I like to read here but usually don't post but I couldn't stand it today.I look down in the check out line and Kim Kardashian, or whatever her name is,is on the cover of four magazines on the same rack.If this is what the general public is interested in we are screwed people.Just saying.
Which magazines were these? Usually at the checkout line at grocery stores and pharmacies are a handful of different celebrity gossip magazines and other similar tabloids. They report that crap because people buy them. Don't like it? Then don't buy it.
I am sure there is something in your daily life that someone would view as beneath them too. Maybe you have dirty habits, or the magazines you buy are filled with dirty pictures, or something worse.
One of my first jobs was at Kroger, every Thursday, like clockwork, this one old lady would check out with EVERY newly printed tabloid she could get her hands on... fascinating.
I will say that once upon a time, one could find some greatly inventive and humorous writing in many of those, plus the "Page 3 girl"... anyone remember BatBoy?
City, thanks for that GREAT quote. I love Thoreau.
Nm, see if you can find an issue of National Geographic, better yet, the Smithsonian magazine. That'll fix ya.
I miss the Weekly World News. Never look inside, that's the secret.
Bat boy, Aliens with Presidents, Secret Moon bases, Satan rising from an oil well in Alaska, ( even though the picture is plainly of the Kuwaiti oil fires from Desert Storm, complete with dunes and burned out trucks under the obvious airbrushing of a laughing devil face in the smoke..... ) Sewer Gators!
Love 'em, won't read 'em.
You may have a point that "tabloids" are an indicator of the fall of civilization. They had this stuff in Rome, England, ( pick a century ) everywhere.
Since I always felt that actually looking inside was going to lower my IQ, I suppose I have to agree.......
I guess the End has been happening for nearly my entire life. During the '60s, the National Enquirer had all the same type of headlines. I remember when Atlantis was discovered in the Bermuda Triangle; and the guy who drilled a hole in his head for kicks. Come on; you can come up with better indicators of the End than that! Just read some of the political threads here.
(probably why this book was banned at my highschool)
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life- I wrote this some years ago- that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.
Look at the bright side: Where is that lazy-eyed bimbo Paris Hilton?
Morons need to know about rich morons. If they tried to read about rich smart people or even <gasp!> poor smart people? Imagine how dumb they would feel.