Scatter Brained

MORTAL KOMBAT FOR SEGA GENESIS
Created by:
 Midway Home Entertainment, Inc., 1992
History:
  Th
  e Street Fighter arcade games captured quarters 
of millions of preteens. Mortal Kombat logically extended 
that genre by making it gorier.
C H A P T E R   2

---

54
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
Perfected by:
 Teenage boys
Advantages:
 You can tell your mom it increases hand–eye 
coordination.
Best Moves:
 “Fatality”
Best Defense:
 B B B B B B!
MIDDLE SCHOOL BULLIES
Created by:
 Poor self-esteem
History:
  For  about  as  long  as  adults  have  been  hitting  each 
other, so have children.
Perfected by:
 Our nemesis, Aaron Bishop, was awfully good 
at it.
Advantages:
 Pathetic opponents can be selected from a huge 
population of weaklings.
Best Moves:
 Gut punches cause discomfort but leave little 
evidence of wrongdoing.
Best Defense:
 In our experience (and we’ve got plenty), hid-
ing your math textbook underneath your denim jacket can 
bruise a bully’s knuckles. Failing that, one can always hire a 
tenth grader. But to do that, you’ve got to learn a thing or two 
about money. . . .

---

55
It’s Easy to Be 
a Millionaire
If  you  ever  feel  like  making 
change for a penny, it’ll be 
nice to know that one Ameri-
can penny can be divided 
into 10 mills. Gas prices, for 
instance, are expressed in 
mills $2.789, and fi ve mills (a 
ha’penny) is still given to an 
old man in a Christmas carol. 
If that doesn’t ring a bell, you 
may recognize mills from 
their sinister roles in 
Super-
man III
 and 
Offi ce  Space.
 
Mills now have so little value 
that it would cost more than 
one mill to print the words 
one mill
 on a dime-sized 
piece of paper.
11
 Dead Pre$idents: 
Historical Tidbits About American Currency
Paul Revere did not in fact shout that the redcoats were 
coming, but he did design the very fi rst paper money in 
America, a 12-pence note for 
the Massachusetts Bay Col-
ony in 1776.
✖  ✖  ✖
While Revere was busy de-
signing notes based on British 
pence, the rest of the country 
was already forsaking the 
British monetary system in 
favor of the Spanish (hence 
our current use of dollars 
rather than pounds). Spanish 
dollars were called pieces of 
eight because they were often 
stamped into eight bits that 
could then be used for making 
change. Hence two bits of a 
Spanish dollar equaled a quar-
ter. Now you know why we 
chant “two bits, four bits, six 
bits, a dollar” to generations 
of bewildered children.
✖  ✖  ✖
But the Spanish dollar’s story does not end there. Chronic 
American laziness had its aff ects on the word 
peso,
 which 
began to be abbreviated “PS.” As Americans got still lazier