Leaderboard

The latest goal of any self-respecting celebrity is to be nominated to participate in a ritual that will benefit a charity established to finance research on ALS, a devastating disease that evenutally totally incapacitates its victims. So what better way to show your support for finding a cure for this fatal affliction than to have a bucket of ice water dumped on your head? Doing this generates a donation to this charity - or something like that. The other requisite is to make one’s participation in this ceremony official by providing a video of the event to be made public via the various media outlets. Everybody who is anybody is lining up for this baptism that will wash away the sin of being excluded from what will maintain your high profile visibility. Of course, fads have been around forever but do they ever serve any purpose other than to show how enslaved people are to being a part of the “in” thing? Today’s pop culture abounds with fads. Pregancy among the rich and famous is an ongoing fad. Having a baby has gone from being an every day event to a spectacular occasion for female celebrities eager to proclaim that they’ve managed to get knocked up and can now wear a tight clinging garment to show off the distorted effect of a baby bump. Add to the this the fad of announcing to a waiting world what bizarre name has been chosen to brand the newborn with. Then, there are the food faddists. Is there anything more irritating than these self-appointed diet gurus led by smug Vegans, wrinkling their noses at food that had a face, as if humans aren’t descended from hunters bagging animals. As if rapturously praising kale and rejecting gluten won’t possibly be reversed in a few years. As if these pests have been authorized to take the joy out of eating. Vying for top fad status is the sexual identity phenomenon that is overshadowing the being-molested-as-a-child explosion. It now seems every other person is something other than heterosexual as an outbreak of gender-challenged people have made up their minds to jump on the gay bandwagon. Smart phone apps are something else that are currently all the rage. There’s an app for everything. Too bad someone hasn’t come up with one that will shock a person every time they whip out their phone in the company of friends and begin to text. Fads could arguably fall under the epidemic category. It’s like there’s a boredom virus floating around, infecting those who have an aversion to the ordinary. I, myself, find it boring to observe what bores do to keep from being bored. Yawn.