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OUTTA LEFTFIELD: The line between smart and stupid continues to be blurred
Published: Wednesday, May 18, 2011
By Mike Morsch
Executive Editor

Exibit A: "Outta Leftfield."

The line between smart and stupid has become increasingly more blurred the past few years. And I’m not referring to just in the political arena.

Gee, to what could he be referring? Hint: he's certainly not calling Obama stupid.

For example, there is the website www.stupid.com, which has been mentioned in this space before.

It has? Is that Borsch's domain name or something?

It features categories like senior gags, office gags, drinking gags, kitchen gags, holiday gags, funny hats and something called the “Poop Shop,” which offers nearly 30 doo-related items. There’s a lot of gagging going on there, and rightfully so, I might add.

For a guy supposedly so grossed out by poop, he finds a way to focus on it in quite a few of his columns.

It’s both stoo and pid. And the folks who run the website realize that by not taking themselves or their products seriously at all.

Is "both stoo and pid" supposed to be funny?

But then I happened across an article titled “Wow, that’s smart!” which was touting some inventions that might make one exclaim, “I wish I’d thought of that!”

Hey, stupid or smart, I’ve had many of those “I wish I’d thought of that!” moments over the course of my life. The closest I’ve ever come to inventing anything, though, was in college in 1978 when I pioneered the “co-ed toga,” a simple bedsheet-turned-toga-for-two inspired by the combination of being 18 and the exposure to mass quantities of alcohol and 18-year-old women. My parents were so proud.

Yet another reference to "coming up with an idea because of beer," a common theme here. And I seriously doubt he "pioneered" that idea.

But hey, going to college in Iowa in the 1970s required us to be creative thinkers because there really wasn’t much else to do, despite the popularity of cow-tipping.

Growing up in the mid-west! WOW! This material is so fresh you can smell it.

Among the smart ideas touted in the aforementioned article were something called “Coffee Joulies,” stainless steal beans about the size of an egg that one puts into a cup of coffee to instantly cool it to a drinkable temperature. I always thought those were called ice cubes.

I don't know what's dumber, the Coffee Joulies or the ice cube remark. You'd think one would displace so much fluid it would spill, and why heat something up just to put ice cubes in it to cool it down?

Another is called a “Cool Wazoo,” a child-protector pad that has five different uses: in a restaurant high chair, on a swing, in a car seat, in a grocery cart or as a changing pad. It sells for $65. I think when my kids were little I used a towel, which means one is spending $65 for the admittedly cool name of the product.

He used a towel as a restaurant high chair and car seat? Impressive. I'm starting to see why none of Borsch's "great ideas" have panned out.

One of the “Wow, that’s smart!” product ideas isn’t really a product at all, which doesn’t necessarily disqualify it from being a smart idea.

This is known as "logic." All smart product ideas are smart ideas, but not all smart ideas are necessarily product ideas.

It’s called the “Poor Man’s Drycleaning” and is accompanied by a picture of a guy with his nose in his armpit. It might be the first recorded image in history of a guy with his nose in his armpit illustrating what’s being called a good idea.

I understand neither the idea itself, nor Borsch's little comment after.

The theory behind this is more along the lines of a home remedy. (Note: Women would never do this, but that is not an automatic disqualifier for guys.)

This is also "logic." Women are not men; therefore an activity that excludes women does not necessarily exclude men as well.

We’ve all seen a guy pick a shirt out of the laundry basket, stick it up to his nose, shrug his shoulders like it’s not too wrinkled and doesn’t smell that bad, and then pull it on over his head. (For the record, I am not one of those guys, which is one of my few redeeming qualities.)

I believe Jeff Foxworthy did this exact routine. The originality here is astounding.

It turns out that those who like to wear their shirts more than once before laundering can make the shirt smell fresh and clean by pouring a little vodka and water into a spray bottle and then spritzing the shirt with the mixture. Once it dries, the garment is good to go. Who said bartenders don’t come up with any good ideas?

I understand the idea now. Please note that we're waist-deep in a "someone else's amusing story I read on the Internet" column.

According to the information in the story, this is a common trick used by Broadway actors so that the costumes don’t have to be dry-cleaned after every performance. Also — and this is big-star product endorsement territory — “Joan Rivers swears by it. So does Madonna.”

I wonder how many paragraphs he has started with "according to" in his "writing" career. They probably number in the thousands.

I was wrong. Apparently women would do something like this to their clothes. Seriously, Joan, can we talk? And Madonna, is that anyway to express yourself?

In this context, it should be "any way," not "anyway." Idiot.

So here’s what we’ve got: The smart ideas include “Coffee Joulies,” the “Cool Wazoo” and the “Poor Man’s Drycleaning” theory. The stupid ideas include anything to do with poo.

Back to poop! I had no idea being a published columnist was so easy. You go to a website, copy the information on said website, and presto! Your column is done.

See how difficult it is to tell the smart from the stupid? Maybe I ought to think about bringing back the co-ed toga idea.

I like how he found these ideas on a website called "stupid.com," and his point is that they're stupid ideas. Hey, at least he TRIED to be funny this time and didn't just summarize random events from his weekend.