Whether you are cornering a person of interest or retrieving one which has strayed away, the skill of how to conduct a manhunt is one of the core competencies of every evil supervillain worthy of the profession. It takes all one's intelligence and perceptivity to defeat the wiliest of quarries, whether it is tracking a fugitive through an urban jungle, scouring cyberspace to catch the elusive spoor, or hot pursuit of a desperate turncoat through booby-trapped passages you both know all too well. Perhaps there is even a car chase, one that necessarily ends in some sort of explosion.

It is all so terribly thrilling, with the restless action and the baying of the bloodhounds, the taut voices of the special ops and the eerie rituals of the clairvoyants, that I have known a couple of former supervillains who have spent far too much of their time playing at manhunt and neglecting the rest of their evil operations much to their detriment. I do not know why there is no manhunt reality program on television, where the contestants get air dropped into unfamiliar terrain with a modest head start and try their best to elude the relentless pursuit, the best of these going on to more challenging and dangerous settings in later rounds, till in the final round the gauntlet they must run is as close to lethal as the producers can get away with. It would be the incarnation of the anxiety dreams everyone has, where some unseen foe is closing in on one, closer and closer, and at the moment one is just about to be caught the sleeper jerks awake and shaky. That is just the kind of television I would watch, personally.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

There is already an abundance of sites which have advice on how to bring down our beloved Internet, so we have decided to forgo, for now, our own tips some of which involve gallium arsenide-seeking nanobots and the sudden liquidation of certain key celebrities, instead merely summarizing here some of the other offerings in this vein which an enterprising supervillain may find useful in working out the kinks for him- or herself.

1. Striking at the structure of the network
2. Severing the tender connection points with handtools
3. Some basic malware
4. Exert the might of totalitarian governments to ban it
5. All of the above plus spam

Let me note that you might want to wait to get started on any of these only after the weekend is through, in case the Midwest is devastated by a massive nuclear strike, disrupting all your work. I shall be in my pod.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

}Yet another entry in the weird animal beat: How to get rid of giant eagles. I hate these nasty snake-eating things and am only too happy to pass along any tips designed to harass or exterminate them if possible, though it is kind of like trying to discourage an active volcano from erupting and I am loathe to make it seem like this is a simple task. I have heard a lot of talk about supervillains banding together to get rid of those annoying "flying buses" which are blamed every time a captive goes missing, but have seen precious little concerted action being done about the problem. So the long and short of it is that if you happen to be the one whose plans keep getting messed up by giant eagles, it's pretty much all up to you to take care of business.

In any case, you can't just ignore your giant eagle problem. Those baby giants eagle nesting on your battlements may be as they scream their little screams rending the air, and maybe you’d hate to boot them from their favorite crags, but invariably eagles mean law and order, not to mention eagle droppings which nobody ever seems to want to acknowledge. If ever you want to even think about selling off your lair to another villain for anything like a decent rate of appreciation you cannot let these unsightly and unhygienic calling cards pile up around the gate.

Veeper

You're a hard working villain, and when you get back to the lair late at night, or perhaps in the early morning, all you probably want to know at that moment is how to sleep in peace. There are times where the soft sighing of the breeze through the trees of summer only serves to tear at your raw and bleeding psyche which can find no respite, not in mood-altering preparations, nor in hedonistic oblivion, nor even in contemplation of your vast store of wealth, and it can be frustrating to confront this faceless enemy that cannot properly be departiclized. At times it seems as if the only relief comes from listening to something very tedious and dull, such as someone else complaining at length about how hard it is for him or her to sleep, which generally works on me as if it were morphine.

Sometimes I am given to understand, telepathically, that there are those who wonder how a villain with a lifetime of shocking misdeeds can sleep peacefully at all, much less bed down like a little child. These individuals, I gather, have not spent enough time around little children, who typically harbor enough spite and malice in their tiny little breasts to give a battle-scarred fiend a run for his money. And yet these malformed homunculi sleep, aided by a powerful system of tissue building and regeneration which our own scientists have not yet managed to reproduce in adults, though we evil supervillains try our utmost to come close, through sundry shocking and depraved means too tedious and dull to enumerate here.

And off to bed.

Grinning Skull (friendfeed)

Here at evilhow I've already given the apes their due, and now it is time to spend a little more time with the other branches of your primate tree, with a page on how to show flying monkeys and win awards. I'm not sure exactly why everyone thinks I'm the obvious choice to present stuff on non-humans (with the possible exception of dealings with various and sundry reptilians), since family-tree-wise everybody else is more closely related to monkeys than I am. They tell me that my perspective is valuable, that it helps others to keep an open mind, blah blah blah, but I'm not so easily convinced. I think it is that they just want the freak, the vegan pit viper who can type, to write about others they have constructed to be freaks, as if that gives one a privileged insight on the very human fascination with The Other.

Well, what difference does it make? I'll do what they make me do, just like always.

One thing which has never been explained to my satisfaction is your people's preoccupation with making ordinary things into art. So you take a bat and a macaque and mix them up together to get something hairy that chitters at you from above. But then to make rules of conformation and breed standards and lists of defects, the way the animal fancy organizations do, and then subject what you had created to so-called artistic criteria as if they were statuary or antique bric-a-brac, that's just weird, to my way of thinking. It's a little easier to understand the urge to turn the serious business of breeding into sport (flying marmoset racing anyone?), because competition is what the ambitious members of your species is all about.

Veeper