Round two of our contest raises the question of cool.

Cool is interesting.

Of course, it’s hard to pull off.  I, myself, am not any good at it.  Occasionally I’ve dreamed about dressing for class like my film studies professor friend, Andrew Rudd, who is very cool.  One day, much to my surprise, I came very close to doing it, except that I wasn’t wearing the Converse canvas sneakers with my tweed sports jacket, jeans, and green T-shirt.  It appears, in fact, to have been something like the middle-aged woman who wins a pick-up truck by shooting a puck from center ice into a 5 inch cut-out in the hockey net at intermission of the hockey game.  A lucky shot.  I won’t get that close again.

Pierce Brosnan and an Aston Martin Vanquish take a break from their duties for a moment to show us how to be cool.

To a certain generation (I’m talking about you, Baby Boomers), James Bond was cool.   Always a snappy dresser, Bond was suave, cool and sophisticated.  He drove sleek Aston Martins.  Over the years his films introduced audiences to the latest technology like lasers, videophones and infrared scopes. The latest technology, of course, is cool.  He came with his own theme music, starting with the electric guitar spy riffs in the opening credits of “Dr. No,” and continuing over the years with commissioned music by cool artists like Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, and Alicia Keys.  He always got the woman he wanted.

And of course, there was his famous line:  “The name is Bond.  James Bond.”  That’s a cool line.

Samuel Sharpe wasn’t actually very cool.

Nobody, apparently, told Samuel Sharpe how cool he’d look in dreadlocks.

Many Jamaicans are cool, but Sharpe wasn’t one of them.  If we go by the drawings made of him in the years after he died, he didn’t have dreadlocks.  So he missed a chance, there. Not really a snappy dresser, from what we can tell.  No background music.   His technology, which probably consisted of a shovel and a machete, was not the latest that science had to offer.   Sharpe had to walk everywhere.  He didn’t even form a bobsled team for the Olympics, which was cool there for a while.

Now, he had the chance to pull off a great line.  Imagine Sharpe appearing at the door of the stately home of a slave owner with a band of armed slaves behind him.  He tells the slaveowner, “The name is Sharpe. Samuel Sharpe.”  Then he turns and burns down the guy’s sugar mill.

That would have been cool.

But it didn’t happen that way.

Score:

James Bond                 1

Samuel Sharpe            1