Let's write for the pop-rags

How about not. I have to expose myself to the whole gamut of bad writing and sleaze-bag copy out there. So occasionally I pick up a "popular" magazine. I call it a pop-rag. They make me gag.

These magazines serve the purpose of billboards, pages and pages of them -- screaming advertisements at you. They stoop low, rife with "stories" that amount to little more than steam-room gossip. They own the souls of papparazzi to whom they award big money for stealing the souls of celebrities via telephoto lens -- the same bottom-feeders who hounded Princess Diana to her death. They shoot through windows, screen doors and any possible angle. They hunt select famous people, particularly singers and movie stars. They give wide berths, however, to certain others.

I notice how they never have embarrassing spy-shots of Junior Rokkenfelder or Natty Bauer. Heck no. That would be one dead paparazzi. While he was aiming his telephoto, some sniper would already have him in the cross-hairs. Bink. Game over. I find it piquant how not only are these guys never photographed and slapped into the pop-rags, but you can't even get a mug-shot of them on the Wikipedia. Heck no. The Wikipedia is well groomed on whom to lampoon and whom to omit. Does it make you so mad you could spit?

Money runs the world. But even these guys know that you can't take a penny with you. I suppose they want to live to be 99 so they can wallow in it. They want to enjoy playing God a bit longer. Their biggest fear has to be how the real God does not run his universe on currency. He won't be needing loans from them to fight his wars. His Seraphim work for free. Where they swing a claymore, money doesn't matter. No need to take your top-hats, gentlemen.

Food for thought regardless, seeing as pop-rags' bread and butter are pictures of the rich and famous. Pathetically, what passes for stories in those things amounts to a paragraph of small-talk tailored to simple folk who got that way watching MTV and Entertainment Tonight.

The Day-Glo Manifesto

I was walking through a highbrow garden the other day and noticed how there were heinous metal sculptures about. It was an exhibit they said. I took this to mean that it would hopefully soon be gone.

These "sculptures" were not sculptures in the classic sense. They were pieces of gargantuan metal beams arranged in haphazard, ugly ways. One looked like a builder's crane in danger-orange. Another, like a piece of yellow gear abandoned by a construction crew. An assault of yellow like school-bus yellow, this pointless apparatus. An eye-sore, mucking up the beauty of God's creation. There was a homely, jagged mess so tall that it competed with stately trees in red -- a piece of modern art they said.

These day-glo eye sores were everywhere, insulting nature with their fabricated ugliness. The message I got by this vulgar display was that Lucifer had just thrown a monkey-wrench into Eden to taunt God. They were spray-painted in loud, offensive colours for some of us to cringe at and others to embrace. Now no one can delight in what God made for us expressly to enjoy. It was as if the evil one set out to rape Eden with his perverted "expressions" that art students and the world are now being told is art. That was the most insulting part.