2370 Butting Heads

'Tis the season for raging opinions on what's important for the holiday season. A time when most religions call for extra tolerance and many of their followers become more intolerant.

So in some ways I should be heartened by the fascination some folks have with the Kardashians. It keeps them out of trouble, I suppose. To follow with near-religious zeal the staged and sordid lives of manufactured celebrities whose only contribution to society is their own narcissism is its own reward, and/or punishment.

Not in the category of ascetics who used to flog themselves with barbed whips while they wore hair shirts, but certainly the psychological equivalent. 

And narcissism is definitely the new religion, with selfies galore littering the interweb and tweets and Instagram and Facebook pictures causing hackable clumps in the cloud to rain destruction on all and sundry.

So it wasn't much of a surprise that Kim Kardashian's recent hope to "break the internet" with her nude photoshoot in Paper magazine generated so much digital proliferation. On the “hope for humanity” side, it was positive that more people posted on Twitter about the Philae probe landing on a comet with 479,434 tweets. What wasn't too hopeful was that in the same 24-hour period KK's naked protruding posterior got 307,782 tweets.

So basically, that's only 172,000 more people that had some sense of perspective.  Still, if 35% more total tweeters see a robotic mission that lasted ten years and took an incredible amount of planning, execution and precision as being more important than a naked set of buttocks there's hope for this world yet. 

Then again, there's something a little odd, and a little scary, about posting pictures of people's posteriors. Might be fine on Twitter.

Butt on Facebook?

America, ya gotta love it.