Clicks Just Keep Getting Harder To Find

LECTOR EMPTOR"Reader Beware" 


The "survey" linked below is yet another example of how low the bar has been moved.

In the cyberwar for eyeballs, Interweb content providers are forced to put-out a constant stream of meaningless filler in order to placate their advertiser's demand for 'clicks'. 
To paraphrase Paul Revere & The Raiders: "Clicks just keep getting harder to find".



Even though it is within the realm of possibility that someday Social Scientists might discover a male human with an internet connection who has not been a consumer of pornography, it's possible, it's not realistic to produce a meaningful survey on modern male sexuality that is based on interviewing "20" testosterone-drenched male university students!?
 
All Men Watch Porn eh?http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/6709646/All-men-watch-porn-scientists-find.html

I suspect that Alfred Kinsey must be rolling in his grave. 

Schwarzenegger Schadenfreude

If an Austrian Oak falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

 

The other day I stumbled a upon a Youtubian clip from the film "Pumping Iron" and it made me think about the very public downfall of Argh-argh-arghnold Schwarzenegger,
the "Austrian Oak".

Like a lot of other testosterone fueled teenagers back in the 70s, I was in awe of Ahnold's uber-masculinity. He was the ultimate posterboy for the Bodybuilding craze that Joe Weider was cultivating and Ahnold was the dude who sold it to the world.

Before the 70s there had been hypermasculine celebrities  and movie stars like Johnny "Tarzan" Weismuller. They counter balanced the female counterparts like Jane Mansfield. Today we still have a great demand to satisfy our voyeuristic appreciation of over-the-top physiques and we have stars with superbodies like  Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and Sofia Vergara.  

as if

Most of us could never attain Ahnold's level of physicality because of the genetic limitations and fear of taking steroids, but the greatest impediment was the amount of physical labour required...it was just way too much work.

It was inevitable that Ahnold would appear on the big screen and from Conan to Predator and Terminator, he became the BIGGE$T box office draw in the world and according to Box Office Mojo, his adjusted lifetime gross amounts to nearly..wait for it...
THREE BILLION DOLLARS! http://boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?id=arnoldschwarzenegger.htm


He parlayed this notoriety into a post cinematic political career. He hitched his wagon to the mystique of American Royalty and married into the Kennedy clan. This secured some serious credibility and piggybacked the zeitgeist of celebrity worship, and became the Governator of "Kaleefornyah".

Now of course the revelation of his indescretions and illegitimate child with one of his domestic servants has torpedoed the magic and he is in the midst of a very public scandalous divorce. How the mighty Oak has fallen.

Last night I watched "Who's Sorry Now" on the CBC's Doc zone: http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/episode/whos-sorry-now.html 

"This episode explores big marquee moments of regret from public figures to take a sharp and timely look at the art, spin and billion-dollar business behind The Big Apology. The recent boom in public apologies is taking place against a backdrop where powerful people and interests have less and less privacy. With a mobile phone camera in every pocket and an internet audience instantly riveted to postings of fresh scandals, it‘s harder than ever for public figures to hide mistakes and misdeeds.   
Inevitably when a crisis comes, an elite brand of "reputation managers" or "crisis control" specialists springs into action. They take control of the message by spinning the apology in an effort to "protect the brand" and salvage the image of the philandering politician, the cheating sports idol, or corrupt CEO. More often than not it all goes wrong."


Our society's obssession with celebrity has collided with the 24/7 365 world of the internet and it's Open Season on famous people. Our pathetic inclination to feel pleasure at the misfortune of others (Schadenfreude) is a deeply ingrained psychological need to measure up to others...and our prehistoric brain is hardwired to make us victims of our own insecurity.

Social validation increases the levels of dopamine and serotonin in the brain, so we subconsciously strive to find ways to even out the playing field. Since many of us believe that we, the great unwashed hordes of workaday nobodies living in anonymity, allow celebrities the privilege of living these amazing wealthy lives, because we finance their fabulous lives by buying tickets or voting for them, so we think that they OWE us...BIG TIME!

The media has capitalized on our natural pre-programmed-pre-occupation with social grooming. "Humans live in a constant duality between how we see ourselves and how others see us."

