The World Needs More Ninjas

I saw the South Park episode this week entitled Smug Alert! (Wikipedia episode summary). Hilarious. Basically, one of the characters gets a hybrid car and immediately becomes “smug”. He thinks he’s better than everyone else and starts always talking with his eyes closed. When he decides South Park is too backwards for him, he decides to move to the most smug city ever…San Francisco. There, he meets fellow hybrid owners who also talk with their eyes closed and, every time they fart, immediately start sniffing to get a whiff of their own flatulence.

So, this got me thinking about smugness. So, I decided to make a Top Ten list of Smug Activities in my life. Here it goes (note…this is all in good jest…no offense intended ):

1. Use Gmail: Once you get use to the nearly 3GB of storage, tagging, POP3 downloading, advanced filtering options, and robust search, it’s difficult to understand why so many people continue using other webmails as their primary email (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo!). While the learning curve for Gmail may be a bit steeper, once you’re familiarized with it, you truly feel like you’re using the next generation webmail system while everyone else is stuck in the past. Plus, it allows you to use any of your existing email accounts via Gmail.
2. Own IKEA Furniture: You just walk into an IKEA and immediately you’ll be immersed in smugness. Most of them even serve it in their cafeteria. I can just feel the smug crawling through my body every time I put my shopping cart on one of their “shopping cart escalators”. If another earthquake strikes San Francisco, I have a feeling that something like 90% of the IKEA furniture in the world will be destroyed.
3. Don’t Have Cable Television: OK, there’s degrees of smugness here because we do own a TV. The next level of smugness is those people who don’t even own a TV. Somehow they always manage to inject that fact in about every other conversation you have with them. But even not having cable emits its own smugness as if to say, “I have more entertaining things to do then watch five episodes of Sportscenter every day.”
4. Have a Sam’s Club Membership: Oh, you can definitely smell smug on someone’s breath anytime they say, “Oh, I can go by Sam’s Club to get that.” There are few things in life that cost $35/year that provide as much smug as that little card. I don’t know whether it’s the fact that you have to show your card to even enter the store, that you have the privilege of escorting one lowly non-Sam’s Club member each visit, or the fact that I can buy a pack of 50 bars of soap and save a dime per bar, but something definitely increases my smug quotient by keeping that Sam’s Club card in my wallet.
5. Use Linux: I don’t know if smug or zealot is the better description for Linux users. I use it at work most of the time and have a dual boot laptop at home, but pretty much exclusively use Windows there (Red Hat/Fedora Core at work and Ubuntu at home). There’s definitely some smugness involved when you know that while other people are merely doubling clicking and icon to install a program, you can wget a file, untar it, make it from source, and then update your environment variables to run it. And those are the easy installs . This is another bullet point that involves degrees of smugness as Mac users take the cake. Good gosh these people love making you aware of the fact that they’re running OS X and not that inferior Windows XP. Sometimes you just want to take their universal binary and slap them upside the head with it. Again, if San Francisco were destroyed by an earthquake, I’m confident that 90% of the Macs in existence would be gone.
6. Recycle: And I don’t mean we merely separate our trash into bins for someone to come pick up. Oh no, we actually drive our stuff to the recycle center every week or two and place it in the appropriate bins. How can you not be smug when you’re saving the world for your grandkids while all the non-recyclers would be perfectly content to have future generations live in a post-apocalyptic, Terminator 2-like society? It’s all about the children, people.
7. Have a Blog: OK, just say the word “blog”. It has to be one of the ten smugest words in existence. You almost naturally close your eyes with smug as the word just emanates out of your mouth If I were a non-blogger, I have know doubt that I’d want to punch someone in the face every time they mentioned blogging about some topic. Never has merely typing on your keyboard been so smug.
8. Own an iPod: The official color of those headphones that come with iPods is known as “smug white”. You can’t help but get a smug look on your face every time you see someone with a portable CD player. There’s definitely a smugness involved when you’re walking down the street and see all the non-earbud wearing people “basking in their thoughts” while you, on the other hand, can continuously fill your brain with NSYNC from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep. Oh, and the smugness extends beyond the mere iPod to accessories. We have two protective shieldings for our iPod. For some reason that can only be a smug-related symptom, all of a sudden protecting the paint job on your iPod becomes more important than the one on your car.
9. Use Public Transportation: Oh yes, I get to work every day without the use of a car. While others may emit earth-killing carbon dioxide while battling traffic, I can sit back and read leisurely as I enjoy my bus ride into campus (all the while saving the earth). If I’m feeling extra smug, I can even listen to my iPod while I ride public transportation! Again, there’s level of smugness involved here since we do own a car which we use a fair amount on the weekends. To reach the highest level of smug, we’d have to either get rid of the car totally or buy a hybrid.
10. Don’t Own a Cell Phone: You can’t help but be smug about the fact that you’ve found some way to live without this modern device when it has became a necessity for so many others’ very survival. Next time you hear someone’s cellphone go off at an inopportune time, look around and notice the people with a smug grin on their face. These are the non-cell phone owners (everyone else is probably digging in their pockets and purses to make sure that their’s doesn’t go off next). There’s that smugness in knowing that you don’t waste precious moments of your life finding a witty ringtone for each friend that is entertaining to, oh, about one person on earth…you, the cellphone owner. If anyone else does happen to bask in your ringtone creativity, it will definitely lose all charm when they’ve heard it for the fiftieth time.

