Here’s the setup: you can jump to any time and place in history for exactly five seconds. Who should you SOCK IN THE JAW?
Can I bring a baseball bat? If I’m going to invent time travel for the express purpose of knocking some sense into someone, I’d like to make a more lasting impression.
If I get to deliver a few choice words, me.
If I just get to show up and punch somebody for no apparent reason, Pope Gregory IX.
A lovely votive vessel with a yield of 27.5 kilotons for the start of the [First Council of Nicaea](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/First Council of Nicaea) … would be my favorite idea, however if I can’t be that aggressive perhaps either Charles the First or Oliver Cromwell - not sure which one would benefit from it more. Charles had a good start with a decent peaceful reign but then he got a bit too autocratic - but I am not certain that Cromwell’s Parliamentarians were all that correct in causing so much death and damage either. Maybe whacking both of them would work.
Does anybody think killing off Mohammad would have headed off any of the West vs Aurient for the past 1300 or so years?
I wish I could go back and un-punch someone…it that an option?
You could go back and pre-emptively punch the puncher.
What’s really depressing is that, at any given point, whichever side is winning the English Civil War is the side we, in hindsight, would call the bad guys! Early on, Charles was a stinker, and the Parliamentarians had the right of it. But later, as Cromwell got to riding roughshod, Charles wised up (a little) and offered some concessions, and the Parliamentarians refused to negotiate. No real good guys in this one.
But, me, I’ve got a much shorter horizon of anger. I’d go back in time and give a really hearty sock to the jaw of the stinking puke who used to lay in wait for me in the high school parking lot. Lay him out his length in the gravel. Would do my soul a world of good.
:eek:
Maybe this is what all those people playing the Knockout game are doing! Somebody’s invented time travel, or will!
Hmmm, Abraham Lincoln, just as he’s about to enter the theater…
Hitler.
FIRST!
psst… see post #1.
second
Can I do something other than punch?
I’d like to go back in time and give Teddy Roosevelt a wet willie.
Or go back in time and feel up Marylin Monroe.
Marcus Junius Brutus
I’d like to go back and punch Kim Jong-il, preferably during one of those grand public ceremonies, but I think I’d need to be wearing a mask and full body armour. Some brass knuckles would be nice, too.
Come to think of it, you could make this whole exercise significantly safer and infinitely more awesome if you did it in Batman gear.
So you’d want to be the punchee?
followed by my parents moments before they heard of that evil fraud!!!
Saul of Tarsus