We seem to, if not as a species, at least as a country, put a great deal of value on celebrity. For some reason, being famous rocks, or so we all seem to think. I myself don't personally think of myself as being all that impressed by celebrities, but at the same time when I found myself sitting ten feet away from Johnny Knoxville at an airport, there was giddyness. I didn't bug him for an autograph or anything, but the thought crossed my mind.
I've been wondering about a particular breed of celebrity lately. Not the movie star or musician that well all know and admire, but a smaller player, someone you probably have seen repeatedly, but might not know on the street. I'm talking about news clip pictures for internet stories.
Seriously, I read a lot of news, and I do it all online. Go to Google, click the news link, and there's everything I could be interested in. They even put up select pictures next to groups of similar stories. The funny thing is, you don't realize how often they have stories about breast cancer until you realize that every other day, there's the same picture of the same naked woman holding her breast, theoretically performing an exam (as opposed to the thinly veiled grab at the viewers eyes that I suspect it is).
Who is this woman? Does she point out that it's her in pictures to her friends? Her family? "Hey, hey didja see it? No, just go to the news page. Yeah, that's me. No, I know you can't see my face, but you can totally recognize my boob. Hello? Grandma?"
Okay, in all fairness, she's probably a model for a stock photographer, so that's not so big a deal, but what about the poor schmuck on the street who happens to fit a profile that they are covering that day (side note - Firefox spell checker caught a mis-spelling of schmuck - that rocks). I always feel bad for the unsuspecting man or woman who got caught when they are once again covering the obesity epidemic. This is particularly sad when they get caught walking out of a burger joint or carrying a bag of donuts or something. It's not bad enough that you're fat, now your fat is newsworthy. How do you suppose they feel when they get home and see that? And do they eat the donuts anyway? I would.
At least they get their faces cut out of the pictures, so they can lie and say that it was someone else walking out of Happy Burger in a torn Leonard Skynard t-shirt that day. It's the known one's I pity. It's Manual Uribe, the Mexican man who tops out around 1235 pounds. (Do NOT Google that.) He's always getting his double-wide behind pasted next to stories about obesity. If that isn't bad enough, it's this picture of him where he's basically naked, his naughty bits covered by a bit of sheet. Why he even let someone take the picture is beyond me. Maybe he couldn't get up to stop them. Either way, now he's famous for it. Lucky him.
Given the data at hand, I think I'd prefer to live in my relative obscurity. Fortunately for me, the paparazzi doesn't frequent this area when covering near-genius computer geeks who are terribly good looking. We can only hope my luck doesn't run out. Well, we can hope for that and for my picture to never appear near an article with "explosive" and "diarrhea" in close context,
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