Having super powers is just the best thing ever. Well, it would be, I guess. I’m told that I possess the actual super power of being able to innately introduce complication to journeys, and I’ve always suspected I’ve got some kind of time dilation field following me around… but for the sake of this week’s Top Ten I figured I’d list 10 super powers which I’d like to have.
10. The ability to be able to transform oneself into a shower curtain.
Admittedly this would purely be for pervy reasons, and of course would also involve a certain amount of stealth/ninja ability in order to gain entrance to the person’s bathroom in the first instance. You couldn’t pop in to visit a really hot chick and then nip into the bathroom & transform, because she’d probably be more preoccupied with figuring out where the person she’d just left in the living room had gotten to than about popping in for a quick nude frolic under some warm water.
9. Being able to turn water into beer.
Without all the pratting about that the homebrew process involves, I mean.
8. Flying.
Although I wasn’t picturing the whole “zooming about like Superman” schtick – it’d most likely be more like the kind of flying I used to dream about, which was more like swimming through the air. You could quite easily clear a house, or a set of powerlines, but I don’t think it falls into the “leaping tall buildings with a single bound” category. Ultimately valuable for saving time travelling because you’ve only got to travel “as the crow flies” and not bother with corners.
7. Being able to transport yourself to a road in another place with the same name as the one you are now on but only if you can get moving really quickly.
Hmm, another transport one. It popped into my mind because I was on Regent Street the other day, and I remembered that there’s another street called Regent Street not far from my parents’ place in Adelaide. It’d therefore be intriguing if somehow these two were linked in some way, and a person who achieved the correct velocity (akin to Marty McFly’s 88 mph) and possessed the power to do so could zip from one to the other in the blink of an eye. Of course you’d be screwed if in the meantime somebody renamed the road you were planning to use, but then Google Maps would more than likely help you find handy substitutes. Another problem might be deceleration at the other end in the case that the road you’re zipping over to was a lot shorter than the one you started from.
6. Being able to sense the history of an object by smooshing it up against your face.
I’m always fascinated by old stuff, and wonder how cool it might be to be able to see some of the things an ancient object might have seen (e.g. a brick in the wall of a medieval walled city, or a Viking broadsword). I’ll freely confess that this one made my wishlist after I’d seen it on 80’s TV show “The Greatest American Hero”. Plus you’d be able to tell for certain whether the pen/stapler/copy of Led Zeppelin IV was yours originally and someone had nicked it from your desk/shelf, as you secretly suspected…
5. It’d be neat to be able to concentrate on another person within line of sight and be able to communicate with them directly into their brain, without having to speak.
Sort of a form of telepathy, but with limitations. Primarily I’d have liked this power around early August – I could have used it to ask out Mystery Sandwich Girl!
4. Some sort of time dilation bubble.
Something like the ability to concentrate really hard to slow time down for other people in a certain area, such that I could appear to get more done in the same span of time. The chief application of this would, I’m sorry to say, be to counteract the current time dilation around me which takes place in the opposite direction.
3. Queue clairvoyance.
To glance at a collection of queues and intuit correctly which one will result in the shortest waiting time.
2. To be able to communicate with anyone in any language by speaking English in the accent of whatever language you were trying to talk to.
Yes. I wish that real life were exactly like ‘Allo ‘Allo. The only problem of course is that – assuming you were the only person who had this power – you would never be able to do impressions of foreign accents again to your friends, as they’d hear you in the language of the country whose accent you were speaking in.
1. The power to make people who stop right in front of you when you’re walking along spontaneously combust.
It makes total sense, truly – if someone’s walking along directly in front of you, and then stops dead still, just to be able to point at them and have them vaporise into a little green globule would be about the best thing ever. I’m not on for the wholesale vaporisation of people, but come on – stopping abruptly (unless the person in front of them has stopped abruptly) is just inexcusable.
Pretty kickarse list, eh?