Real Superheroes Are A Little Crazy

While I was on vacation this Christmas, I was lucky enough to grab the newest article of Rolling Stone and read "The Legend of Master Legend." I haven't read anything so funny in a long time.

I highly recommend reading this brilliant article that details the exploits of real life superheroes. Their main focus is on the man on the right in the photo, his name is Master Legend and he makes his own weapons to fight crime. And he give socks to homeless people to help fight staph infections.

While their hearts are in the right place, I have to believe there's less insane ways to save the world. Still, it's hard to resist adoring their great stories:
There was the time Master Legend and the Ace shut down a crack den; the drug kingpin they put out of business; the money Master Legend forcibly retrieved from a thief who stole from a handicapped Vietnam vet; and the recent mission when the Justice Force had to "put the stomp on a child molester and his gang of crackheads." They had a plan, but things went awry when Master Legend's brother was captured in the thick of battle by the child molester, whom they call Tree Man Roy.

UPDATE: For more pictures and a touch more info from the author of the article itself, be sure to visit this link.

Link

Comments (14)

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Newest 5 Comments

Ya know, I went into this article after reading the description expecting to be amused by a couple of people acting like jackasses... and I kinda did, but I also came out feeling somewhat amazed. The writing is dripping with sarcasm but it fails to put this guy out. This dude is _into_ it.

Plus, you can't really knock anyone who who makes it their sole duty to honestly try and help people even during his day job above anything else. That takes balls, delusional or not. Good for him that he's actually doing something he loves and committing his life to it. Thanks for posting this.
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Something about this appeals to me in an odd way. As crazy as they seems, there's something... just neat about the idea of helping people and fighting crime. A life of adventure and knowing you're making people's lives better. Oh, sure, I'm sure it's dangerous as all hell, but you'd probably feel good at the end of the day.
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They will all fall prey to the disease. All cavendish bananas are genetically identical--like clones, so there is no genetic diversity, and thus possibility for immunity in some small area, so there is no way to repopulate with resistant bananas. This is the same thing that happened back in the 60's, as mentioned in the article. Banana growers have known that this would be a problem since then, but they did nothing to prevent it. We'll just all have to switch to a new, likely less tasty variety.
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there is no genetic diversity, and thus possibility for immunity in some small area

Hmm. Exactly the thing my genetics prof tried drilling into us when he'd rip into the big corporate farms with patents on genotypes.
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When I was in Bali I got to have little bananas for breakfast every day. They were so much better than our US imports! I'm guessing the cavendish wasn't chosen because of flavor or texture, but some trait that allows it to travel and store well.
The part of this that scares me is that African staple foods are at risk.
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Ah, the joys of a monoculture.

@Homer
A lot of the people who go around saying "Well, look at bananas (or housecats, or corn, or whatever)! Obviously they were created by an intelligent being!" fail to take into account that almost all of the plants and animals humans surround themselves with have been heavily altered by humans. Corn was bred from a type of grass; wild bananas from thousands of years ago were doubtless just as different. We manipulate evolution to benefit ourselves, and this (the banana blight) is the consequence of breeding for ease of use without regard to the dangers of a monoculture.
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Would there be any way to take the wild bananas that the ones we eat evolved from and once again manipulate them to evolve into edible bananas? Or are the wild bananas also affected by Panama disease?
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DOJ: Commercialized bananas are sterilized to reproduce asexually, thus they have no seeds. They were all identical copies with hardly any genetic variations, and were multiplied by artificial planting methods.

(Some wild bananas do have seeds, like how watermelons are used to be.)
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I think I must clear something up with the anti-creationism crowd here. Creationists/Intelligent Design scientists AGREE that the kind of "evolution" talked about here happens (i.e. variations of bananas).

The difference is whether the fruits we have today merely evolved from other fruits from a long time ago, or whether they evolved from primordial soup or aliens or whatever.

By the way: Intelligent Christians don't get their science from Kirk Cameron or whoever that other guy is in the video. I like Kirk, but he doesn't represent the Christians well is the science department.
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Gibson8or has good commentary.

As a practical matter, generally diseases like that affect an entire species pretty uniformly. So while relying on a single cultivar like 'Cavendish' doesn't help, in truth, probably the whole species will be affected. What sometimes happens though, is that a rare individual plants *within* a species exhibit some degree of atypical resistance. When that happens, the resistant plant can be cloned (usually through age-old vegetative means such as cuttings) and then crossed with existing cultivars such as 'Cavendish' in the hope that a variety can be produced that has the good features of 'Cavendish' without the disease susceptibility.

This is a great plan, but it can take decades and decades... such has been the case with producing a American Chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight -- that was introduced in 1904 and has completely decimated the U.S. Chestnut forests.

While there have been some individual trees within the native chestnut species that exhibited some resistance, most of the effort on finding a blight-proof solution has been doing crosses with other species that are more resistant (but otherwise lamer trees). So they start off by crossing a blight-sensitive American Chestnust with a blight-resistant Chinese Chestnut ( a different species) and select the most resistant "children" (seedlings) and then backcross these with American chestnuts. The idea is that in the end you have a tree that is almost indistinguishable from an American Chestnut, but is blight-resistant. This can take 8 or more backcrosses & since chestnuts takes years to fruit (and have seeds) it can take a long long time.

It sounds like something must be needed for bananas. They'll need to cross seeded cultivars with other species that are more resistant, come up with something resistant and then get to work at developing a seedless cultivar thereafter. It will be a ot of work, but the banana market is huge, so they'll have the bucks to do it. Time is time, however...
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