I was born son of Byford, brother of Al...

Everyone has that one friend that is almost eternally out of the loop. You know the type…he or she has no idea about those things that the majority of the world takes for granted. Mention a popular movie and they’ve never seen it. Point out someone in a restaurant that looks a lot like a well-known actor or actress and they have no idea who you are talking about. Quote some lyrics from a popular song and they don’t get the reference.

Yep, we all know someone like that. Unfortunately for me, the person in my life like that is my best friend Scoot. We’ll get to talking and I’ll mention someone or something from pop culture and Scoot either goes silent or drops a classic line revealing his ignorance.

Past classics include him not being able to identify Humphrey Bogart, never having heard Devo’s “Whip It” for the first time until 1996, and not seeing “The Blues Brothers” until he was deep into college. My reaction at the discovery of yet another Scooterian slip is almost always the same — I stare in disbelief for a bit, slowly shake my head, return to the stare of disbelief, and then ask “where do you go?!?”

For someone that is so highly intelligent and prides himself on staying abreast of current events and things going on in the news, I simply can’t believe that he’s somehow managed to miss out on pop culture. It truly blows my mind. Last month he had no idea who Jessica Simpson was and wondered about “this Nick Latch-ey” guy that he kept seeing on banner ads.

Last night was “Nerd Night” (thanks to Codding for the name), the one night of the week where Scoot and I get together to work on our own personal Web-based projects like we both did back when we actually had a creative outlet. While working on updating the voting engine on the Top Ten lists, I was poking around on the Web looking for inspiration for future topics. Somehow I managed to end up on a site that had the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the top 500 songs that shaped rock and roll.

I love ranked lists so I began pouring through this, chiming in with my own opinion on which songs were blatantly left off and others that I couldn’t believe were on there. Eventually, I involved Scoot in the conversation I was having inside my head and I began to play clips from some of the songs on the list through the iTunes Music Store so that he’d know which song I was talking about. All of this came to a crashing halt when I read aloud that Run-D.M.C.’s had made the list.

“Oh, did they get on there with ‘Wipe Out’? Oh wait, that was The Fat Boys. Who is Run-D.M.C.?”

What the f…?!? Remember me telling you about my reaction when I’m face to face with yet another “how the hell can he not know about this” moment? Verbatim. I stared. I shook my head. I stared again. I asked “where do you go?!?”

Back when Scoot and I shared an office at BlairLake in the late ’90s, I played their “Raising Hell” CD quite a damn bit. To this day I’d still have to list it in my top 100 CDs of all time. After trying to explain to Scoot that I’d played their hits time and time again, I decided to just play the clips from the Music Store to jar his eternally failing memory.

“Run’s House”. Nothing. “It’s Like That”. Nada. “King of Rock”. Zilch. “Mary, Mary”. Squat. “My adidas”. Crickets. “Walk This Way”…a faint glimmer of recognition spread across his face before he realized that yes, he knew that song.

My God. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, he had no idea until last night that Lionel Richie is NOT blind. That’s right, he thought both Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie were blind musicians and “that’s why (he) always (gets) them confused.”

Where did I go wrong?!? Jeeeeeeeeez. Anyone wanna buy a Scoot?