Childhood Memories

Memorieeeees...light the corners of mah mahhhhhhhhnnnnddd...

Oh, hi folks. Jeff here. As Clark so rightly said on Monday, we do have fond memories of childhood. For example, the first time I met Marissa...

Wow. I had forgotten how much she used to look like a goofy Natalie Portman. But she clearly dug my style.

And the first time I met Michael...

Debonair fellow even then.

I remember also the first 'official' photo session.

Double knee denims were our idea, by the way, folks. Essential for when you're hiding in a crouched position for hours on end. Comfort is paramount.

I even remember an early case. We met a pair of beguiling twins, Greta and Gerta Klumpmasterflash.

They looked a lot younger than they actually were. This was Junior High.

Greta and Gerta were sweet and funny and charming, and Michael, Clark and I almost came to blows over who was going to take which one to the sock hop and which one of us fellas was going to end up as the gooseberry.
Sadly, what we did not realise right off the bat was the fact that the Klumpmasterflash Twins were evil. Pure evil. One day, we showed up and there they were, in full 'evil twin' garb.

Bad. Ass.

That didn't stop us from wanting to date them, though. Those gals was purty. But they were up to no good. They had bad news written on them like a Washington Post headline. We hadn't realised that the whole time we'd been chasing them, wooing them and generally being goofy teenage boys about them, they'd been studying our every move, finding out about all our secrets and using this info to gain favor with our early nemesis Henri Petit, that little brat!

Lil' devil.

Well, we are pretty sharp, you know, and Petit isn't, so as soon as he started making cardinal errors such as bragging to us about all the dirt he had on us, we made the connection and ditched the ladies. Actually, what Petit said to us was the childish "I know something you don't know!" which was a stupid thing to say. We knew all the stuff he knew. It was about us! Doyyy!

Nope, when it comes to the ladies, we were better off stickin' with our best gals - like Laura here.

Laura had skills. Laura could LEVITATE.

Les Unbeliev-enfants

Hi there. I'm back and can reveal my whereabouts last week: I was saving The Royal Baby. That's right, freshly minted Prince George got kidnapped briefly for a day or two shortly after getting born. What's that? You didn't hear about it? Why, thank you! I can't give away all the details (some aspects of the case are still classified) but it was a pretty quick and easy operation. You might think Jeff would be the one called to handle a situation with The Royal Family... which is precisely why I took care of it. The element of surprise. Crooks would have seen Jeff coming a kilometer away.

The most difficult disguise I've ever attempted

Upon the successful completion, William and Kate were so thrilled that they wanted to name the baby after me. I blushed and said, "That isn't necessary. I was just doing my job. But since you're The Royal Family, why don't you name him after the greatest player in Kansas City Royals history?" William said, "You...think we should name our son, the eventual heir to the throne, Prince Willie Wilson?" I replied, "What? No! Of course not!" Kate piped up, "Prince Amos Otis?" Man, British people really don't know their baseball history. I said, "Never mind. Just name him after the fourth most popular Beatle then."

No respect.

Cases involving children take on a special meaning for us. Probably because, and not many people know this either, we started out as kids ourselves. Here's a picture from one of our earliest cases together...

Sometimes, one or more of us is black. Don't let it throw you.

If I had to guess, I would say this was taken just after the successful completion of "Operation: Sneak out of school and go to the zoo to watch the monkeys do it". That case literally changed Michael's life.

Speaking of Michael, he and Jeff undoubtedly have fond childhood memories of their own. I''m sure they'll be thrilled to share them with you!

The Unbelievables Are Everywhere ... !!!

Wow! 

Forget Clark's buffet jaunts and proclivities!

Check out this little known, in-the-works portrait Bob Ross of television's The Joy Of Painting was working onduring one of his broadcasts ... !!!

Public TV advertising for The Unbelievables!

Again: Wow ... !!!

Clark's Missing!

This week, folks, Clark is out of town. AWOL. Gone troppo. He's missing. Well, not exactly missing as such. Michael and myself know where he is. Roughly. He's out of town hosting a couple Unbelievinars™.

NB: Not an Unbelievinar™.

But Clark has a very special reason for hosting Unbelievinars™. He loves the buffet.

And who can blame the man? Practically free food you can go and help yourself to time and time again? Why the heck not?

