- Name: Captainbrass2
- Age: As of 21 June 2011, 36 years old.
- Occupation: I'm a lawyer in a government department.
- Nationality: British
- Place of birth: Leeds, West Yorkshire
- Place of residence: London
- Hobbies: Reading, music, sitting around in pubs eating mixed grills and drinking gin with other grumpy borderline middle-aged guys, visiting art galleries, systematic irony, annoying pedantry. Oh, and wasting far too much time on this wiki.
- Of what are you a fan: CSI and its various spin-offs, Law and Order and its various spin-offs, mob movies, basically anything with crime, detectives and/or lawyers in it. Also gin and Italian cuisine (although not usually together). Musically, I like the Clash, Talking Heads, Madness and Blur, but I'll give most things a try.
- Creative efforts: Nothing ever published, but I am one of those people who always seems to end up writing something, whether I really want to or not. The most sustained effort was a novel I wrote years ago about two guys who smoke some magic weed and end up going on an adventure through the minds of one of them with Sigmund Freud (who's also trapped in there). It didn't work ultimately, but it had its moments, not least when one of them insists on keeping a large bowl labelled "CHARLIE" and filled with washing powder in their living room as "an amusing centrepiece for parties."
Then there's my blog
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- Eleven reasons why I am not a Badass:
- It's a concept that relates to fictional characters who can get away in their fantasy world with stuff that real people can't. Not every troper has fully assimilated this basic point.
- I do own a long coat. However, it's purple, rubberised on the inside, fastens with velcro and has a hood. It keeps off the rain pretty well, but had Keanu Reeves been wearing it in The Matrix that security guard would probably have pissed himself with laughter, not fear, as Keanu strode in, no matter how many guns he had under it. It'd have worked well for the late Benny Hill though. There's nothing like the sound of Velcro ripping open to accompany sketches about flashers.
- My sunglasses fit over my real glasses. No matter how often I use them to impersonate Horatio Caine, they will not be Cool Shades, particularly given that even in Mediterranean sunshine, I don't really like wearing them because it's too dark and I can't see properly. If I dressed like David Caruso I would spend half my time tripping over pavements and falling on my arse (and the other half fielding queries about why I was wearing Elton John's wig).
- I do not own a Cool Car. The only car I ever drove, when I made an unsuccessful attempt to learn to drive a couple of years ago, was a Vauxhall Vectra, which is just the sort of heap of junk they let learners practice on because it doesn't matter if they wreck it. Vauxhall isn't cool. Even its adverts (featuring really annoying puppets) aren't cool, which is saying something given the brilliant adverts they make about crappy cars.
- Badass Creed? Er, will "always pay your bills and phone your Mum regularly" do? No? Oh, well.
- I lack fighting skills. Apparently I had about two fights with my brother when we were kids, neither of which I can remember. I did once intervene in an argument on a railway platform between two guys who I thought were about to start fighting, to tell the aggressor not to be so silly. He said "Well, he pushed me" a couple of times, then we both got really embarrassed and scuttled off to separate train carriages.
- I do not have a Bald of Awesome. I have a Balding of Not Very Awesome. Actually, there's nothing that cool about being slap-headed anyway. The main practical consequence is that sweat keeps trickling down your face whenever you get hot, in the absence of hair to stop it, and that you start seriously considering hats as a fashion item.
- "I went to Cambridge and know quite a lot of property law" is a boast of sorts, but it's not a Badass Boast, unless you plan to crush your enemies through restrictive covenants and resulting trusts (and, to be fair, that has been done).
- I don't pump iron. I go on healthy afternoon walks. Sometimes.
- Badasses are a fictional concept, damn it!
- "I've watched a lot of films with hostage situations, shoot-outs, bank robberies, and I always wondered how I would react in a crisis. Friday I got the answer. I might have thought that I would have stormed out, with no thought for my own safety, to rescue those who needed me most. The bitter and stone-hard truth is that I, like all others, didn't dare do anything other than lie quiet as a mouse on the floor for three-and-a-half hours until the police found us." Hakon Sandbakken, survivor of the Utoya island shootings, July 2011.
- Captainbrass2's response to over-enthusiastic fans and unduly vitriolic haters of anime:-
- "It was the best of animated stories about fictional characters, it was the worst of animated stories about fictional characters, it was the source of wisdom, it was the source of foolishness, it caused the passion of belief, it caused the laughter of incredulity, it was the incarnation of badass, it was the incarnation of lame-ass, it was the spring of trope, it was the winter of "that trope's not exclusive to anime, damn it all!", its fans had everything before them, they had nothing before them unless they grew up fast, they were all going direct to heaven, they were all going the other way, even if the story said she just looked 12 and was actually 300 - in short, the art-form was so far like all the other ones, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received in the superlative degree of comparison only."
- My Epic Fail Troper Tales:-
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech - I once had this really terrible manager who used to load me with work, never gave me any thanks for anything and stole the credit for everything I did. One day I'd finally had enough. "You know why you really suck, Bob? Because you're a sucker, that's why?" Obviously, I never had any problems with him again. At least, not once he'd stopped laughing and fired me.
- Catholic School Girls Rule - This Troper has the good fortune to live near a Catholic girls' school and has spent many hours staring out of his bedroom window drooling at the short-skirted pupils. He cannot understand why people spit at him in the street or why the school took out an ASBO against him.
- Are you me?
- There Are Two Kinds of People in the World - Those with one leg and those with two legs. So what's that all about, eh?
- Took a Level in Badass - This troper took one at his local FE college, together with A-levels in Physics and Chemistry.
- Mistaken for Racist - This troper has been so mistaken, especially due to his membership of an Al Jolson Fan Club and his penchant for wearing white sheets to school. Blackface has so many haters.
