You Might Be a Zombie . . . (13 page)

Why would anyone go to work after that? How do you think starving third-world nations would regard their machine masters, knowing that their misery is purely the invention of the machines and that the Matrix could have rained food down from the sky any time it wanted?

The world would descend into utter chaos. Luckily, the people can escape the madness anytime they want by exiting the Matrix!

Oh, wait, they can’t. In the real world outside the Matrix, the one city where people could live has been devastated by the robot attack, and there is nothing close to enough housing, food, clothing, fresh water, or anything else to accommodate even a small country.

Hey, thanks for waking us up, asshole!

1.
TOY STORY 3

The “happy” ending

Woody, Buzz, and most of our favorites from
Toy Story 1
and
2
narrowly escape a freaky daycare ful of creepy, manipulative toys and dangerous, thoughtless brats. Our heroes return home and Andy, before leaving for col ege, donates the gang to a little girl named Bonnie, ensuring the toys a carefree future of playing with a sweet and lovable girl forever and ever!

Wait a minute . . .

Until Bonnie throws them away.

The toys don’t age along with their human owners. Sure, Andy was kind enough to donate them to a little girl, but who
knows
what’l happen when she grows up? The best-case scenario is that Bonnie keeps them around long enough for them to watch her die of old age.

Of course, unless Bonnie suffers some sort of head trauma, she’l be interested for another few years max. Hel , Little Bo Peep never even made it to
Toy Story 3
. It’s far more likely that they’l eventual y wind up at the bottom of a rotting compost heap, sandwiched between an empty pizza box and a copy of
ASS!
Magazine. At least the hel ish trash incinerator we see in
Toy Story 3
offers a quick way out.

With a fate like that in store, it’s no wonder 90 percent of all fiction involving sentient dol s ends with them trying to kil their owners.

LUCKILY,
we slept through high school, but we’ve got some bad news for those of you unfortunate enough to have stayed awake: Every bril iant inventor you’ve ever loved is a huge thieving asshole.

5. GALILEO GALILEI

If you asked the average high schooler what Galileo’s lasting contribution to science was, they would most likely reply, “The telescope,” before going off to smoke some grass and listen to Bon Jovi records (hey, we were in high school once too, you know). well, imaginary high school student, put down that Atari and prepare to have your mind blown: Galileo did not invent the telescope. (Also, if you start
Slippery When Wet
and
The Wizard of Oz
at the same time, it sort of looks like the Tin Man is lip-synching for about two seconds of “Livin’ on a Prayer.”)
Who actually invented it?

Lots of scientists were looking up at the stars back then, but no one was doing it quite as hard as Dutchman Hans Lippershey. In 1608, Lippershey completed construction of the first telescope and attempted to receive a patent for it but was denied.

A few countries over, when Galileo heard about Lippershey’s work in 1609, he quickly built his own telescope, one that could see just a little bit farther than Lippershey’s. Necessary? Not particularly. Emasculating? Oh, you betcha. While Galileo never registered a patent, the fact remains that his name is synonymous with telescopes, while Lippershey’s name was quickly forgotten.

The lesson, as always, is that having an unwieldy, nonal iterative name that sounds like an STD is never good for your career.

4. ALEXANDER FLEMING

Sir Alexander Fleming is the name people think of when penicil in is brought up. There’s even a charming little story that accompanies it: Fleming’s father saved a little boy from drowning in Scotland, and the father of this boy vowed to fund the young Fleming’s education to repay the kindness. Eventual y, Fleming graduated from med school and discovered the healing nature of penicil in, which eventual y saved Winston Churchil ’s life when he was stricken with pneumonia. And who was the boy that Fleming’s father saved? Winston goddamned Churchil .

Two things. One, Churchil wasn’t treated with penicil in. Two, Fleming wasn’t the guy who discovered it. Just some asshole.

Who actually discovered it?

North African tribesmen had been using penicil in for thousands of years by the time Fleming was born. Also, in 1897 Ernest Duchesne used the mold
Penicillum glaucoma
to cure typhoid in guinea pigs, which was about the stupidest waste of time in the history of science but still proof that he understood the mold’s healing properties.

Other scientists at the time didn’t take him seriously, due to his age and strange preoccupation with guinea pigs, so he never received a patent. He died about ten years later, from a disease that would have been completely treatable with penicil in, and he was survived by his healthy, yet totally indifferent, guinea pigs.

Even when Fleming did accidental y discover penicil in years later, he didn’t think it could be used to help anyone, so he moved on. Meanwhile, scientists Howard Florey, Norman Heatley, Andrew Moyer, and Ernst Chain disagreed and worked with penicil in until they’d mastered it.

So even though Fleming wasn’t the first person to discover penicil in and didn’t actually believe penicil in was useful, he will forever go down in history as a penicil in-inventing, Winston Churchil -saving genius.

3. ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL

For being the man behind the telephone, Bel sure loved deaf people. His wife was deaf, his mother was deaf, and he was even Helen Keller’s favorite teacher. With this near obsession with deaf people, it’s amazing that Bel found time to invent the telephone. Wait, not
amazing
.
Impossible
. That’s the one.

Who actually invented it?

In 1860, an Italian named Antonio Meucci first demonstrated his working telephone (though he called it the
teletrofono
, because Italian is a ridiculous language). In 1871, he filed a temporary patent, but in 1874 he failed to send in the ten dol ars necessary to renew his patent, because he was sick, poor, and Italian.

Two years later, Bel registered his telephone patent. Meucci attempted to sue, of course, but when he tried to retrieve the original sketches and plans he sent to a lab at Western Union, the records, amazingly, had disappeared. Where was Bel working at this time? The very same Western Union lab where Meucci swore he sent his original sketches.

Did Bel , given his convenient position at Western Union, destroy Meucci’s records and claim the telephone as his own invention? It’s difficult to say, though it has been argued fairly convincingly that, yes, of course he did. Absolutely. Most notably, by us just now. It makes sense, if you look at the facts: Bel already had a number of important inventions under his belt; it isn’t unreasonable to assume that he got greedy and didn’t want to see anyone else succeed. Further, who is Bel even cal ing? His deaf wife and mother? Bul shit.

2. ALBERT EINSTEIN

When you hear the name Einstein, you undoubtedly think, “He discovered relativity,” or “He came up with that E = mc2 equation,” or “He was a sex maniac.” Only one of those things is true. (It’s the sex maniac part.)

Who actually invented it?

Henri Poincaré was the foremost expert on relativity in the late nineteenth century, having published thirty respected books and over five hundred papers on the subject, which is strange, because Einstein’s famous
On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
, which contains his theories on relativity, doesn’t mention Poincaré once. As a matter of fact, Einstein does not reference, footnote, or cite a single goddamn source in his entire paper.

We don’t want to jump to any conclusions. Maybe Einstein’s paper didn’t contain any sources because he was so smart he didn’t need any other current physics texts. But according to Peter Galison’s
Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time
, Einstein and a small group of his fel ow nerdlings had a group called the Olympia Academy, which would regularly gather to discuss their own works as wel as the works of current scientists. The book goes on to mention specifical y how Poincaré was one of the scientists who Einstein and his battalion of nerds discussed.

Shoots that whole “maybe Einstein didn’t read any other papers” theory right to shit, doesn’t it? It’s interesting that Einstein sat studying and discussing the work of Poincaré for years, published a book that featured a theory that was startlingly similar to Poincaré’s, and then didn’t reference Poincaré once in his book. Wait, that isn’t interesting; it’s total bul shit. Good luck sexing your way out of this one, Einstein.

1. THOMAS EDISON

Edison has been described as one of the “world’s most prolific inventors,” with 1,093 patents to his name. You know, a guy could round up and kidnap a shitload of children and keep them forever, but would you cal that guy the “world’s most prolific father”? No, of course not. A “soul ess monster,” maybe. A“skilled thief,” if you’re being generous, but you wouldn’t cal that guy “the world’s most prolific father,” because those aren’t his kids. He stole them. Such is the case with Thomas Edison.

Edison is celebrated in schools across the country for inventing the lightbulb, the motion picture, electricity, and a bunch of other important crap he had

very little to do with, and while all of those claims are spurious, we’re just going to focus on the lightbulb today (we’ve only got 320 pages, you understand).

Who actually invented it?

Plenty of people messed around with the idea of the lightbulb (Jean Foucault, Humphry Davy, J. W. Starr, some other guys you’l never read about in school), but Heinrich Göbel was likely the first person to have actually created, back in 1854, a version of the lightbulb that resembled the one we have today. He tried sel ing it to Edison, who saw no practical use in it and refused. Soon after Göbel died, Edison bought Göbel’s “meritless” patent off Göbel’s impoverished widow at a cost much lower than its worth.

Screwing over just one inventor might be all right for Galileo, but Edison was a dreamer. A year before Edison “invented” his lightbulb, Joseph Wilson Swan developed and patented a better bulb. When it became clear Edison’s “this guy Swan’s a lying asshole” defense wouldn’t hold up in court, he made Swan a partner, forming the Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company (known as Ediswan), effectively buying Swan.

Thomas Edison: Father of the goddamned lightbulb.

Edison then used his incredible wealth to buy out Swan completely, leaving all records of the lightbulb under the care of the Edison Electric Light Company. Sure, Swan got rich in the end, but Edison purchased the right to claim he invented the lightbulb. Of course, there’s a whole laundry list of inventors Edison stepped on, bul ied, exploited, or convinced to name their price. But what do textbooks say about him?