 Like our Ape cousins and ancestors, we evolved big brains that freed up a lot of time from food finding and sentenced us to the majority of out time being kidnapped by social grooming. Now this natural obssession has spun right out of control to the detriment of our participation in political and social activism..things which actually affect our lives.

It's sad that we need to invent and create heroes. If we spent more time concentrating on our own lives, we'd realize that the real heroes are the people we know, who actually affect your life. We also need to appreciate that the great unwashed hordes of workaday nobodies living in anonymity aren't looking at our lives under a microscope.
We should all be ridiculously overjoyed that when saplings like us fall in the forest, nobody is watching and it doesn't make a sound.

WE ARE OUR BRAINS

If I could, I would like to arrange for every person on the planet to watch this video. If we could collectively acknowledge that the 3 pound glob of jello holding our ears apart controls how and who we are, it would free us from all of the bullshit that we think that we know about ourselves.

Even a casual glance at my blog roll or list of "friends" on Facebook proves my obvious predisposition towards associating with like-minded individuals is a direct product of my selfish genes.

"Social validation increases the level of dopamine and serotonin in the brain and allows us to let go of emotional fixations and become self aware more easily. We are in a constant duality between how we see oursleves and how we think that others see us."



We are what we think, but we need to train ourselves to be consciously aware that we are still operating with a prehistoric brain that can hijack our rational thoughts when we feel threatened...regardless of whether that threat is real or imagined.

The more attached we are to a belief system, the more imprisoned we are by this artificial environmentally induced bias. To have self awareness and free choice, we must disconnect from our socially induced cosmology.

HAPPY EVOLUTION WEEKEND!

I am Agnostic because I accept that the BIGGEST question of this ongoing debate cannot be definitively won or lost based upon our current level of available scientific data.

To many folks this is perceived as fence-sitting. This is how the incomparable Carl Sagan explained his position: "An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic. I have some discomfort with both believers and with nonbelievers when their opinions are NOT based on facts ... If we don't know the answer, why are we under so much pressure to make up our minds, to declare our allegiance to one hypothesis or the other?"

I have friends who are anchored along every angstrom of the debate scale. Oh sure sometimes I totally lose it with the Fundies, but I acknowledge that the vast majority of people wish to incorporate both aspects into their lives. So instead of letting the extremists on either end continue to monopolize this discussion, Evolution Weekend looks like a viable alternative that most of us can build upon..without compromising on Evolution because I oppose the ongoing movement to incorporate "Intelligent Design" into the education system.

"Evolution Weekend is a chance to celebrate the intersection of religion and science and to do so in a mature manner. The clergy members of The Clergy Letter Project are deeply religious, every bit as devout as the fundamentalists who oppose them, but they also recognize that practicing their religion should not have to mean turning their backs on the facts of science.

Instead, they understand that a deeper understanding of the natural world will only enhance their faith. And they are not so insecure in their faith that they feel compelled to condemn all other belief as false and demand that everyone else be forced to accept their singular perspective."

Evolution Weekend is an opportunity for religious individuals to practice their faith while appreciating all science has taught us.

Evolution Weekend: Protecting Both Religion and Science

www.huffingtonpost.com

Rattling The Swill Bucket

"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket"
George Orwell

We male homo escapeons might try to distance ourselves from the primordial impulses which control our wenis and influence 99.99% of our behaviour...but we can't....not really.

Like it or not Ladies, we men can blame the brain. Yes our ridiculous sex drive is mercilessly dictated by the three-pound lump of jello lodged between our ears. The thick skull houses the 200,000 year-old monkey-brain which helped our species escape a period of drastic climate change that ravaged our once edenic& verdant bithplace, the African Savannah.

Fast forward to the present day age of incomprehensible miracles such as the world wide interwebs, mapping the human genome, and Hollywood suits green-lighting re-makes of 70s & 80s movies that nobody really liked the first time around...
and here we are..
still slaves to our apeman cravings.


I present as evidence of our anthro-psychological mindcuffs exhibit A: a simple car commercial.
Perhaps you've seen it?
How I love the catchy song Tightrope by Janelle Monae
you can listen to her video for the song here>
 *  
Mm-mm-MM!

and now here is the car commercial >!



