A Touch of Sophistication

When exactly does the primal instinct to drink beer and eat pizza transform into an urge to taste wine and snack on tiny pieces of cheese? Is there an age when all of a sudden cheese is too good to socialize with sauce and crust, when swirling wine around in your mouth like it's Listerine is more manly than owning the competition at the Beirut table?

And why oh why is this tranformation considered sophisticated? Let's take wine, for example. You know how they make wine? They step on grapes. Some asshole's feet were in that shit. And chances are it was some migrant worker making $5 a month, and you know damn well that guy can't afford Tough Actin' Tinactin (BOOM!) because he's got to feed his wife, his sixteen kids, and his burro. Drinking Pablo's foot juice is classy? And what about the cheese, most of which smells like Pablo's feet? No matter how many crackers you slather it on, no matter how much J$ tries to convince you it deserves to be prayed to five times a day while facing Wisconsin, cheese is not a meal. Cheese is old milk. Cheese is cheese because it's two days away from turning into a steaming pile of festering bacteria with a mind of its own and a license to kill.

Sophistication is also supposed to go hand in hand with intelligence. The two are generally inseperable. So why, then, does one drink wine that will make one drunk while simultaneously eating cheese that will give one the shits? Choosing which end of your body should be positioned over the commode is not a fun decision at 3 in the morning. That's just poor planning, which reeks of stupidity, which is the opposite of intelligent. Therefore, this is not sophisticated.

So who was it who stood up and declared that wine and cheese parties are sophisticated affairs? Probably some jackass with a vineyard and a dairy farm and a very large advertising budget. This jackass can be summed up with one word: pretentious. Pretentious, as any of the five literate people in America can tell you, comes from the latin root "pretend," which, roughly translated, means "to be full of shit."

His first forays into the business did not turn out go well. "Purple Foot Juice" and "Going to be Mold" didn't sell nearly as well as submarine screen doors or Hooked on Phonics for Gerbils. His follow up products, "I Can't Believe It's Not Purple Foot Juice" and "Might Be Mold, But Not Yet!" sold just as poorly, despite a heroic endorsement effort by Fitness Celebrity John Basedow.

But did this guy give up? No siree! Proper marketing can solve any problem known to mankind. Purple Foot Juice was finally renamed after the pathetic cries of the migrant workers who'd spent the last sixteen hours dancing the cha cha in tubs of grapes, thus becoming "wine" (dropping the h from "whine" makes the word appear to be European, which makes it that much more sophisticated). Going To Be Mold became "cheese" in an effort to remind the consumer of happy times taking photographs with loved ones, as all sophisticated people like to feel that they are more sophisticated than their immediate family.

Now you know the truth. It's all a pile of marketing horseshit.

So for your next party, eschew the wine and cheese. Sophistication? Pfffffffffffffffffffft.

Get a keg. Get some tunes. Get some Beirut. Get some Northeastern girls who've been pregaming since noon for a 10 pm party. And if you must add a touch of sophistication, look no further than Miller High Life, the Champagne of Beers.

Scott Colby Loves Spaceships

It was brought to Scott Colby's attention the other day that he automatically loves any movie featuring a spaceship. He was unable to immediately refute that claim, a fact which has been bothering him.

Today, while watching Pitch Black, a movie Scott Colby thoroughly enjoys, he had an odd thought. Does he like Pitch Black because it is a good movie, or does he like Pitch Black merely because it provides him with a spaceship fix? Is it a valid piece of cinema, or is it just heroine for nerds?

And what about Independence Day? Men in Black? Mars Attacks? Serenity? Star Wars? Space Balls? Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Alien? Flight of the Navigator? The Last Star Pilot? Stargate? Earth Girls are Easy? Are any of these movies actually good?

It took several days, but Scott Colby eventually came up with two spaceship movies he did not like: ET and the Chronicles of Riddick. However, one might argue that ET is more of a kids' fairytale than a spaceship movie. And Vin Diesel's career took a nosedive down the shitter as soon as he signed on for XXX, so Riddick doesn't qualify.

And what about other genres? Do people who happen to like Westerns like some Westerns that are crappy movies simply because of the horses? What about sports movies? Do people who like sports movies like sports movies that are crappy movies simply because of all the balls?

This is too deep for I Stole Your Lunch. Scott Colby apologizes. He felt the need to update, as his special celebrity guest is fulfilling his reputation for being chronically late. Or is it her reputation? We shall see.

