beauty is in the eye of the...beholder, which is a mythical creature that looks like a giant eyeball suspended in the air. armed with ten smaller eyeball stalks -- each possessing a power ray such as charm, death, disintegrate, sleep or telekinesis -- the beholder was one of the more dangerous d&d creatures to run into. so dangerous in fact that i often thought of it as way too overpowered. how can one creature have the equivalent of ten attacks and an anti-magic ray to boot? totally unfair isn't it?



and it's not just the beholder that is overpowered and seemingly invincible, beauty is too. you can get anything with good looks. trust me, i've tried and failed so i know the converse must be true; if i get nothing then beautiful people must get everything. it's all very logical and rational so don't try to refute it. thirteen percent of my whole existence is spent ogling beautiful people and wondering what benefits might be bestowed upon me were i suddenly brad pitt-like hot. i would hope the prize would be more than a jennifer aniston, but that's very subjective. really though, who would win in a "your face or mine" scenario, brad or jennifer? i rest my case.



i would love to go on "your face or mine" by the way. it's the easiest four thousand dollars i could ever hope to make. i would go with the hologram every time and not even try to pretend that the audience will side with me. just gimme the money dammit. and how long before mtv starts a FMK television show? three months? should i be marketing FMK to viacom right now? and how often are you shocked by who the contestants pick as "hotter"? the audience is like never wrong but some of the contestants sure are.



in mr pitt's recent movie, diane kruger was (mis)cast as helen, the "face that launched a thousand ships." critics, and terrible human beings, have deemed ms kruger not good looking enough for the role. imagine how that feels. ugly people -- inside or out -- saying that you aren't up to par physically. it's not that ms kruger was wrong for the role or a bad actress, she simply wasn't "pretty enough." ouch right? what can a girl do? her choices basically come down to attacking gallons of ice cream or reaching for a serrated butter knife. in interviews that i've seen addressing this issue, ms kruger takes a very admirable stance about it all, citing the right of ugly people to their opinions and freedom of expression. it's hard for me to believe however that there weren't at least a few nights when ms kruger went to bed a little teary eyed after reading a particularly scathing review of her less than perfect features.



honestly, being one of the aforementioned ugly people myself, diane kruger's face wasn't worthy of a thousand ships setting sail, at least by our current standards of beauty. she is somewhat run of the mill and a dime a dozen. i've heard that actresses such as angelina jolie or catherine zeta-jones would have been much better choices. oh well, what can you do? make everyone look past the skin? stop, you're making me laugh. judging people's looks has been a pastime since the dawn of man. it's biological and it's necessary, we are genetically attuned to attractive things. fruit, babies, gems, breasts, fat wallets, etc. beauty is not just in our eyes but in our blood. we have to stare and drool, it's a natural human function like breathing or blinking.



you know where i'm going with this: a long winded defense of why guys have to check out girls or vice versa. and that's where i would go if i didn't already know that this was common fact and in no need of my feeble defense. instead i'm more interested in what mtv has done with the "your face or mine" and "am i hot or not" phenomenon. what they've been able to capture in thirty minute installments is the thing that has been the engine of human creation: evaluating someone's desireability. sure it's crude to judge someone's desireability based solely on looks but it's only a half hour show. and really, it's very telling to see people get all addicted to watching which person is better looking than the other.



don't we all just want to know how similar our attraction-o-meter is to other people's? or where we might rank on it? isn't this what the superficial life is all about?