And, here’s a list of stuff that I don’t do but find to be smug:

1. Eat Organic Foods: Another one that involves levels of smugness. There’s vegetarians and then there’s the ultimate smug-o-nators, vegans. All the health benefits your getting from eating these foods is negated by the build-up of smug that occurs in your body as a result.
2. Flying First Class: You can’t help but notice the smug look as these people board the plan first and then stare at you as you walk down the aisle as if to say, “Poor schmucks in economy.” I’ve heard in most planes, the emergency masks will drop down if too much smug is coming from the first class section of the plane.
3. Only Getting Your News from One Source: Whether it’s the New York Times or Fox News, you can’t help but notice the smugness emanating from those who have to name their sole news source every time the tell you a piece of info and make darn sure that you know they’re more enlightened than all the rest of us mere mortals who do not trust one organization for all the news.
4. Listen to NPR: Speaking of news sources, here’s the government funded smug. Normally, you don’t preface every nugget of knowledge with the citation from which you learned that information. Except for NPR listeners. If they tell you something that was heard on NPR, without fail they’ll cite NPR as the source in the conversation. San Francisco is known for their historically high smug level since so many cars are tuned to NPR during the commute.
5. Go to Krannert Events: This is the arts center at UIUC that has one of the highest concentrations of smug on campus. You just can’t say you’re going to one of the plays or concerts at Krannert without breathing smug onto all your listeners. Pretty much any “fun” activity that requires you to wear a tie is immediately suspect for high smug potential.

And, my final list is the most smug celebrities and athletes. I’m sure I’m forgetting some obvious ones, but these are the ones that came to me off the top of my head:

1. George Clooney: Hi, I’m George Clooney. I am so smug that I was featured in the South Park episode on the topic. I would basically like flip a bid middle finger towards Middle America to let them know that Hollywood is in fact better than them. We gave an Academy Award to an African-American, Hattie McDaniel, in 1939. Please disregard the fact that it was for playing a stereotypical slave role in a movie that glorifies the slave owning South. If America was only smart enough to let Hollywood run the country, we would be much better off and have much more smug.
2. Kobe Bryant: Hi, I’m Kobe Bryant. I’m living proof that one can do no wrong if one has enough money. If someone accuses you of rape, just pay them to settle out of court and buy your wife a five karat ring. Problem solved. My smugness on court is so strong that many times it overwhelms opponents to the point that they can’t stop me. I really wish that they would just let me play one-on-five in the NBA because I don’t need my teammates anyway and a lot of times they just clog up the lane when I could be scoring more points.
3. Tom Cruise: Hi, I’m Tom Cruise. Not only am I an actor, but my brainwashing by Scientology has made me a health care expert far beyond those “doctors” that spend a decade of their life studying medicine. Though many people may think medication is required to cure smug, really all that is needed is to give more money to the Church of Scientology. Smugness, depression, and any other number of disorders can be cured by this simple approach.
4. Barry Bonds: Hi, I’m Barry Bonds. Even the people of San Francisco consider me to be smug. Many of the steroids I use are laced with smug to keep me performing at the highest level. Babe Ruth? I “wiped him out”. Media, teammates, coaches? Overrated. Just give me my steroids, a bat, a ball, and a wall to hit it over and I’m set.
5. Sean Penn: Hi, I’m Sean Penn. Because I starred in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, I am better than you and far more qualified to make political statements. Because of the utmost importance that Fast Times gave my career, I am now qualified to serve as the unofficial US ambassador to Iraq and Iran. And, because of the infinite wisdom afforded to me by virtue of my Fast Times role, I am now not only qualified to criticize anything our government does, but also above any criticism or parody that others may throw my way. This is why it was absolutely vital that I take time to write an inflammatory letter to a pair of comedy writers that parodying me in Team America. Do these jerks not know I starred in Fast Time at Ridgemont High?! I am orders of magnitude better than them (and all of you) because of it.
6. Bill O’Reilly: Hi, I’m Bill O’Reilly. Amazingly, I’ve never been wrong a single time in my life. In fact, I typically catch my own flatulence in a jar and sell it on eBay for $1000. When I have to crap, nothing but solid 24-karat gold turds come out. If you don’t agree that mankind is lucky to have a specimen like me, then I’ll tell you what you can do with your loofah and falafel. My aura of smug covers the set of the O’Reilly Factor. I particularly like to invite people to be on my show where I have complete control and then make fun of them when they refuse. Would I ever go be on an Air America show? Heck no. That would require me to operate in an environment where I don’t have 100% control. My head might explode or something. My set, my rules. I particularly like the one that I have where all staff members must build a shrine to me and spend at least an hour a day meditating about how lucky they are to get to be near me on a daily basis.

Please leave comments if you can think of any other smug activities and/or celebrities/athletes. Or, let me know items on these lists with which you especially agree or disagree.