P.S. - If Geena Davis was still as hot as she was in Earth Girls are Easy, Scott Colby would dump Kelly Clarkson for her in a heartbeat.

Deport A-Rod

Dear President Make-A-Monkey-Face,

Please have Mr. Alex Rodriguez deported immediately. He might be about to commit a crime against the free world. Surely Scott Colby does not need to tell you this, as he is sure your wiretaps have already intercepted evidence to support his claims; he is merely writing to remind you that failure to act upon this evidence would be an act of treason this country hasn't seen since Cat Stevens became an Islamic extremist. You, dear sir, should go on television right now and ramble for a while about how some asshole, namely Mr. Rodriguez, is about to drop a great big steamer in the hat of freedom.

Maybe.

You've heard of the World Baseball Classic? Of course you have. Scott Colby was chatting online with a friend about it the other day, and he knows Dick Cheney's chief duty as Vice President is to read everybody's instant messages as they fly back and forth across the Interweb, just in case someone in Kansas is considering an abortion, and that he reports his findings to you five times a day. But just in case Mr. Cheney's cyborg kidneys were out of goat's blood that day, the World Baseball Classic is an event scheduled to take place during Spring Training, pitting the best players in the world against each other in a World Cup style tournament. Members of the winning team are excused from MLB's steroid tests until the next tournament.

So here's the problem. A-Rod might play for the United States.

Scott Colby says might, because one day he's playing for the Stars & Stripes, the next day he's playing for the Dominican, the next day he's sitting at home playing with himself...then he's playing for Uncle Sam again.

You do realize that whatever team he's going to play for is going to lose, right? And since there is no team for people with scary purple lips, it's either the United States or the Dominican.

So kick this fucker's ass to the curb already. You can even torture him a bit before you do it; no one will mind. Seriously. It's the patriotic thing to do. Just don't hurt him too badly...the United States needs him to play, so his innate ability to make his own team implode can cause the defeat of the mighty Dominican Republic. Do you really think the US team with Dontrelle Willis, Mark Texeira, and Brad Lidge can beat the Domican team with Pedro, Manny, Big Papi, Tejada, and Colon without outside assistance? That's right up there with thinking the United Nations will take an ambassador named after a horrible pop singer seriously.

So please, make sure he's on that team. If you do, Scott Colby promises the liberals will let you have Kansas. You can do anything you want to it - teach people that dinosaurs never existed, make everybody pray seven times a day facing Texas, pass a law stating that employers can only hire people they've already known for at least ten years - whatever you batshit crazy conservatives are into these days. You can have Kansas; please, just let the American people have the World Baseball Classic.

Sincerely,
Scott Colby, Ph.D
King of the Interweb and One Sharp Looking Bachelor

While we're on the subject of teeth...

You know how sometimes there's toothpaste stuck to the sink? Not the used stuff...the blue and green, unused globs that were denied their plaque attacking destiny. Scott Colby does not understand how toothpaste gets stuck to the sink in that form. The physics of it is baffling.

Squeezing toothpaste from a tube onto a toothbrush generally is not considered a difficult task. In fact, most cultures would describe it as something any moron, regardless of physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual ineptitude, should be able to do. One does not need to perform complicated mathematics or sacrifice a goat to the Best Toaster Ever to properly dispense toothpaste. A gentle squeeze, and the toothpaste slowly eases out, giving the user plenty of time to correctly align the toothbrush.

And yet people miss, as evidenced by the neon blue globs that occasionally appear on Scott Colby's sink. Scott Colby does not understand this, as the individuals he lives with have thus far managed to pass Scott Colby's Official Test to See If You Are Retarded or Just Dumb, though the test is known to return an occasional false negative, especially when such a large quantity of pink shirts is involved. So how is this happening? Does someone have a Nitrous powered toothpaste dispenser? Does someone lack depth perception? Are those globs being saved for later easy access by an individual who doesn't desire to operate a tube every day?

Doesn't Scott Colby have anything better to write about? Apparently not. However, to make up for this crime against the spirit of the Interweb, Scott Colby promises that somewhere in the next several days there will be a special update by a celebrity guest. With any luck, it won't suck.

Scott Colby also apologizes to all the bulleted list fans who were hoping for The Beautiful Format to appear in this update. Fear not, the bulleted list will reappear soon, as it is a real assload easier to work with than this prose stuff. The original writings of William Shakespeare, you might recall, were all originally composed in bulleted list form, which is why it's so difficult to read Hamlet when it's translated to modern language, which is why the literature people made up the word iambic pentameter.