Debate: Comparing Apples to Oranges

By Glenn and Jake

Some of the worst scum in human history have said you cannot compare apples and oranges. Why not?  They’re both round, fruits and can be paired with a banana to make a “joke” penis and testicles.  As summer approaches like a unarmed black teen walking through your apartment complex, now is the time to stand out ground and fight over which fruit is truly superior.  Lie down, put on your favorite Beach House track and enjoy two fruits debating two other fruits.

Glenn: I love apples.  Braeburn, golden delicious, blood libel, or the sweet and implicitly sexual “pink lady” - these flavors do to my taste buds what the finest male prostitutes can do for extremely wealthy conservative Republican men.  Their taste is amazing and their uses are plentiful.  You can convert them to juice, sauce and, with enough persistence, Mormonism.  So many of America’s finest suburban legends are based upon apples: William Tell shooting one off his son’s head, Johnny Appleseed massacring the Mayan Indians and your mother cooking you an apple pie.  Frankly if someone gave me a fruit basket that included oranges and no apples, I would send the fruit basket back and then commit an Anders Breivik-style shooting at my nearest grocery store.


Jake:  Biting into an orange slice is like waking from a walking nightmare.  The rest of my day might be intolerable and filled with jeering passers-by, but for the moment when I’m eating my daily orange, I get a momentary reprieve.  An orange is bliss wrapped in a fragrant waxy peel filled with concentrated pesticides.  The orange is such a benchmark when it comes to fruit it spun-off into its own color.  Is “apple” a color?  No way.  At best, it is a sauce, juice or cider.  Orange juice is superior to the juice of an apple.  Orange sherbet is miles ahead of apple pie.  When you are “tripping balls” do you reach for an apple or an orange?  Which makes staring at a candle more entertaining?  I think we all know the answer to that question from the Timothy Leary records we listened to as children.  Orange has zest and apples are rotten to the core.


Glenn:  Orange is, famously, the only word in the English (olde or otherwise) language that has no rhyming counterpart.  This is an abomination and your first clue it is Satan’s fruit.  My opponent asks if when tripping, do we prefer an orange or an apple?  If I grab an apple on mushrooms, especially a Granny Smith, I’m likely to experience a taste sensation. If I grab an orange I’m going to struggle with my fingernails to peel it, then struggle with a razor blade to cut out the bugs crawling in my veins.  Talk about a walking nightmare!  I like apples because they are simple to eat but you have the option to peel them if you are autistic and cannot handle the skin.  Also children love “shrunken apple heads” because they’re cute, fun, and you can throw them away once they start telling you to kill.  They biodegrade too, unlike oranges which break down slower than styrofoam.  They’ll still be there in a million years when we’re all watching TV on Hulu and no one has cable and most of us have canceled our landlines.


Jake:  What rhymes with apple?  Snapple?  Snapple is a sugar drink passed off as a health drink.  While nothing may rhyme with orange, “Rhymes with Orange” is one of the best comic strips in the Dispatch and Rock Island Argus.  Oranges have a pleasant odor.  If you eat too many apples you will get diarrhea, but you can use the orange peels in your potpourri mix sitting on the back of your toilet.  You can use orange oil to fight the fire ant infestation you have dealing with ever since your significant other broke up with you.  And let us be honest for just a moment, oranges blow apples out of the water in terms of taste.  Oranges have a complex taste bursting with layers, apples are flatter than your ten-year-old sister’s friends.  Oranges are the shape of a planet, apples are the shape of an ass (at least according to Nelly’s brand of Apple Bottom jeans).  Do you really want to side with ass fruit?

Glenn:  Yes!  One of the worst experiences of my life was when, to prove something to myself, I ate an entire orange, peel and all.  I got terribly sick, puking and bleeding from the bottom of my feet.  I ended up having to get them both amputated.  Some might say this was just punishment for eating an orange peel but I say there is no justice in this world.  George W Bush walks free among us and every day apples are picked from a tree, loaded into barrels and sent to their certain deaths in shades of the Armenian genocide Bush’s grandfather helped orchestrate.  Unlike oranges, my memories of apples are as sweet as a Pink Lady and as sentimental as the early days of M(a)cIntosh: the time I spent eating applesauce after a fist fight knocked all my teeth out, the summer I lived in an apple tree to protest GMOs, and especially when I ate the first apple from the Tree of Knowledge.  I stand by that decision and think we’re better off realizing our own nakedness.  Place leaves over your genitals with one hand and eat an apple with the other.


Jake:  When Adam ate the apple from the tree of knowledge he probably said, “what the fuck is this?  This is what I’m supposed to be staying away from?  Two out of five stars.”  Apples are just not very good.  They are too crisp, they will pull the teeth out of your mouth if you’re not careful.  Oranges are supple.  What is better than biting into an orange and getting a mouthful of its juice?  The only things I can think of are wind-surfing and reading a Jane Austen novel.  An orange is loaded with vitamin C, which helps boost your immune system, which is already working overtime trying to fight against HIV.  As you lay on the floor, coughing and overly thin, would you rather have an apple or an orange?  Of course the answer is “orange.”  If you bite into an apple your teeth will shatter like the glass at the beginning of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s theme music.  Orange is the color of the sun, and the color of my heart.