is my subject, when I am not picking on the grieving.