Listen to all the benefits of owning this vehicle...
interspersed with the now ubiquitous jumpcut imaging of young people on the cusp of having it all. WOW!
But wait?

There is one shot 40 seconds in that every wenis owner from 12 to 90 remembers..
BAM...
it's only on for a single second...
and it has nothing to do with driving the car.

It's this cute girl in repose enjoying a carefree moment at the beach..

Actually most guys don't even notice that there is a Dude sitting behind her?
I didn't.

Now we all know that male humans crave a mindnumbingly low standard of needs, wants and desires... and therefore sex sells. 
I suppose that as a former TV spot writer/producer I may scrutinize Ads a smidge more than most folks, but most of the comments about this spot are asking about that girl. 

Perhaps the male sex drive is the achilles' heel..it is regularly used to destroy Kings, capture Spies and snag the tall good-looking guy down the street with the great job that's married to what's-her-face?.

We "Y" chromers and our seemingly endless supply of fertilizer..enough to effortlessly impregnate bajillions of females and re-populate our own planets...we're all virtually powerless to deflect either subliminal or blatant sexual messages.

It's not fair...ladies you should point fingers at the evil advertising wizards who are manipulating  our evolutionary monkey-see, monkey want-to-do brain!

This might be the greatest car in the world, but 99% of the hetero men will remember this one second flash of this cute girl in the Ad, and maybe even the name of the vehicle.

If Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket, this Orwellian pronouncement works on so many levels.
Rattling the stick indeed!

Midlife... it's all about the what "if" ?

 
Yesterday at the Beach I saw the question mark cloud (helped it out a little ;) and spooked the Gulls to get them to go up right in front of me.

Humans are odd little creatures.
We're Causal Determinists cursed with Cognitive Dissonance and Inequity Aversion.

In the West we sit back and grumble as the Governments bail out the Billionaires & Banks that gambled and lost billion$ of our money.

We don't live in the nice little comfortable Middle Class world of the 50s. Advertisers want us to think we do but in reality we live under the same system that has existed since day one. If you need proof, here it is...MotherJones

It has been amazing to watch the young people in the Middle East risk their lives to escape the tyranny of the elite. 

I wondered what would happen if North Americans decided that the system needs replacing and march en masse? Until people are starving I don't think that we'd challenge the system. We have too much stuff to lose and we don't want to get clubbed or shot at with rubber bullets. We'll just wait and vote for the opposition, then things will change! We'll show them!

"Many of us have superstitions – odd, reassuring habits that make no rational sense – but there may be an underlying reason for such behaviour.

Our brains are designed to detect structure and order in our environment, says Bruce Hood at the University of Bristol, UK. We are also causal determinists - we assume that outcomes are caused by preceding events.

This combination of sensing patterns and inferring causes leaves us wide open to superstitious beliefs. "But there are very good reasons why we have evolved these capabilities," Hood adds. Spotting and responding to some uncertain cause-and-effect relationships can be crucial for survival."


Ten Things We Don't Know About Humans
 

It almost seems as though we've just started to wake up from Millenia of bullshit? I like to think that the Interwebz had something to do with that. People can only respond to situations when they have information.?

Winterkills

I shouldn't read stuff like

" Why The Future doesn't need us :( "

during the Winter months.

It argues that human beings would likely guarantee their own extinction. Like Winter isn't bad enough?

Whinging and kvetching aboot it feels good. 

Donnsizing

I think that I'm ready to do some serious eviscerating on my stagnating blog. I just don't have the heart to delete it.

I'll go back through the archives and keep a couple postings per month...but only if they somehow connected with my inner narrative or a few readers.

I need to be pro-active and clean up my clickstream in case I decide to run for public office in the meatworld.

 No really? Could happen?

Most of us say/write things which might be misinterpreted by others and might interrupt the momentum of our mid-life crisis of consciousness crusade.
Hahahaha.

I can hear you laughing but it could happen?

Does your archive contain any time bombs which might blow up in your face? What exactly is the point of keeping all of that dynamite in your basement?

