Groggus Maximus

Certain things just don't make sense to me before my first cup of coffee in the morning. Or sometimes even after my first cup of coffee, but never mind that for now.

I logged on to AOL this morning to adjust our satellite TV account. We had grown weary of what we came to call the "Bruce Willis Channel" - that would be Starz, with its literally endless repeats of Armageddon, Mercury Rising and selections from the Die Hard family of movies. Does Bruce Willis own Starz? Or have I not been paying attention and somehow 85% of all movies ever made now star Bruce Willis? Not that I dislike Bruce Willis; I just don't want to watch Armageddon every night. Or any night. Once was enough.

But that's not the point. The point is that I logged on to AOL to adjust our satellite TV package to add HBO. I have a deep and apparently bottomless curiosity about Rome, and I confess the idea of watching the HBO series "Rome" appealed to me. And the idea of watching movies other than Armageddon also appealed to me. So we picked HBO, which combines new movies and "Rome", and thus are all plants watered.

And as usually happens, I got drawn into the pop cultural train wreck that is AOL's welcome screen. I regard the "lifestyle" and "entertainment" tabs on the AOL screen to be two somethings of the apocalypse. Maybe not two actual horsemen of the apocalypse, but maybe two stable boys of the apocalypse, or two mounting blocks of the apocalypse. The apocalypse aint here, but when you read the lifestyle and entertainment tabs, you can sort of see it coming.

So this morning I was nostril-deep in my coffee reading these press releases from the outer circles of trivial celebrity hell and saw something called "Natural Beauty", where AOL proposes to reveal its top ten picks for women who possess natural beauty and don't require "four hours in a makeup chair". Like a moth drawn to the headlights of a speeding Kenworth, I clicked on this story.

Ugh. My point isn't that the women listed in the article weren't beautiful. And I have no personal point of view on the great makeup-vs-no makeup argument. I don't dispute the fact that some women are naturally beautiful (and I might even go further and argue that most are naturally beautiful).

Here's what confused me. These ten women who are supposed to be exemplars of natural beauty who didn't need four hours of prep work to look good had all been subjected to four hours of prep work! Some of the photo captions even listed the makeup and hair artists who had done the work! So we can't even be sure that the women AOL listed really were naturally beautiful. We just have to take their word for it.

I think I need more coffee. A lot more coffee.