Captain ILL was first introduced to Anthony de Mello by Uncle ILL who gave him an extra copy of one of his books. While Christian spirituality isn't really the Captain's thing, as someone who isn't usually aware of the state of his own shoelaces, Captain ILL could certainly use a lesson or two in awareness so here is a short story from the foreward:A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up in awe, "Who's that?" he asked.
"That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbor. "He belongs to the sky" We belong to the earth-we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.
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Despite his chosen headgear, Captain ILL is not a natural in the kitchen. He does like looking at food though, and can follow a recipe, so he can't resist flipping through recipe books when they cross the ILL desk. The Captain has expressed his derision for cookbooks without pictures many times in the past, so there's no reason to bring up that topic again except that this cookbook doesn't have any pictures! Get with the program! If this book is indeed full of America's best recipes, lets have some pictures to prove it! Recently Captain ILL did his Christmas baking and promptly took pictures of all the cookies. How else could he prove that he had baked them? Certainly not by their presence on Christmas since he will have succumbed to temptation and consumed them all by then. He's already eaten enough of the Crisco sugar cookies to qualify for Cookie Monster's job if the great "C" ever retires. In any case, the cover of this book is certainly enticing, and Captain ILL loves his macaroni and cheese ...
Captain ILL hasn't paid much attention to his personal appearance over the years. This is no doubt a result of wearing a cooking pot on his head at all times. Similarly, he's never had a pedicure because he refuses to remove his boots as he needs to remain ever vigilant in case some miscreant needs booting. Even so, he likes the idea of being able to "use common food items from the pantry to make pure, fresh and inexpensive beauty products". Here's a recipe that the Captain can't wait to try if he ever takes his boots off:
Captain ILL is very passionate about crime. Fighting crime, that is. He feels that criminals should be booted, or at the very least, be locked up for extended periods of time, where they can be booted at leisure. The Captain is often asked how he became so passionate about crimefighting, and whether he has always been that way. He has not. When Captain ILL was a mere child he was caught shoplifting a squirt gun from Fred Meyer. It was this tragic, humiliating experience that put him on the straight and narrow path of justice that he still walks today. This origin story may lack the melodrama of watching your parents get killed by a mugger (like Batman), or the terror of getting bitten by a radioactive spider (like Spiderman), but when it comes right down to it, the reason why you fight evil doesn't matter nearly as much as how hard your boots are.
Captain ILL has been called away to fight off an army of laser-shooting cybernetic turkeys, but he wanted to wish everyone out there on the internets a very happy Thanksgiving.
Unfortunately, Shelly is sad. Captain ILL is sure that all his reader's are sad after learning about Louie, the blind collie from yesterday's ILL of the day. Of course it's always sad when a dog goes blind, but poor Louie can still lead a happy and fulfilling life even if he can't afford Lasik. According to Wikipedia, dogs have 44 times the number of smell-sensitive cells as humans as well as a much greater sense of hearing. So while Louie may not get as much enjoyment out of his favorite TV shows anymore, he'll still have a sense of smell and hearing far superior to even Captain ILL's superhuman senses, and that's nothing to sniff at!
Healing is a big issue for superheroes, though you wouldn't know it from reading comic books. Some folks like Wolverine have healing factors that enable them to heal dreadful wounds almost instantaneously. Captain ILL, though highly resistant to damage, doesn't have a healing factor so he has to rely on things like vitamins or mad scientists to heal him when the occasional adamantine bullet or left hook from the Hulk injures him. It turns out that special instruments are needed to perform surgery on someone with bullet-proof skin and if your sutures are made out of anything weaker than titanium wire, you can forget about jumping right back into action. So take your vitamins kids, and you can grow up to be big and strong like Captain ILL, but you'll still need to be captured and genetically altered by aliens if you want to have superpowers.
The ILL of the day today is dedicated to Bowlingjoe and Bowlingwidow who just got back from the land of salt and limes. Captain ILL wasn't even aware that you could manufacture limes, but flipping through this book he sees that it seems to involve kilns and various complicated bits of machinery. All these years the Captain thought limes were grown on a lime bush-but it doesn't really matter where they come from, the most important thing to remember about limes is that you need about a half dozen of them to make a yucka.
There is a long tradition in the superheroing world to have headquarters or secret bases on space stations. From Magneto's Asteroid M to the Justice League's Watchtower, there's something about outer space that draws superheroes and supervillains alike. Perhaps it's the ability to perform dreadful experiments away from the watchful eye of governments, or the advantageous position it gives for keeping a watchful eye on miscreants, or even just for the fantastic view. Captain ILL doesn't have the financial backing to have an orbital secret lair, but it's probably just as well since he has a tendency to get motion sick in freefall.
Electricity is a pretty useful thing (unless you're on the wrong end of Doctor Destroyer's shock blasters ... even if you're nearly invulnerable like Captain ILL, 3000 volts still stings) but, like nuclear energy, some folks don't like it much. There's something about dangerous unseen forces that seems to make people nervous. Unfortunately, the universe would not exist without dangerous unseen forces so the best we can do is learn to live with them, and try not to worry about quantum black holes colliding with the earth and sucking us all into oblivion, or even the dangerous unseen forces behind the collapse of the global economy (Captain ILL finally watched the news last night). Even so, once the economy finishes collapsing it might be useful to be able to "obtain, pump and store potable water" and this book conveniently explains how to do so.
Captain ILL is starting to get a bit concerned about all the doom and gloom money books he's seeing all the time these days. Is the economy in trouble? Should the Captain pull all his money out of turnip futures and put it back in his mattress? Why does it cost so much to fill the ILLmobile up with anti-matter? These are all important questions so perhaps Captain ILL should start watching the news once in awhile instead of relying on cosmic vibrations to inform him of important events.