DOES DEATH SCARE THE LIFE OUT OF YOU?

Most of us are all too familiar with the Kübler-Rossian 5 F'n stages of dealing with Death, terminal illness, catastrophic personal loss, significant life events, and any other tragedy or disaster.

1) NO F*CKING WAY?
denial
"This can't be happening not to me Nuh-UH?
Talk to the hand."
 

2) F*CKKKKKK!
anger
"Son-of-a! Oh no YOU di'int!?"

3) HOLY F*CK!!!
bargaining 
"I'd make a deal with God, 
And I'd get him to swap our places"
Kate Bush Running Up That Hill

4 f*ck it  :(
depression
 "Think I'll just go and eat worms.
And when I'm gone you wait and see,
They'll all be sorry oh so sorry that they picked on me."

5) Ahhh f*ck
acceptance
"Yeah but what-are-ya-gonna-do?"
Homer J Simpson

 
What brought this on?
Last weekend I went to see BODIES the Exhibition and yes it did affect me.
 

 
The platicized people made me realise that we are, to quote The Fifth Element, meat popsicles. When sliced up and laid out on a table, we look like a platter of Ham, Turkey, Steaks and Ribs. I'll never carve a Christmas Dinner again without noticing how similar we are.
 
Which is fine. As an empiricist I accept the scientificky theory that it took 3 Billion Years of evolutionary tinkering to create us. From stiffly finned fish through to primates...
 

it makes perfect sense that our basic template has been modified to accomodate our progress.

We've come a long way from the primordial ooze to our own unique place in the grand scheme of things. No other creature can boast of having attained such a dysfunctional and near complete separation from the Natural World.
 
But it dawned on me that all of those other organs are just there to support the 3 pound glob of jello folded betwixt our ears. I don't know how electric-chemical connectors create a mind out of a brain, and I also understand, that I never will.

That being said, I honestly believe that we ARE our mind.
 

 
When I looked at the bodies in the exhibit I was fine, but once I glanced into the faces and saw those marble eyes in a real face, it freaked me out. Then I would suddenly be aware that at one point in time, this WAS A REAL PERSON.
 
A human being who experienced all of the same emotional trials and (hopefully) a few triumphs as the rest of us, and who no doubt wondered what would happen to "them" after they died...
especially ending up on display like this?
 
When my time comes, I hope that it's sudden, and that somehow Monica Bellucci was directly responsible.
 

 
Just kidding, no seriously, I can only dream of dying in my sleep like Grandpa, and not like the terrified screaming passengers in his car...
okay sorry, I love that old joke.
 
For the time being I'm not going to obssess aboot it. All the whatifs and shoulda-woulda-coulda's add up fast and take the fun out of being a cognizant being. Like these future Darwin Award recipients. 
 

 
NOW is a gift, that's why they call it The Present.
..go ahead and groan.
 
Personally, I don't see any point in trying to figure oot what's waiting on the other side, if anything, because nobody knows, and there is no way of finding out.
 
There have been plenty of theories dreamed up over the past several Millenia. Some of them are creative & comforting, the recycling ones are nice, but for the most part, most of these imaginings are just plucked out of thin air and burdened with laugh-oot-loud, perplexing, guilt-ridden, value-added rules which nobody can adhere to anyway? 
 

 
I just hope that researchers keep pluggin' away on how a physical brain creates a magical mind so that eventually Humans can stop worrying aboot it.

For now I'll just keep renewing my Lease On Life with the Reaper every Halloween. I guess that if I am being perfectly honest with myself, I'm stuck in the "bargaining" phase.
 
 

Aren't we all? 

THE ANGLE OF THE DANGLE

"What is life but the angle of vision?

A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Am i right?

I used to Blog..
but you know what?

My throaway 'spur of the moment' posts always had better responses than the gilgameshian epics which I had painstakingly researched and spent hours fact checking and captioning photos...

that drove me f*cking crazy!

All of which explains why I am now inconsolably despondent and wandering aimlessly oot & "whooring aboot" the slums of Facebook, begging for scraps of attention from long-lost cousins, and a smattering of former co-workers, old friends,  and schoolmates and people I've never met.

