SUPERPICKS: The search is on for a new arch nemesis

Hollan Holm

Citizens, regardless of their age, race or education, can all agree on one thing: Saddam Hussein has huge eyebrows.

I could parallel park a Volkswagen Microbus covered in peace signs on one of those, as long as I could hang my arm out of the window and feel when I ran out of hair.

With a war waging overseas, America has a new arch nemesis – well, actually just a revived arch nemesis. Hussein, like him or not, now plays an important role as an object of mass hatred.

Whenever I check my e-mail – 20 times per each half hour I’m not in class – I find new, creative Saddam hate forwards sent to my inbox. Some make me smile, like the photo of the Redneck Special Forces team recently dispatched to Afghanistan to take out a terrorist organization, which is clearly in cahoots with Hussein. Some make me cringe, like when the Iraqi dictator and a Dixie Chick appeared in my inbox on a mock album cover. (Not only did his eyebrows attempt to bite a hole through my computer screen, but it was a country album.)

While Hussein made a respectable target for mass hate time in my second grade classroom, he doesn’t cut the Kurd anymore as an archenemy.

It’s partly because he no longer dresses to intimidate.

In “Gulf War: Part One,” the small rodents resting on his forehead always had a black, slightly off-centered, beret to coordinate with. The olive fatigues really brought out his complexion. At the time, my overall impression was that this man had the right stuff to be loathed not just in America but also worldwide.

But this time around, Hussein wears fedoras and suits more than battle dress. I’m at a loss for spite any time footage of what may or may not be him comes on CNN.

Now Hussein looks more like Paul Newman in “Road to Perdition” – if Newman had worn pet leeches on his forehead during filming.

To replace my modern day Groucho Marxist, I turned to two other villains, both students I met throughout my educational career.

I spent a good deal of my sophomore year in high school despising a guy for no particular reason other than the fact that he repeatedly made dry-heaving sounds in my Spanish class.

He was a mortal enemy of convenience. His last name sounded like Jerry Seinfeld’s own Newman. It gave me pleasure to walk into Spanish Class and sneer “Hello… ****man.”

Unfortunately ****man could never equal the Iraqi dictator because he had no facial hair whatsoever, much less the kind of eyebrows fur trappers lust after.

I crossed the path of my next mentionable nemesis at college. What our blood feud was about isn’t relevant. His facial hair is.

His eyebrows couldn’t measure up to Hussein’s, but it didn’t matter. He had gigantic sideburns. Whenever I saw his Muttonchops of Malignance coming toward me, I knew to immediately toss a cold shoulder his way.

It’s having some grossly exaggerated facial feature that really makes an arch nemesis’ career. Without an eye patch, half chewed-off nose or a foot-long scar, what would super heroes doodle about in the middle of class? Even Boris from Rocky and Bullwinkle had enough of a trash-stache to inspire fear in the hearts of “Moose and Squirrel.”

But with my Iraqi nemesis possibly not dead or at least dressing badly, and the Side Burns from Hell in evil-graduate school, I have nothing to occupy my darker sense of humor. So to all super villain wannabes: Check out my column next week for an application to be my new arch nemesis.

Puberty-challenged goody-goodies need not apply.

Picks O’ the Week

•Think a Kurd is something a cow chews? Well you’re probably not alone, but why travel in small social circles? Round up some of your posse and mosey over to Grise Hall auditorium tonight at 8 p.m. to see “Iraq After the War: What is the Future of Kurdistan?”

•Tired of the worldly problems? Then listen to someone else sing about theirs. Don and the River Rats will be performing at the Spillway Bar and Grill tomorrow night. Considered one of the area’s best bands by the Spillway advertisement I read, the Rats play country music “with an edge and a smile.”

The way it works is Hollan Holm does the thing he’s scared Blank-less of, and he gets the courage AFTER he does it, not before he does it. [email protected] thinks that is a dumb-blank way to work. It should be the other way around.