OO Column: The Obtuse Angle by Jeb Lund (Pro Wrestling News, Analysis, and Commentary... WWE, WWF, WCW, ECW, The Rock, Brock Lesnar, Triple H, Rob Van Dam, Hulk Hogan, Undertaker, Trish Stratus, Lita, Stacy Keibler, Divas, RAW, SmackDown, WrestleMania, S

THE OBTUSE ANGLE
Even More Ramblings
August 5, 2004

by Jeb Tennyson Lund
OnlineOnslaught.com/CitizenScholar.net

Q: Is there a female equivalent to the phrase "sausage-fest"? It would be inserted into sentences like: "I would never join an all-female gym. Sure, I wouldn't have to deal with guys ogling me all the time, but it would be a total [blank]." Is there a catchy phrase for this situation that I am unaware of?
--Sara Regan, Tempe, Ariz.

SG: Great question. I even sent this one out to my friends. Out of the top 100 possible answers, 100 of them couldn't be printed. In fact, nine of them would have redefined comedy as we know it. But since this Web site is owned by the Disney corporation ... well ... you know. I could come up with some generic ones, but they would end up being about as funny as one of Tammy Pescatelli's "I'm Sicilian" routines on "Last Comic Standing."
— The Sports Guy Bill Simmons, ESPN.com, July 23, 2004

One of the privileges of being an online wrestling columnist is that you have all the credibility of Anthony Kiedis stumbling into a Daughters of the American Revolution meeting while wearing a sock over his naughty bits. It doesn't matter how talented or well-liked you are, you're still essentially "that guy."

Because of that I have no shame in suggesting a name for the female equivalent of "sausage fest," to answer Bill Simmons' reader's letter. (Before I go any further, let me just say that "sausage fest" is a wretched name for a male-dominated party. It's not funny; it's not clever; and it pretty much gives a false endowment to most of the guys in

attendance anyway.) I wracked my brain, and I came up with one term.

Even one term was hard. Keep in mind, guys don't mind saying "sausage fest." The name makes a lot of them seem like bigger players than they really are. Also, guys have no shame. On the other hand, women are generally more decorous, more apt to view themselves with dignity and more likely to balk at euphemisms. That was the other problem: there aren't many terms for the female anatomy that aren't insulting, ugly or something that no woman in her right mind would use in reference to her own body.

Therein lay the rub: come up with a socially acceptable term — something PG-rated — that women wouldn't necessarily balk at the first, second or tenth time they heard it. So here we go:

Box Social.

Yeah, you know what the euphemism is. Yeah, it's not pretty. But, by the same token, it's one of the least ugly terms out there. Furthermore, it's got two things going for it:

1. It's a social occasion. Anytime you get people together, it's social. The problem with "sausage fest" is that I can't think of too many times where I've been hanging out with friends of any gender where we could call it anything approaching a "fest." A fest is sort of a big deal, whereas the term "sausage fest" could describe 10 guys at a low-key party. No low-key party is a fest. Sorry, it isn't. Still, anything from two women to two hundred women is by nature social.

2. No man uses the term "box social" anymore unless he's some sort of aristocratic nightmare who sprang forth from his mother's womb sporting a pair of deck shoes, a boater hat, and a blue blazer featuring the heraldic crest of a school that celebrates Latin, polo, and an initiation ritual verging on sodomy. And as far as I can tell, no women participate in box socials anymore unless they're members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, married to a guy with that blue blazer and boater hat, and have no idea who the hell Anthony Kiedis is.

Therein lies the beauty of box social. It's a term that's been almost totally vacated by society. Since no one uses it anymore, let's redefine it and use it for our own ends. It's a party that's almost entirely composed of women. It's social, and everyone there has the requisite anatomy. Forget the old definition. The only people who might object will breed themselves out of society in a generation anyway: either fatal brain disease or hemophilia will take care of them all.

Anyway, on to the ramblings....

Random thoughts while wondering how many years I can get away with blowing off irritating conversation by saying, "Now watch this drive."

You know you're getting old when you fall asleep while watching pornography.

Seeing the lead singer of Steely Dan and his black backup singers is like looking at the matter and anti-matter of Soul.

Every time I go to Sam's Club, I see the same pack of 50 Nathan's Hot Dogs. And each time I say to myself, "You could eat all of those before they go bad."

