A frightening trend has been going on according to the Television News reports: Fat people have no heads. Have you noticed? Every time the news does a report on obesity, which is about 3.2 times a week, they take their cameras to the streets, pan the crowd, and lo, and behold! Not one fat person out there has a head. There are plenty of huge stomachs, the approximated size of Volkswagen Beatles, plenty of legs like tree trunks stomping along, and the occasional, perhaps female, derriere whose owner, if asked to "Move your rear" would have to make four trips. What has happened to these poor peoples' heads? And if they have no heads how is it they are able to eat enough to maintain that girth? And why do I identify so closely with these headless creatures? I have a head and the rest of their anatomies bear a sad resemblance to mine, so does that mean my head is endangered? I worry about these things!
Television is a medium all to itself. They are unusual creatures there. We once had a white cat with blue eyes and everyone who saw her asked if she was deaf. Apparently the gene that causes the combination of blue eyes/white fur also causes deafness most of the time. I tell you this because I think that there must be a "Journalism/Attractiveness" gene since there are obviously no talented journalists who are not reasonably attractive or they would be on the national news programs. Even when a correspondent is reporting from a war zone, wearing a helmet like a turtle's shell and wind whipping sand around his or her head, the hair, though flying, still looks soft and supple, and the make-up is in place.
And, curiously, television journalists never age. This would be a great gene to have. Yesterday I saw Barbara Walters interviewing the president of Syria on Good Morning America. Admittedly, she began her career when the standards for beauty were somewhat different than they are today, but, my gosh, the women is, I think, ninety-eight years old and she doesn't look a day over sixty. Or maybe fifty in my case since people were asking me how I liked being sixty just a few days after my fiftieth birthday. I may have the anti-journalism gene.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and television weather people, excuse me, meteorologists, are exempt from the need for the "Journalism/Attractiveness" gene to secure a job unless they are in the major markets. The network weather reporters must cross-train so they can sit in the anchor seat on holidays when the Talent want the day off and they must also look good announcing the floats coming down the street at the Rose Bowl Parade on New Year's Day or holding onto poles with the wind knocking them off their feet when standing outside during a hurricane instead of high-tailing it out of there like sane people. Willard Smith doesn't count. He is a throw-back to another age, since he is over one hundred years old, and must have sneaked in from a station in Lower Boise. Local meteorologists can, and do, look like real scientists, which they are. Their anchor desk partners, though, still adhere to the strict standards of beauty/reporting that the major networks do since they may, at any moment, be called up to The Bigs.
Another standard that television news people meet is that not one of them even approaches obesity even though the morning shows, at least have cooking segments with banquet tables laden with every food imaginable and they all gather round at the end of the show to taste oysters sautéed in champagne or some such by Emeril Lagasse at nine o'clock in the morning, for goodness sake! And not one of them has ever said "Yuck, how can you eat this??" but finds it fabulously delicious. It may be because they have no feet or legs. Perhaps they borrow them for the trip out onto Rockefeller Plaza for the food. Or maybe only morning anchors have to have legs. It is probably a temporary condition and they will shed them like tadpoles in reverse once they secure positions at the evening news anchor desks. You've never seen legs on any of those people, have you? I believe their bodies are intact only from the waist up.
Maybe there is radiation or something leaking from the television cameras. The anchors have been exposed to it for a long time, hence the elimination of their limbs. Fat people are only photographed from afar, so it is just their heads....for now. Forget all that scare stuff you hear about watching too much TV. It's being on TV that is dangerous. If I see a news truck in the neighborhood, I'm out of here!
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