It's pathetic, but somehow it feels as if a karmic-cosmic  justice has been served.

My intention is to keep visiting your Blogs so see you around...

The SUEnited States Of America

Congratulations America.
As the most litigious people on the planet your society is malfunctioning.
If you live in SUE S. A. perhaps you need a copy of this BOOK
..maybe a couple..one in the car, one at work, one at home.

Actually, you should sue the Government for not giving you a copy!!

This recent story perfectly demonstrates how governments and corporations are so worried about covering their ass, that this paranoia of facing liability seems to have superceded the last shred of decency and common sense.

These rent-a-cop so-called "guards" are just there for decoration and to stop the occasional suicidal person from jumping in front of a corporate train in a public area. They have orders to observe and report...
is that useless or what?

Seriously, how much longer can the average American afford to live under the ubiquitous gaze of ambulance chasing lowlife lawyers and their greedy willing accomplices?

What is up with these spineless security guards..
oh I know they are following their orders..
but for the price of three useless rent-a-cops they could probably afford a real cop that could have intervened, restrained, and maybe even tasered that psychotic little bitch into submission.

I can't wait to see photos of these three spineless wussy asshats..
how could all three of them stand there and watch a 15 year old girl get kicked in the head...
especially since she ran over to them and asked for protection?

Here is an American Dude who sued Guiness Book Of World Records for being named the most litigious person in the world.

Unbef*ckinglievable!

THE WEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE


Above all else I am an incurable Coherentist.

My insatiable curiousity compels me to assemble a manageable cosmology.
I want to understand as much of the Who, What, When, Where, Why and HOW I am who Iam..
and why the world around me and everyone in it, is the way IT IS!

I started Blogging because I realised that this medium is amazing. Although I am limited by my brain and all of it's inherited pre & post conditioning, I want to find my Oasis of Homeostasis; a workable balance of unrelated thingamabobs..Coherentism.

And I want it all funnelled into neat and tidy little packages with a ribbon on top...
but I am also very aware that I am an insufferable hodge-podgerist prone to smush ideas and factoids together even if they don't fit.

The fact that YOU are reading this means that you have voluntarily engaged in becoming part of this experience via the Next Wave. This Tofflerian-McLuhanian Matrix known as the Global Village.
We are out here networking because the old model of Hierarchies failed miserably. Blind faith in leaders is no longer acceptable because it doesn't work.

The Information Revolution has levelled the playing field and now any of us can have access to most of the information that our trusted Leaders once used to dominate us.

Why should those grossly over-compensated leaders reap all the rewards when we were doing all the work?

We keep the ball rolling not them.
Enough of that bullsh*t!

So here we are. Information is and always has been the most powerful form of currency on the planet. We are attempting to attain control over our lives..something no other generation has ever accomplished.
We want to think and make decisions for ourselves..and the old Matrix doesn't like it.

However, we all may just end up becoming cyber-cogs in some huge global melting pot of presumed universal ideals.

Fellow Canuck Marshall McLuhan coined the term Global Village back in the 60's.

"McLuhan wrote that the visual, individualistic print culture would soon be brought to an end by what he called "electronic interdependence":
when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture.

In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village.

The idea that technology has no per se moral bent -- it is a tool that profoundly shapes an individual's and, by extension, a society's self-conception and realizationMcLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study –-
popularly quoted as "the medium is the message."

Ok let's look at his tetrad theory about how each medium inter-reacts.

Wiki uses the Radio example.
Radio was supposedly going to kill newspapers.

Radio is a sound medium that amplified the importance of voice and music. Radio relied on limiting the importance of print and visuals.

The next logical step was a morphing of the two into Television...which in turn gave birth to the Personal Computer which puts every person in charge of operating their own Radio/Tv/Newspaper or Magazine that offers both audio and visual aspects...
and all with a level of immediacy and intimacy that none of the other mediums can compete with.

Advertisers are jumping off those old Media like rats on a sinking ship. Conglomporations and Advertisers already know this and they are desperately trying to control the Internet. They want to be back in the driver's seat.

The Conglomporations want to control and pillage the global village.

