Daniel Day-Lewis
The elaborate system Cromulent Word uses to measure actors’ performances ranks three Daniel Day-Lewis roles in the all-time, hall of fame top ten — Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, Daniel in There Will Be Blood, Bill in Gangs of New York — but each of these, along with every other performance by any actor in the history of the world, stare up with an incomprehensible envy at the number one item on the list: Devin Ratray’s portrayal of Buzz in the first two Home Alone films.
Humphrey Bogart
Were he alive today, Humphrey would certainly recognize that his subtle, tear-inducing delivery of the words “gin joints” (and the subsequent mania wherein gin joint became a culturally acceptable moniker for a bar) is inferior to Ratray’s even more subtle, even more tear-inducing delivery of the word “phlegmwad” (and the subsequent mania wherein phlegmwad became a culturally acceptable moniker for anyone’s younger brother).
Albert Einstein
Sure, the theory of relativity is nice and all — however inapplicable to daily life — and Einstein was a smart dude, but the way Ratray uses logic to move from Point A to Point 2 to Point D allows humanity to exist in a way that a pre-Ratray world could not even imagine.
Axl Rose
For many years now, theorists have suspected that Axl Rose could be Devin Ratray, which would explain why Rose often assumed the persona of a recluse, why he refused to do any press for Chinese Democracy, why he would rarely emerge from his Malibu mansion. Alas, recent footage from Taiwan, where Guns N’ Roses are currently on tour, suggests that the conspiracy theorists are wrong, wrong, dead wrong. While Rose, in all likelihood, has a number of different identities he goes by, to insinuate that one is Devin Ratray, at this point, makes you sound like an unintelligible fool.
The Guy I Shared an Elevator with Last Week
The elevator ride was mundane — the guy nodded in my direction and muttered a flimsy hello — and the word “mundane” should, by law, never appear in the same sentence as the words “Devin” and “Ratray,” unless of course the sentence also contains the word “never” and the “never” distances Devin Ratray from the long tradition of mediocrity one taps into when using the word “mundane.”
Captain Ahab
Ahab and Ratray share the insatiable hunger for the impossible and the sublime. Ahab’s takes the form of a white whale, Ratray’s materializes as a slice of cheese pizza he elegantly rams into his mouth and eats before his brother can find it, thus satiating aforementioned insatiable hunger, a subtle way of calling Ahab a whiny little baby.
Zach Randolph
Though he averages twenty points, ten boards, and two strip club visits per night, the only way Z-Bo’s awesomeness could out-awesome Devin Ratray’s awesomeness would be if Zach spent more time at the strip club, but recent, empirical evidence suggests that no human being can spend more time in strip clubs than Zach Randolph already has, and thus, has hit a ceiling when it comes to accruing awesome points.
The Guy I Saw on the Subway Platform Who Looked Similar to Devin Ratray
There is no reason for a celebrity as recognizable and universally renowned as Devin Ratray to ever, ever, ever use public transportation, and it’s possible that this guy keeps his body shape and facial hair similar to that of Devin Ratray as some kind of elaborate tribute, but wow, it really looked like Devin and I tried to say the word “Buzz” loud enough to elicit a response, but the guy just sat there and read his boring book and didn’t even look up when I said that a friend was “growing out of my ass.”
