Google+ A Tangled Rope: The Ocean-Going Goat-Powered Cheeseboard

Friday, January 15, 2010

The Ocean-Going Goat-Powered Cheeseboard

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Encumbrance Stoatdisorder became famous as the first woman to circumnavigate the globe using a single-handed goat-powered cheeseboard. Of course, the sheer pointlessness of anyone attempting such an 'adventure' in this day and age, when global travel is such a commonplace affair, was overlooked in the media's headlong rush to find something outside its usual mundanities to over-inflate.

The very inadequacy of the goat-powered cheeseboard as an ocean-going vessel - especially in its single-handed version seems - in the sheer perversity of its use for such a purpose - designed to extract the maximum amount of publicity and media attention rather than for any other reason.

The sheer number of these pointless adventures taken for no real purpose using more and more outlandishly absurd methods by these increasingly bizarre individuals, can be for no other purpose than some sort of self-aggrandising ego-stroking reasons for their perpetrators. The only noteworthy aspect to all of these stunts is the amount of media attention they seem to attract, often out of all proportion to their worth, and - in reality - newsworthiness.

Someone attempting to reach the South Pole naked on a pogo-stick powered by steam-driven badgers, or whatever, should really only be of interest to mental-health-care professionals, and yet the media - in all its wisdom - seems to think that the perpetrators of these events are to somehow - and for some reason - to be awarded the status of hero. That the notion of hero has in itself become devalued through tabloid overuse is yet another irony lost upon them as they over-inflate the importance of another non-entity for performing deeds both pointless and absurd.

It seems to be yet another iteration of that strange modern phenomenon - akin to the endless parade of surveys and opinion polls, 'brand' renames and re-launches, government initiatives and business 'announcements' that seem only to exist in order to appear in the media and then - just as suddenly - disappear again.

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