Archives, eh
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# 1 is always a fumble
Normally I ignore celebrity news when I mistakenly wander into it. I don’t read gossip sites so I don’t really come across it much except during my daily scans of the two Sydney newspaper websites. The Sydney Morning Herald isn’t too bad but the Daily Telegraph has their entertainment section right in the middle of the prime real estate, so there are a few occasions where I have to tear my eyes away from the train smash unfolding before me.
Today, I failed my Saving Throw versus Trashy Non-News. I blame the party I was at on Saturday night; the alcohol consumed has given me a temporary -5 to Wisdom and the ensuing penalty to saves has cost me dearly. A gossip reporter in the UK has failed his saving throw versus irony and devised an equation for determining Celebrity Pointlessness. Billed as a determinate of the biggest wastes of space, it allocates semi-arbitrary values to various attributes: Cash; Publicity; Google Index; Delinquency. Plug these values into the equation and a number comes out. The lower the number, the more pointless the celebrity.
Now, normally this is the kind of thing I would shrug off as the work of pointless gossip columnists bitching about pointless celebrities when the irony struck me. Not just that said columnists normally devote column yards of breathless idolisation of said pointless celebrities, but the equation itself. The equation is constructed in such a way that what anyone else would deem indicators of worthy celebrity – things like talent and positive personal qualities – are negatives. To have maximum talent is bad. You want no talent. Intelligence and Wit? You want a rating of 1. On the other hand, publicity and cash – those accidental attributes that have raised Paris into the heights of the celebrity brown nosing sphere – are rewarded. Cash especially so. Delinquency? Positively rewarded, so to get a good rating, flashing your vagina while snorting coke through the rolled up strip of the Mona Lisa you just ripped out of the frame? That’s good.
I wish I was speechless, but there are three paragraphs so far. It’s like a race to the bottom – a pointless columnists pointlessly pretends to dislike pointless celebrities, so devises a pointless equation that rewards pointless metrics and – from a cavalcade of no-name, z-list personalities unknown outside of the gossip rags – crowns as the least pointless celebrity measured…Paris Hilton.
And so I could also bathe in the pointlessness shower, I indulged in an exercise of rating someone who, while her music is not really my thing, seems genuinely quite talented and a well-rounded person, Beyonce Knowles. She comes out with a rating of 3 – which allowing for fuzziness – is the equivalent of the rating given to the Most Pointless Celebrity according to the Daily Mail, Peter Andre.
I’m stunned and more than a little amused at how blatant it is – I wonder how much Paris paid for the article to be placed in the newspaper :- )
