As a connoisseur of cultural detritus, you've probably seen this ad in which purported actor "Stephen Dorff," looking weary from days of dogged stubble-trimming, juts his chin repeatedly in your direction while explaining why he chooses to smoke Blu™ brand e-cigarettes, besides the fact that he is their paid spokesman. "Negative! One! I'm tired of being a walking ashtray," says "Stephen Dorff," no doubt bathed in Tom Ford cologne at that very moment.

I'm afraid that actor "Stephen Dorff" and all of his glamorous compatriots are lying to you, friends. No matter how many attractive models pose for pictures exhaling clouds of electronically vaporized nicotine solution, and no matter how many sixteenths of an inch "Stephen Dorff" allows his stubble to grow while striding down a beach with the alien-looking neon blue tip of his Blu™ brand e-cigarette glowing betwixt his fingertips, electronic cigarettes will never be cool.

"With Blu, you can smoke at a basketball game if you want to," says actor "Stephen Dorff." Exactly, person writing Stephen's lines. Exactly. You can smoke at a basketball game, if you wanted to, for some reason. And do you know what that tells us? That tells us that electronic cigarettes are not cool. Because they are inoffensive. They are safer. They are not as dangerous. Exactly. Cigarettes were never cool just because of their phallic connotations, and the fact that they gave you something to do with your hands. They were cool because they are dangerous. They surround you in a protective cloud of deadly poison. By smoking a real cigarette, you symbolically tell the world: "I am too badass or, more likely, dumb to care that I am killing myself and others right for no particular reason. I am, in other words, the type of person that you want to fuck."

E-cigarettes just don't say that. And they never will. Electronic cigarettes say, "I can't decide whether to stop or not." Nobody wants to fuck a wishy-washy school crossing guard.

Plus, the glowing neon thing on the end. Come on.