Saturday, February 21, 2009

Top 6 Matchups of Kid Things vs. their Adult Analogues

6. Milk chocolate vs. Dark chocolate

Milk chocolate is delicious.  Dark chocolate is tasty, but not delicious.  It's purer and snobbier or whatever, but seriously, if you actually think dark chocolate tastes better than milk chocolate, then go eat unsweetened chocolate because that would be even more hardcore.

WINNER: MILK CHOCOLATE (Kid things 1, Adult things 0)

5. Ping-pong vs. Tennis

Somebody might object to my classification of "ping-pong" as a kid thing, when it's an Olympic sport and there are professionals who devote their life to it.  But hold--those people are playing TABLE TENNIS.  If you call it ping-pong, you are probably still a kid.  And you can learn to play it way before you're physically able enough to play tennis.  And yet...it has so much depth that there ARE professionals, and watching professional ping-pong is almost as entertaining as professional tennis!  It's a close call, but the versatility of the former through age ranges takes it.

WINNER: PING-PONG (Kid things 2, Adult things 0)

4. Pacifiers vs. Cigarettes

Some smokers are going to give me grief about how cigarettes are more than just "things you shove in your mouth to keep it busy."  And I agree.  They're "things you shove in your mouth to keep it busy that also give you cancer."  PARMLOT COMES OUT STRONGLY IN FAVOR OF TRUTH, THE ANTI-DRUG!!!!

WINNER: PACIFIERS (Kid things 3, Adult things 0)

3. Fairy tale utopias vs. Dark fairy tale dystopias

This is a tough one.  The fact is, I like fairy tales, mythology, that whole bit.  Especially Greek/Roman and Norse mythology.  But I also like inventive visions that create entire worlds but one which are wholly and fundamentally flawed, stuff like 1984 and Brave New World, things that make us recontextualize ourselves and our relationship to both fantasy and progress.  On the other hand (back to the first hand, I guess?), I'm wholly sick of the current trend of stuff like Shrek and Enchanted and Pan's Labyrinth and their overly conscious effort to adult-up or realistic-ize my fairy tales (even though two of those three are pretty good movies).  So in the end, straight up fairy tale utopias are gonna take it.

WINNER: FAIRY TALE UTOPIAS (Kid things 4, Adult things 0, this is looking to be a blowout)

2. Grape juice vs. Wine

Well, the adults have to win one sometime.  As much as I like grape juice, which is friggin' DELICIOUS, wine manages to have the combined qualities of being even more delicious than grape juice and also making you all drunk and shit.

WINNER: WINE (Kid things 4, Adult things 1, could they make a comeback?  They could if you're bad at math!)

1. Videogame consoles vs. Computers

My heyday for video-game-playing was in the time of the Super Nintendo.  I could tell you more about Donkey Kong Country (and its two sequels), or Final Fantasy II or III, or ESPECIALLY Chrono Trigger, than I could about any other videogame.  I'm actually just remembering now that at one point in time when I was a kid what I actually wanted to do with my life was to write videogame plots.  That shit's nerdy.  But is it as nerdy as everything you can do with a computer?  More importantly, is it as good as everything you can do with a computer?  Well, guess what I'm typing this up on right now--as much as we both wish it was a Virtual Boy--it's not.  I finished a new draft of a 30 Rock spec earlier today, and similarly, Ataris were not in any way involved.  You can't surf YouTube on a Bally Astrocade.  (Maybe that one's actually a point for videogame consoles).  Well, in any case, the adults have it on this one, too.

WINNER: COMPUTERS (FINAL SCORE: Kid things 4, Adult things 2)

Hooray!  The kids beat the adults, just like in every good episode of What Would You Do?

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