Chuck Norris is the poor man's Cormac McCarthy.

Unless you live in Topeka you're aware that Chuck Norris is no longer the hotness. It turns out that all those facts about him distributed on the webness were total falseness. A marketing ploy for tshirts. But for those of us left yearning for a new beacon of superlatives, I have found a replacement: Cormac McCarthy. Not much is known about this elusive Southwestern author of rugged, austere fiction. According to a 1994 article in The Atlantic,

Over the first twenty-five years of his life as a writer... remarkable rumors freely circulated. It was said that he had lived for a while under an oil derrick in West Texas; had at one time been a destitute and homeless person who roamed the back streets and cadged drinks in the sleazier bars of Knoxville, Tennessee; had been, and perhaps still was, a truckdriver and a ditchdigger; and, what is at least approximately true, had lived for long periods in cheap motel rooms where he subsisted on canned food warmed on hot plates.

Indeed, he was living in a motel when he learned of winning his MacArthur grant in 1981. He still writes on a manual typewriter and has only ever granted one interview. But through several factfinding missions I have unearthed some remarkable new information about this man. Notes are below.

•Cormac McCarthy drives an oil derrick around West Texas. It has a bumper sticker that says, "My other car is East Texas." The bumper sticker does not lie.

•Cormac McCarthy is a self-made billionaire. His cash cow is a line of bumper stickers that say "My other car is East [state of residence]." Those bumper stickers do lie. Except for the one he sold to Chuck Norris, whose state of residence is Bumfuck.

•Cormac McCarthy's most well known book was originally titled All the Pretty Hearses.

•Cormac McCarthy is older, dirtier, and less legitimate than Russell Tyrone Jones (RIP).

•In his first NBA All-Star game, Cormac McCarthy messed around and got a quadruple triple.

•Cormac McCarthy enjoys pickup games of synchronized swimming.

•In Rock Paper Scissors, Cormac McCarthy has a lifetime winning percentage of 56%. That number is statistically significant.

•Cormac McCarthy is physically capable of mimicking the "chh chh" sound of a bottle of Olivio Buttery Spray while simultaneously pantomiming, in jest, the open-mouth-directed use of said condiment dispenser. (He is in talks to replace Michael Winslow as Larvell Jones in Police Academy 9: Hightower vs. Predator.)

•Sometimes men have morning wood. Fuck that. Cormac McCarthy had birth wood.

•Cormac McCarthy once built a helicopter out of a cocktail umbrella, a rubber band, and MacGyver's testicles. The testicles were not actually needed. They were just decoration.

•Cormac McCarthy doesn't give people roundhouse kicks to the face. Roundhouse kicks to the face give people Cormac McCarthy.

•Cormac McCarthy doesn't give people crabs. He practices safe sex religiously.

•Cormac McCarthy has his own record label. In fact, he has his own record label maker that he uses to alphabetize his album collection, which includes SEVERAL copies of Switched-On Bach and can only be properly alphabetized using the subscript numeral option on the label maker, a tricked-out model that served as the centerpiece for the first episode of the short-running MTV:8 series Pimp Yo Mama's Office Supplies, starring Lil Bow Wow and some prick from the even shorter-running That 80's Show.

•Cormac McCarthy is so post-postmodern he can deconstruct blank parody.

Previously: Chuck Norris Breaks Rules, Craniums

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I read a Cormac mcCarthy book once and had to hide under the bed for a week after.