But our Clark is somewhat of a connoisseur of buffets, and we can reveal that his Unbelievinar™-hosting mission is a mere cover for his secret hobby: buffet-spotting. Yes, some people are planespotters, some are trainspotters, and Clark is a buffetspotter. Some of his favourites are shown here in pages from his buffetspotting scrapbook.

Hello, ladies!

I said helllo, ladies!

Who knows what delights he will sample on his culinary adventures? What pictures will he bring back? What will he cross off his list of "Buffet Foods I Have Wolfed Down"? Will it be...

Veal Burgundy?

Louisiana Hot Pot?

Or Sausage Meat Tree?

Join us on Wednesday for more. Till then - ciao, babies.

Diversionary tactics

Michael isn't even in this photo... or is he?

Ho ho! Well played, Michael!

Now that he's told you all that he's going to be in San Diego, attending comic-con, can you guess exactly where he isn't going to be? If you said "in San Diego, attending comic-con", congratulations! You're starting to think like an Unbelievable and less like some dumb dope criminal.

"Duh, why do I always get caught?"

See, much like magic, the key element to going deep undercover is deception. Also, subterfuge, deceit, deception, delusion, equivocating, guile and fibbing. Those are all basically one thing.

So now that Michael has told you he is in San Diego and I've just told you that he is not and also that we are good at lying, where is he really?

Exactly.

(Truth is, we honestly don't know, which means he's doing it right. Although, wherever he is, we figure he's probably naked)

(Possible) Undercover Operations

Funny.

It doesn't look like I'm undercover in any of these photos. Duh. 

You think I can reveal what particular beard/hairstyle and couture I'll be sporting for the coming days while at Comic-Con in San Diego?

Heck no! What are you ... GOOFY ... ?!??!? 

There has to be decorum ... secrecy ... backdoor doings ... and intrigue. 

If operations are successful, I might be able to get files declassified immediately in order to download information that you might find ... interesting.

In the meantime, you know where I'm at - with a bunch of geeks, freaks and weirdos invading the streets of San Diego ...

 

In Too Deep

One of the things that occurs around these parts from time to time is having to go undercover. We usually don disguises whilst working on cases, lest our true identities be revealed and the case becomes compromised. However, sometimes we have to be in what is known to professionals (like ourselves) as deep cover. This is when we are so far undercover that even our own proctologist wouldn't recognize us, and believe me, that's saying something.

Well, the reason I am saying all this is because this particular week, Michael is on a solo undercover deep cover mission. Well, you might think to yourself that it's a bit dumb for me to be telling you he's in deep cover. You might think that that would blow the whole assignment. But you'd be wrong. He really is that far undercover that I could stand on the rooftop and use a massive PA system to shout to the whole world, "ATTENTION EVERYONE! MICHAEL'S IN DEEP COVER!" and criminals the world over would hear it and go, "Whatever. We haven't a hope in hell of figuring out where he is or what he looks like currently."

I suppose you'd like some examples, wouldn't you?

The following are all genuine photographs of Michael, Clark or myself (or all three of us) while in deep cover. Try to spot us, won't you? Make a game out of it.

Hello, ladies!

See? I told you. When in deep cover, we cannot be spotted. Now, I suppose you'd like the answers, would you? Okay. I have circled clumsily where an Unbelievable can be seen in each picture.

See you back here on Wednesday for more undercover fun.

Teamwork Ain't Easy, You Know ...

Hokay ... I admit: Jeff threw me with the shout out about boobs in his previous post. Because, well ... you know ... BOOBS! As in ... we Unbelievables are sometimes a bunch of boobs, if you get my meaning.

But that's part of our charm. And, in the right moments, the ladies? They dig that. (Hello, ladies!)

I mean ... you've been following The Unbelievables, right? As fabulous and fashionably put together as we appear to be, you have to understand formulating a crack crime-fighting team (let alone working within one cohesively) is no piece of cake.

It takes work.

It takes time.

It takes cooperation.

It takes effort to make a team work.

Yep. It takes work, people. And it's not always a comfortable fit right off the bat, either. Oft times blood, sweat and tears need to be infused into the mix for a team to gel into something as swanky, superior and superb as The Unbelievables. We make it look easy but - as you saw in Clark's and Jeff's previous posts - we're still human.


I know you've seen our influences and heroes in previous chapters. With respect to teamwork specifically, I thought I'd toss a few "teams" your way we tend to emulate.
 
