I love lists and alliteration. Put 'em both together, and it's nirvana! So last month while I was waiting for my family's carryout at a sushi parlor and picked up the copy of USA Today there, I couldn't resist the op-ed essay by "A Different Type of Porn" by Robert Lipsyte. It's a diatribe against newspapers that waste space on:

... the Four F's of porn — Food, Fashion, Fitness and Finances. They are insidious because they masquerade as news you can use while crowding out the genuine information we need to make informed decisions ...

Maybe so. But given the death of reading in modern society, the accelerating decline of newspapers as a vehicle for thoughtful discourse, and the ever-shortening attention span of just about everybody I know (myself included) ... well, perhaps there are more important things to worry about than the fluff sections of printed media.

But that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy Lipsyte's article — I'm always a fan of well-written rants!

_{("A Different Type of Porn" by Robert Lipsyte, USA Today 11 Jul 2007, and cf. YearsOfWandering (2 Feb 2006) for Z. A. Melzak's list of the "seven deadly p's" ...)}

TopicHumor - TopicSociety - 2007-08-13

(correlates: EyeCandy, Mostly Sane, DangerousPlaything, ...)