So, I would imagine that most of you out there are familiar with L.L. Bean, purveyor of fine mail-order garments and seasonal ham baskets.  But has the thought ever occurred to you that nobody knows who this L.L. Been fellow actually is (not that it has to be a guy, mind you).  I mean, if we’re going to be going around wearing flannel shirts and cardigans fashioned by him, I think the least we can do is verify that he is not, in fact, one or more supervillians.  Alas, all of my research into this subject has suggested that the truth may be exactly that.  But before you all recoil in collective horror at the implications of such an audacious thesis, let’s take a walk through the evidence and see just how deep the rabbit hole of diabolical fashion goes.

            First, let’s take a look at the L.L.  Now, there are only two people who have those initials that I can think of.  One is Lucretia Lunchferrets, whom I am fairly certain that I just made up, while the other is Lex Luthor, nemesis of Superman and all around evil genius.  Why, you might ask, would he want to sell clothes to anyone?  I suspect that he makes all his sweater-vests out of kryptonite in the hopes that one day Clark Kent will decide to go for the business casual look that only sweater-vests can make, and in doing so shall plunge headlong into a certain, yet trendy, demise (however, the fact that The Kryptonite Sweater-Vests would make a great name for a band would, to some degree, mitigate the terribility of such an event).

            Now, as for the Bean part of things, I think that our best bet here is to start out by casting a catawumpus eye at none other than Sean Bean, who was played by Boromir in Lord of the Rings.  Though once a good and noble man perhaps, the power of the One Ring has clearly corrupted him, and as a result one suspects that he has some plans which involve selling sweaters to Frodo, so that he’ll lose all interest in the ring and go on to play a cannibal in Sin City.  Or perhaps he just got tired of Gondorian shopping malls always getting beaten out by the Gap of Rohan and wisely decided to start up his own franchise of trendiness.

            The way I see it, the two of them were probably both at say, the evil laundromat, or at one of those evil speed dating things, or maybe just serendipetously happened to frequent the same evil needlepoint shop.  Sharing many things in common, they would have both soon lamented the general paucity of affordable yet evil clothing on the market and so, by pooling the endless resources of Lexcorp, and the endless creepiness of the Steward of Gondor, they started selling flannel shirts with the ultimate goal of taking over the world.

            Of course, this entire scenario leaves out the one other possible player in this diabolical little duo of doom, Great Britain’s own Jim Varney, Mr. Bean.  Long a very vocal critic of the increasingly intrusive British government (he recently helped to defeat a bill which would have made it illegal to not be a total sissy), Mr. Bean surely realized long ago that his best bet was to amass a great fortune using his own innate humor-generating abilities and to invest these gains in his own personal army of like-minded free-thinkers, so that when the fateful day or reckoning did at last arrive, Mr. Bean’s Army of Doom (which would also make a great band name) would be able to sweep the vile oppressors before them as all the normal people shall be swept away before the unstemmable tide of force-wielding geeks when they start selling tickets for “Star Wars: Episode VII: Mr. Bacca goes to Coruscant.”  Clearly, to have a stake in such a profitable enterprise as a major garmenteer.

            Either way, L.L. Bean is at best devoted to overthrowing the legitimate government of the United Kingdom and killing superman, and at worst is only gather funds to help ensure that hobbits turn evil and have to fight Bruce Willis.  Not that I’m trying to start a boycott or anything, I’m just trying to burnish my Upton Sinclairian credentials so that next time a real controversy comes down the pike, I’ll be able to lie about it more convincingly to Oprah.