The Internetted Computer is why we are seeing the BIG Newspapers start to falter, CD sales dwindle, Broadcast Tv fading, the Book market is next.
Video killed the Radio Star but the PC will kill them all...to some extent yet to be determined.

Where does that leave us?

McLuhan's collective global village is still in it's infancy and it is choking on cliches and archetypes.

We can still lump Blogs into categories but I've noticed that most of you can express yourselves in multiple ways.

We don't need to box ourselves in but we do because we've been trained to think that way.

Now we can interact with individuals anywhere in the world anytime.
We are the ME in MEdium.
Welcome to the WEDIUM Neo.
WE are the message and the messengers.

Like it or not it is on! Right now cyberstars are recreating the successful aspects of the previous mediums but as we figure out how to do more out here, this too will change. Imagine a world with 6 Billion Stations?

Have you noticed that the number of Celebrities seems to be growing exponentially out here? There was a finite number of Movie Stars when I was a kid back in the 60s..now I couldn't possibly name or keep track of all of them.

We finally realised that there are millions of incredibly talented people out here...not just a handful like our previous generations were led to believe. Millions.

There is more information out here than we can handle...too many Blogs, too many Twitterers..remember we can only handle about 150 relationships.

So the rest of all this crap out here is going to gel and morph and become some sort of collective conscience. Big Brother meets the Matrix at the cyber water cooler. Physical borders will blur and our global village will become a part of our reality...as real as the real world.


Now do you want the Red Pill and see how deep Carroll's Alicinian rabbit-hole goes?

Or the Blue Pill:
the story ends, you wake up, and you believe whatever you want to believe.

CROW-A-TREE POETRY,

BECAWSE I CAN

Every so often I feel the urge to express the magic of the Dinosaursian descendents, the Birds.
Okay Okay, so I've done it twice,
here Wholly Crow and here Bird Droppins.


This morning a caw-cawphony overhead really cawght my attention.

I witnessed an amazing scene.
A solitary Owl, beset by dozens, a "murder", of Crows, flew a few feet overhead and sought refuge from it's tormentors in a tree across the street.

I ran into the house to retrieve my camera but ultimately failed to procure a decent shot of the beleaguered, yet wise, old bird.


I was startled yet thankful that this metCAWphorical imagery didn't just "go over-my-head".






















DEEP eh!?

Despite my "pun"ishing style, once-in-a-while it's fun to put the TRY in Poetry...innit?

IS IT JUST ME?

Does anyone else detect a subliminal message in this poster?

The Wiggles are coming out to Whateverpeg. I noticed this peculiar advert in the paper..hmm?

The WIGGLES are "the world's biggest preschool band" and also Australyer's top-earning entertainers?

Most of you are no doubt surprised that Austraylyer would have children's entertainers..afterall, back in May 0f 1976 I learned all about Australians from P.J. O'Rourke's brilliant Foreigners Around The World article in National Lampoon magazine.

Bear in mind this was written in the halcyon days of Satire years before Political Correctness ruined everything.

Racial Characteristics:

"Violently loud alcoholic roughnecks whose idea of fun is to throw up on your car.

The national sport is breaking furniture and the average daily consumption of beer in Sydney is ten and three quarters Imperial gallons for children under the age of nine.

"Making a Shambles" is required study in the primary schools and all Australians are bilingual, speaking both English and Sheep.

Possibly as a result of their country's being upside down, the local dialect has over 400 terms for vomit.

Some of the peculiar forms of native wildlife have up to nine assholes.

The recent destruction of Darwin by a hurricane was actually a cover story for the regrettable coincidence of paydays on three separate sheep stations."

Now to be fair O'Rourke was equally critical of us.

Racial Characteristics:

"Hard to tell a Canadian from an extremely boring regular white person unless he's dressed to go outdoors.

Very little is known of the Canadian country since it is rarely visited by anyone but the Queen and illiterate sport fishermen. It is thought to resemble a sort of arctic Nebraska.

It's reported that Canadians keep pet French people. If true, this is their only interesting trait.

At any rate, they are apparently able to train Frenchmen to play hockey, which is more than any European has ever been able to do."

After reading that analysis, aren't you a bit surprised that Australyer even has children's entertainers?

