Furmanifesto

When I go see the Hobbit this weekend I won’t be having a Diet Coke.  It has nothing to do with whether or not Diet Coke is a good product, because I suspect that it is.

I just don’t like Diet Coke.

Diet Coke doesn’t taste very good to me and let me explain why: It doesn’t actually taste like the real Coca-Cola, which I love.

Diet Coke is a substitue for caffeine addicts who feel the need to watch their waistline while battling their own personal energy deficiency.

I know that this opinion doesn’t describe every diet soda drinker because I’ve talked to people who’ve never had a regular Coke before.  I have quite a few friends who started with Diet Coke and they don’t actually enjoy the original version’s ultra-sweet combination of caramel coloring and high fructose corn syrup.

To these folks, having a regular Coke throws their entire palate off-kilter.  In fact, many of them actually enjoy the strange aftertaste that artificial sweeteners bring to the table.

Having never experienced the original, they’ve developed a preference for the not so “Real Thing.”

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I recently overheard several middle-aged, female, Starbucks customers gushing over Hollywood star Ryan Gosling.

They each took turns trying to describe what it was that made him so attractive to “their daughters”:

“He can do it all: Act, direct, sing, even do a lot of push-ups with his shirt off.”

“I saw him looking good in some cut-off cord shorts and mid-ankle boots with heels.”

“He looks good when he’s wet, dry, bearded… even wearing those nerd glasses that the pastors at my church are all getting.”

The whole thing eventually devolved into a conversation about whether his eyes were better than his pecs, or his pecs were better than his abs.

I left before they started working any lower.

As I drove away I wondered if they realized that these things are also true of just about every other handsome, chiseled, actor in Los Angeles?

When I relayed this story, and my cynical comments about the common desirability of A-list leading men to my friend Jordan (who looks good dry or bearded) he told me that Ryan Gosling was actually quite a bit different than the average movie star.

“That guy works at a sandwich shop”, he said.

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Photo: MGM

When I was 9 years old I saw my first James Bond Movie, It was the mid 60′s classic “Thunderball”. The film was a thrilling cavalcade of car chases, scuba battles, and shark bites.

This might have been one of the most amazing experiences of my life had I not been a pre-pubescent innocent trying to comprehend a twenty year-old, made for the middle-aged man, fantasy movie.

While I could follow the plot about stolen nuclear bombs and international upheaval, try as I might I could just not make any sense of the interpersonal motivations.

In children’s stories, the bad guys are obviously bad, the good guys are obviously good, and the issues are fairly “black and white”- people are bad because they do bad things and they are good because they do good things.

In this movie the bad guys did bad things, the good guys did bad things, and the girls did the worst of things!

I understood “what” the Thunderball people were doing, I just couldn’t grasp “why” they were doing it.

It didn’t make sense that two men would fight to the death over a woman.

It seemed illogical that a fighter pilot with top secret clearance would be so casual with his credentials when a lady starts rubbing her hands in his hair.

In short, I couldn’t understand why men kept making bad decisions about the future of our planet whenever women were around?

Since I’d never been to Jamaica I just assumed that maybe this is the way people behaved there?

When I asked my dad about it he said, “It’s not real”. When I asked my mom about it she said, “I had a some growing up to do.”

I felt like the Thunderball people had a lot of growing up to do.

After I’d “grown up a bit”, and by grown up a bit I mean “made several bad decisions about the future when a woman was around”, I realized that the only truly honest thing about the 007 film series was its assertion that men will attempt the ridiculous to possess a woman that they shouldn’t have.

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