Orlando Bloom Vs. Roombas

The Case For Roombas

First of all, are these things even real? We've heard of them but have never seen one in action. Do they actually zip around unhindered and...you know, pick stuff up? Don't you just have to go over the room with a regular vacuum anyway, to get everything the robot missed? Does it really get cat hair -- we mean, all of it?

More to the point, who knew the future, when it finally arrived, would be so shockingly ho-hum?

Think about it: if you'd told someone in the nineteenth century, or even 1968, that a magic machine would vacuum his house all by itself, he would have screamed, dropped his straw broom/enormous Hoover, and rounded up the townspeople to roast you at the stake.

But here we are in the twenty-first century, and are people running out to buy the magic room-vacuuming robot? Not that we can see. On the mass acceptance scale, Roomba seems to fall somewhere between Segways and those idiotic robot dogs Sony was selling for the price of a Hyundai a few years back.

It's not like people want to vacuum, so maybe Roomba's just too unsettling. You know, first comes the vacuum robot, then the meal-preparing robot, and then the next thing you know robots are breaking your arms and skinning your kids alive. Or maybe it just doesn't work. Or maybe introducing it to the public at large in a series of soda commercials in which a Roomba-like robot stalks Dave Chappelle wasn't, in hindsight, such a hot idea. Look what's happened to him.

The Case For Orlando Bloom

First of all, is he even real either? He's a little too pretty, and come to think of it, we've only actually seen him "act" in the Lord of the Rings movies, and with his ears and bows and dialogue, he could well have been computer-generated in that film.

We don't remember him from Black Hawk Down, never saw Troy, and know him mostly as the not-Johnny-Depp guy in Pirates of the Caribbean. Since we, like the rest of the country, have no plans to see Kingdom of Heaven, we can't authoritatively say that Orlando Bloom actually exists.

If he does, then he, like the Roomba, personifies a disappointing future. Bloom's a fine actor and pretty to look act, but the whimper of Kingdom suggests he may simply be the latest in the long line of male movie stars thrown against the wall to see if they'll stick. And so far, he's like Pam: non-stick. Zow!

The Decision

This is a dilemma: we don't own a Roomba and we don't see Orlando Bloom movies, so they'd both seem to be nullified, yes? Except we sure don't like vacuuming, yet we still have to do it, while we can probably survive the rest of our years without any more sword-and-sandal epics, which is turning out to be Bloom's burgeoning niche.

Plus, we're assuming the Roomba technology will get better, so that eventually it will lick the floor clean and balance your checkbook and bring you a gimlet on ice. That robot, we will want. If ushering in that day means living without Orlando, we're prepared to do that. It's been working out okay so far.

The Winner

Roomba