Apart from having to have sex with Anne Rice, being Stan Rice has gotta be the cushiest job in the world. You sit around a nice house in New Orleans, write Godawful poems called "Tragic Rabbit," and as long as your wife's still working, it means there's someone in the world stupid enough to publish them.

The saddest part of watching American Psycho II is that it's a greater waste of Shatner's talent than it is of Mila Kunis'.

If there's one B-List celebrity who I want to drink with, it's Donal Logue. I don't know why: that guy could trash my house, and I wouldn't give a damn.

Now that Stone Cold's off the roster, the next WWE employee I expect to get arrested is Randy Orton. Not for anything so mundane as domestic abuse. I'm thinking Idiot Crime here on the level of Randy Moss practically running over a traffic cop when he had marijuana in his car.

Did Ashley Judd sign some contract prohibiting her from ever appearing in a movie with a black man who is not Morgan Freeman? And what kind of penalties did she get hit with for being in Twisted with Samuel L. Jackson?

I'm almost convinced of these two things:
1. Pink is a man.
2. You could fry five chickens in the grease on that man's face.

Ali Davis' True Porn Clerk Stories livejournal will never be equaled. I must insist on this. It gets truer with each passing year, as I learn of more college friends or their siblings working in porn stores. They all abuse the hand-sanitizer.

Which was the more troubling part of Catch Me If You Can?
• Tom Hanks' "Massachusetts Accent"?
• The fact that Spielberg thought we'd swallow it?

Speaking of accents: there's comedy; there's high comedy, and then there's "Jamaican" Kendra, the Vampire Slayer from the second season of Buffy. She can't tell if she's Jamaican or from Northern Ireland. "Ah cain't tell if ah should tink you be a vumpaire slayin ting! CALL ME NOW! I miss de ould sod o' Dublin! Aye, Darlin', let's sing 'The Rare Old Mountain Dew'! NO COLA NUT! Oo' wants de Guinness and de ganja?"

If I hear a song like "Barbie Girl" by Aqua come on the radio while I'm driving, I automatically change the station. Not because I really object to the song, but because I can picture getting in a fatal accident, and the officer on scene finding my bloodied body while a girl wails: I'm a blond bimbo girl, in a fantasy world/Dress me up, make it tight, I'm your dolly. Not a good way to go out.

Is Anne Hathaway forbidden to be in any movies where she doesn't play the princess of a fictional country?

Only RVD can cut a promo and look less human than the video-game version of himself cutting a promo.

There are few uglier "supposed-to-be-pretty" women on rerun TV than Miss Parker from The Pretender.

Today I went to the grocery store to get stuff for a rib marinade. The only things I needed were beer and orange juice. Lots of OJ. The cashier looked at my stuff, then at me. "I'm fighting a cold," I lied. He started to point to the beer and say something. I cut him off. "It's a big cold."

A long time ago, someone told me who the "Ronnie" was when Eddie Money says, "Just like Ronnie said," in his song, "Take Me Home Tonight." I'd just like to take the time now to thank God that I managed to forget that little piece of trivia.

The list of drummers who are also singer/songwriters is so small that you'd think Don Henley would put a bullet in Phil Collins for dragging the average down for the rest of them.

It's only a matter of time before there's a power-punk cover of the Law & Order theme.

Say what you will about an exciting Devil Rays game at Tropicana Field: it might be a party, but it's still a party in a crypt.

My all-time favorite Goth-related pastime is running at a group of them and screaming, "I'M THE SUN! I'M THE SUN!!!" Chances are one or two of them are in a live-action role-playing Vampire game, and they'll immediately fall on the ground, cover themselves with their cloaks and begin hissing. I wish I were making this up.

How did Keira Knightley become a sexy starlet with an overbite that's got a longer reach than a flyweight boxer?

Probably my favorite reason to go to the James Joyce pub to watch baseball is to see the bar's owner (Irish, Red Sox fan) berate his barkeep wife (American, Yankees fan). It's not the post-season without something resembling a quasi-domestic dispute and your asking yourself, "Is this just for show? Should I be concerned about this?"

Nothing says you've just quit smoking like horking up a lunger and wondering what year it's from.

Each year, Mariska Hargitay comes closer and closer to looking like beef jerky.