For example: You think it was all fun and games for Laurel and Hardy to do all those wonderful things they did time and again?

Of course, Clark leaned toward Ollie, Jeff? Stan.

I loved them both equally.

How 'bout these guys? Was it a laugh a minute for The Marx Brothers?

The resemblance is almost uncanny:
Me, Jeff, Clark (l to r). "Swordfish!"

Nothing but rainbows and unicorns and candy picked from trees for Yakko, Wakko and Dot?

Clark digs Yakko (left), me Wakko (right).

Jeff, curiously, has "a thing" for Dot.

None of them were continually "on." It didn't happen for any of them 24/7. The thrusters weren't firing every waking moment of every minute of every day. That's just fact.

And it's the same for The Unbelievables. Our training, our trademark Unbelieva-Fu, our suave and smooth moves, the Unbelieva-Base ... these things took time to cultivate and perfect. 

And we continue to improve each and every day. 

Despite, you know, the occasional bump in the road ...

Again ... not the shining moment from Clark

as an undercover, multi-tasking neo-Nazi ...

SNAFUs, Foul-ups and Errors

We Unbelievables pride ourselves on being insanely good at crimefighting. It's true. We really are insanely good.
But by being insanely good crimefighters, we become susceptible to some common mistakes that make us actually less good at what we do. Trouble is, it's easy to commit them without noticing.

A great way to prevent yourself from making these mistakes is to become aware of them and to be able to recognize when you are doing them. But hey - that's easier said than done. It usually takes a good dose of Unbelieva-Zen meditation accompanied by a few Bahama Mamas from Red Lobster to do it. At least, that's what works for me.

Mm-mmmm.

The first of these common mistakes is…

Not Wearing The Right Gear

As crimefighters, it is easy to become focused on doing things faster and better so we sometimes forget the point of what we are doing. We use excellent time management tools to fill our schedules with activities and we use a system to get through our huge To Do lists we create for ourselves. Sorry, no, none of that's true. We are some of the most disorganised people we know. And that's saying something. However, we have a system, and 99% of the time, it works.

The problem that arises when you constantly focus on HOW to do things more efficiently (yeah, right) is that we can forget small yet important things, such as the right clothes for the job. Take this picture for an example.

This was the time we infiltrated a Latin American drug ring that were concealing the goods by stuffing them inside soccer balls that were being used by visiting minor league Colombian teams. We went undercover and donned traditional woollen ponchos. What we failed to remember is that soccer tends to be played 90% of the time in the rain, on a muddy pitch, and woollen garments tend to become waterlogged and weigh 400 pounds each. It was a rookie mistake, and no one Unbelievable was responsible for this error, except for Michael, whose idea it was in the first place. We still saved the day, but only after we had fought our way out from under the rain-sodden ponchos. Eesh.

The next mistake we've made is…

Multitasking


That cheesehead talking on the phone while typing an email on his BlackBerry all the while checking out the latest news on the TV has become the poster child for productivity. You might think to yourself, "Hey, that's cool, that's what I want to be able to do, I could get so much done!" Truth is, not only do most people not have enough stuff on their to-do lists to fill up even an hour of their day, but geez, that guy's a dork! Being able to multitask well seems to imply intelligence, but seriously, what's so great about it?
Research has shown that the human brain actually processes one thing at a time. If you are reading a magazine while chatting with your buddies and surfing the Internet, you are actually doing each of those activities one after another and not in parallel. In short, multitasking is a big fat lie.

Clark is one of those people that sometimes makes the mistake of trying to multitask, and somehow he always gets in trouble for it. For example...

Note: he was undercover as a neo-Nazi in this photo. Trying too hard.

The next mistake I shall focus on is...

Using Too Many Tools

OK, we admit it: we like bright, shiny objects.


When there is a new weapon, martial arts move, or shiny new gadget, we want to learn about it. The great thing is that they usually all have some intrinsic value. The problem is that there is a learning curve for each one and you spend a bulk of your time learning how it works as opposed to actually doing what you want to do. Take this new Swiss-Army tool as an example:

You wouldn't believe how long it took to learn what everything this handy-dandy item does. But when we finally got down to the nitty-gritty of every single gizmo and gadget on there and found that they neglected to put a USB stick on there... boy, did we feel foolish! Buyer beware!

Anyway, I'm sure that Michael will have more slip-ups and boobs for you next time. Till then...

Ciao!