jeffvrabel.com I humorist and music writer

GateHouse — Barack Obama is a better human being than me for a number of reasons so large that it was discovered only last year by researchers in Denmark. These reasons include, but are not limited to:

1. His teeth, which are awesome, and which I would like to paint, even though I’m not a painter and never have been. I just, I don’t know, want to commemorate them. Maybe on, like, a plate.
2. He can call Scarlett Johansson if he wanted to — not that he does, or would. But he could, which makes me hate him with seething jealousy, much like how I feel about Clooney.
3. Everything else he knows about and can do.

But the most pressing reason that Barack Obama is better than me is that apparently he can prepare for the idea of abandoning his BlackBerry and not explode in hysterics. Like a 4-year-old boy when you tell him he can’t have his third chocolate milk of the night while he reads night-night books because it will most likely cause him to assertively expunge said chocolate milk directly into his bedsheets at some point in the evening. And Dad is tired of doing sheet laundry three times a week, not that this something I have a lot of precise experience with right now or anything.

Indeed, it is highly probable that when Obama takes office in 60 or so days, he will be forced to relinquish his prized BlackBerry. There are various and legitimate reasons involving security, scrutiny, presidential record-keeping and the always-percolating desire to check your Facebook during important briefings regarding which greed-soaked failing giant Wall Street company needs a government handout this week. Sorry, did I say handout? I meant bailout. My apologies.

I would never pretend to be a professional political commentator, because that would cause me to want to perform self-directed dental surgery with those little two-pronged deals that you use to hold corn on the cob. But that Obama can operate a BlackBerry might be one of those generational details that set him apart from John McCain, who carved important messages into slabs of dinosaur.

But he can do this and get by just fine, because of many reasons, most of which are those teeth. I, by contrast, would lose my damn mind. I obtained a BlackBerry earlier this year for the very simple reasons that I finally became able to escape from the clutches of my mobile-phone plan, and also BlackBerrys are very shiny. Also, some other people I knew had one.

I was instantly wrapped in a warm loving embrace of the BlackBerry’s goodness. The device can do a great many pretty astonishing things, exactly none of which I take advantage of. I use it mostly to check for e-mail I do not have and to regularly avail myself of the Facebook statuses of people about whom I am only slightly interested (if any of you are reading, let me offer this advice: your simply being “tired” does not constitute an important enough development to trouble the bulk of your life contacts with).

Well, that’s not true, exactly. Twice I needed to use the map function to find out how lost I was (turns out I was extremely lost), and a few times I’ve used the phone’s camera to take terrible pictures of rock concerts, all of which come out looking like some sort of graduate-level art-school project in Things That Are Unbearably Blurry. So it’s probably best for Obama to ditch it anyway. Think of how many Facebook friends he must have.