When it comes right down to it, Woody Paige could tell me the meaning of life and still come off looking like that uncle that the family had committed and then didn't tell you about until you were eighteen.

Nothing makes you appreciate the technological and hygienic advances of the last century like a hooker on Deadwood offering someone a free bath before they do anything else to them.

Sometimes getting hate mail from wrestling fans is like being the screener for the "before" writing in a late-night literacy infomercial.

I give it four years max before I meet a hippie girl named Chlamydia.

Maybe Randy Orton's total unfamiliarity with ring-psychology stems from the fact that he can't spell it. Do you ever get the feeling that if he pulled a prank on someone via email, he'd follow it up with, "It was a prank. SIKE! SIKE, SIKE, SIKE!!!"?

Whenever I'm on a cell phone, I like to pause for a few seconds to say hello to John Ashcroft. Because, hey, he probably gets lonely.

I don't care how old and infirm she becomes, if the media starts rehabilitating Yoko Ono as some sort of well-meaning artistic quasi-genius in her twilight years, I'm going on a killing spree.

I'll put it this way: if I get to choose my form of torture in Hell, and my three options are a Jennifer Love-Hewitt album, Jewel's poetry or a collection of Sarah Michelle Gellar interviews... I sincerely won't know which one hurts the least.

Every time I see another teenaged girl with an over one-inch-thick roll of fat gasping over the top of her hip-huggers, I remember that they cause nerve damage, and laugh.

M. Night Shyamalan's "twist ending" gimmick is pretty played out. So I'm thinking that his next film should be about world peace coming true. Then, five minutes from the ending of the film, during the premiere showing, he can cut through the movie screen with a Bowie knife, scream at the audience, then mow everyone down with a machine gun. On the DVD commentary (recorded in prison), he can say, "The clue for the audience is the color red used throughout the film. RED FOR BLOOOOOOODDD!!!!!" Come on, people, work with him, here.

If there were any justice in this world, MTV VJ Kennedy would long ago have wound up in porn.

I'm not one of those doom-and-gloom social pundits, but reality TV just leaves me cold at this point. Let's ramp it up and lock people in rooms with a sharp and pointy but telegenic animal. Like an otter that's been maced. Wouldn't this be great to watch? Yes, I'm drunk again.

When someone buys a "Sex Machine" shirt, with an arrow on it pointing to their crotch, where do they think they can wear it? There's got to be some island where everyone walks around in these novelty shirts. And yes, it's probably off the coast of Florida.

Take out all the original compositions, and The Simpsons' full-series soundtrack of licensed songs is probably one of the finest varied collections of music in history.

If Maroon-5 and Marc Anthony swapped "This Love" and "I Need to Know" as their signature songs, would anyone notice?

The cancellation of Angel and the continued success of Judging Amy leads you to believe that average Americans don't like hot chicks and angular men nearly as much as they like watching Tyne Daly slowly morphing into Ernest Borgnine.

I just mentioned Judging Amy. It's probably legal to kill me now.

Burning questions: Am I the only one who thinks Coca Cola C2 sounds like a plastic explosive? Since a "reverse-tachyon beam" fixed everything in every Star Trek spinoff, why didn't they just start trying to solve problems with that first? Why are acoustical Led Zeppelin ballads okay for "hard rock" programming when virtually no distortion-laden Beatles song fits the bill? Shouldn't you be able to wake up passed-out partiers with a leaf blower and have them just accept it? Is it legal to punch out the local "bar troubadour" if he drunkenly plays a song for the second time in one night? Who eats poi and likes it? Why doesn't McDonalds make onion rings?

For a drinker, having a beer at a wobbly table with an over-enthusiastic friend who slams his hands down on the table all the time is pretty much on the same paranoia level as a husband watching his pregnant wife take inside fastballs from Roger Clemens.

Is there any reason why the WWE refuses to record the Undertaker's theme with a real pipe organ instead of synthesizers? Who would be against this?

No one can go longer without blinking than Captain C. W. Jensen from World's Wildest Police Videos.

E-MAIL JEB LUND
BROWSE JEB'S ARCHIVE

Jeb Tennyson Lund's Ramblings columns have been described as "Andy Rooney on crack." He'd like to dedicate this column to the memory of Rick Scaia's brother, who is a writer for Judging Amy and thus technically dead.