Does that poster make you wonder what wiggling is?

I'M DYING TO KNOW
HOW LONG I'LL LIVE








“One can survive everything nowadays,
except death,
and live down anything,
except a good reputation."
Oscar Wilde

How often do you think about DYING..
or assisting in the premature demise of somebody else?

YOUBIQUITOUS $ELLEBRITIE$

Many of you have probably been wondering why our world is in such dissarray.

I have tried to ascertain the primary source of our present discombobulation.

You see, up until the introduction of the interwebs, the "world" was organised so that only a few Earthlings were allowed to be famous. You are no doubt nodding in agreement.

Perhaps you can recall a simpler time when there were but a handful of celebrities; movie stars, politicians, athletes and the like. Now that the "great unwashed" have access to "the show" via Youtube, Blogs, Facebook and Twitter, and all hell is breaking loose.

Most of you are painfully aware that we have a limited capacity to store information..there is a reason that phone numbers have 7 digits. Now it is all but impossible to keep track of the seemingly endless array of pseudo-celebrities cluttering every form of communication.

When Andy Warhol suggested that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes he had no idea how awful that would be...and due to time constraints that figure may need to be compressed to 15 seconds.

We can't all be famous!

The lines on what constitutes being famous are getting blurry. When I was a lad the meritocracy of our culture was still in effect. Individuals became well known based on some form of achievement. Now $ellebrities are famous for being famous.

Why? Corporations and their advertising agents see the opportunity to sell something to you and they will reward anyone who attracts eyeballs. It doesn't matter whether or not they are an asshat or a genius.

We are a visual creature so IMAGE rules..recognisable people have become brands..what I call $ellebrities.

The human face and written ideas, are the two most powerful forces on Earth.

Many Icons such as Monroe, Hitler, and Elvis have sustained a measure of ubiquity that entices Joe Schmo. We see the opportunity to become Youbiquitous without actually accomplishing anything worthy of note.

With user friendly "impression management" tools like Facebook and Blogs, we can easily assemble a charm offensive designed to bloviate and gain recognition from people all over the world.

Isn't that awesome? I for one am delerious that I can flaunt my encyclopedic ignorance upon the world. The price of admission is an internet connection.

It is troubling that I have keep so much crap in my cerebral RAM. Why do I retain the awareness of the Numa Numa Guy

in the same files as Plato, Darwin, and Hiltons Paris and Perez?

UGH! Do you see what I mean?

I've read that our brains evolved to manage about 150 relationships because most of our journey has been spent in clans. Since the dawn of Civilization most people were forced to squeeze in a working knowledge of their Rulers and the accompanying Gods that arrived to support their claim of superiority.

Now we are faced with the millenial multitask of juggling useless data on hundreds, even thousands, of faces and bits of information. This gives me a brainrash because this is all bullsh*t!

My Grandparent's generation had encyclopedias. They didn't need to "know" that N'Djamena was the capitol of Chad or who Pete Best was. I feel like an idiot because I don't need to store so much useless information in my head because I have the Internet.

I don't need to remember which movie won the Best Picture Oscar in 1974, or what Cognitive Dissonance means, because the answer to almost any imaginable question is a few keyboard strokes away.

"Knowing" is virtually possible.

I should have 90% of my mental files scrubbed because I should only be using enough RAM to run my basic program. Hel-LO!

Those of you who graciously encourage my egregious display of impression management, and tolerate my shameless self promoting (yet hopefully deprecating) antics and diatribes, can appreciate that I am actually quite comfortable just being "some guy".

My cyberbluster and iconoclastic bombast may be well intentioned, a cry for help, and heartfelt but

A: who gives a f*ck what "i" think and

B:"i" have no illusions about persuading others.

You can make your own fun @ GlassGiant

What I love about each and every one of you (*nice touch eh?) is that you folks represent the miniscule percentage of the human population which bothers to ask questions.

Plus you want to have fun, you're eager to share your own trivia, schadenfreude, and fanciful notions.

So, yes, I have finally and mercifully exhausted the thought forming in me 'ead.

Will we ever be allowed to return to a simpler time when ordinary people become famous for actually accomplishing something extraordinary?