Last night Ethan and I finally beat Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. It was pretty satisfying, except for the part where you have to kill the ‘Dark Fantastic Four’ like… 10 times over… oh yeah, and the part where the game hung up and froze during the closing cutscenes. That was bad too.

So it was like… 1 AM, and we were kinda hacked about the game screwing us at just about the last possible second. So what did we do? Got on the computer. Initially, we just wanted to find out what we’d missed in the closing scenes. When we couldn’t find that though, we just got on Wikipedia and wasted time looking up the lyrics to ‘Iron Man’ by Black Sabbath to see if it had anything to do with the Marvel character of Tony Stark / Iron Man.

If you were wondering… it does not.

Somehow though, this lead to me telling him about ‘The Elders’, which is, among other things, a group of former world leaders that’ve gotten together to bash some diplomatic skulls. Their roster includes:

• Nelson Mandella
• Desmond Tutu
• Kofi Annan
• Jimmy Carter

Along with a handful of other people; but the above is what I would call the “MVPs” of the Elders. Anyways, Ethan and I found our way to their Wikipedia entry. They sounded so much like one of the global super-hero agencies that we’d been hearing about in Marvel: UA that we decided to spice their membership up just a little bit:

That’s right. Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. is a member of the Elders. Or at least he was. His tenure lasted from about 1 AM until 6:15 AM today, when the file was reverted to it’s pre-Tom-and-Ethan-M:UA-induced-stupor-edit version. However, I’d like to say instead that Fury was kicked off for his tendency towards forming task forces of super-power humans to beat the crap out of people and/or things, as well as his distaste of diplomacy in general.

See: “One of these things is not like the other.”

In any case, it made us laugh really hard for about five minutes, so now I’m retelling the story with the screen-capture to prove it.

[A Final Note: Nick Fury jokes aside, I think the concept of ‘The Elders’ is really cool, and I’m interested to see how much they’re able to accomplish.]