An Opinion Piece by Guy Graybill, Author of Bravo, Claims "This Pedestal is a Sham!"

 

    THIS PEDESTAL 

   IS A SHAM!                                   
                                             
                                      
© Guy Graybill
Formerly Published
in Bloomsberg News







Clearly, the glamour world is without shame and People magazine reveals that
fact to the nth degree. 
In fact, I think that People magazine happens to be the world’s dumbest publication.  My evidence?  People magazine’s pathetic, yearly naming of  the world’s most beautiful woman  or the world’s sexiest man!  Under the guise of legitimate journalism, they have informed their gullible readers that they will be the lucky readers who will be first to learn the identity of the year’s most beautiful woman or sexiest man.  People’s entire project raises a host of perplexing questions for which the editorial staff members need to provide some pithy answers.

One’s first query might be:  Who says?  Who judges the judges? How many people, and of what position in the journalistic world, are those people who are involved in the selections? What training and qualifications have they acquired?  What qualifies People magazine to act as arbiter for selecting a single, unique male or female for annual worldwide honors?

Why have the selections come, almost exclusively, from the entertainment world?  Why are there no selections from business, politics, academics, art, labor or stay-at-home-parent categories?

Why are the choices so blatantly devoid of sexy men or beautiful women from the world’s teeming populations of Asia, Africa, Latin America or Oceania?  Those two annual issues are patently xenophobic and shockingly racist!  How do we know that there is not a truly beautiful woman or sexy man in some Indonesian city or Japanese prefecture or Himalayan village?  How can the editors of People sleep nights, knowing that somewhere there might be some truly qualified beauty or hunk who has been overlooked in this inane, twice-a-year rush to create an eye-catching magazine cover?  

Another thought:  If Brad Pitt was the world’s sexiest man in 1995 and, again, in the year 2000, why wasn’t Brad the sexiest man for those intervening years?  And since this year’s selection of Julia Roberts as the “World’s Most Beautiful Woman,” (issue of 5/1/17) matched People magazine’s choices in 1991, 2000, 2005 and 2010, why hasn’t Julia been their choice in all the intervening years?

There’s that other annoying thought:  Certain things disqualify people from competing in certain competitions.  I say that anyone who competes in a ‘sexy’ or ‘beauty’ competition should automatically be denied consideration if they work in a known glamour industry where they likely have a stable of make-up artists, stunt doubles and publicity agents!  Do you recall?  People even had Jennifer Aniston featured in a recent year.  Goodness!  My impression is that Ms. Aniston must keep a bevy of publicity agents busy placing her portrait on countless magazine covers and feeding the tabloids titillating details of that one old romance that she couldn’t seem to let die quietly.  To give such glamour hounds consideration for the cover under discussion is skewing the competition against all the world’s natural beauties or natural hunks.

One might also suggest that such an international contest should have a panel of judges with international credentials and who come from a true variety of lands.  

I say that there appears to be but one overriding criterion for being eligible for the honor of being chosen as the “most beautiful” or “sexiest” whatever for placement on the cover of People.   That lone eligibility requirement is that the designee’s portrait on their cover will help sell copies of their journalistic rag.

So long as People  runs this twice-annual phony feature with absolutely no fairness… and no substance, they are placing their publicity-loving winners on a sham pedestal.

~~~

In the chaos we are experiencing related to accusations of "fake news" and whether we can trust the media... I wanted to share this excellent opinion piece by Guy Graybill...

Have we routinely accepted material from various sources without consideration of the substance, the truthfulness, the validity of accuracy? Sure, we know there are news and magazines designed purely to "speculate" and if we have some reason to want to read those, they are available...

Yet Graybill brings up some certainly valid points on just ONE particular subject... Can we assume that this magazine could or would also publish similar questionable articles?

Perhaps more than ever before, we can no longer look at the media as "entertainment" that has valid reasons for sharing their material...

Even more, how can we consider basic newspapers and news reporting when the cry of "fake news" continues to point toward long-standing news media that we have followed for years... 

Just as Guy's opinion piece questions just who is the sexiest, or most beautiful individual, we have been forced to face reality that many will continually lie, even on important and current happenings in our world...

Personally, when Julia Robert's notice came out, and she didn't even know it had been published, I began to question...There is no doubt Julia is a beautiful woman...but... reread Guy's questions and I have to agree with him...

Just as Adam Levine responded to his selection... it is today very important that we stop accepting tweets as valid news...take caution with who and what is published for both entertainment, news and other issues coming to us in all forms of media, including the Internet... By the way, that goes for Blogs as well, in my opinion... Check out writers of blog information just like all other sources...

Comments welcome!

End of Secrets by Ryan Quinn Added to Personal Favorites for 2014!

"Good morning, Kera. I'm Gabrielle di Palma."
"I know who you are, ma'am. It's an honor."
Kera had not seen the Directorate of Intelligence's deputy director this close before in person. Di Palma had collar-length blond-white hair that shot back from her forehead. Shallow tributaries of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth were visible in the low light coming through the tinted windows...
"Lionel tells me you've come up under him in CSAA," di Palma said, referring to the agency's Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis. Kera nodded and glanced quickly at Lionel...
I'm going to offer you a job, Kera. But before I do, I need you to agree to keep this conversation between us. Please sign and fingerprint this NDA after you've read it carefully."

Kera moved her eyes over every word of the agreement, but she was too distrated to absorb more than a quarter of them. Using a finger, she scrawled her signature on the touch screen and then pressed the flat tip of it to the print scanner at the bottom of the display.
"Thank you," di Palma said as she tucked away the tablet. As you know the new frontier in our field is all-source data mining. The problem we've run into at the agency is not our technology. We've got that, we're ahead of the curve, even. As a result, though, we're absolutely buried under mountains of signals intelligence data that is piling up in servers much faster than we can make any sense of it. It will take a decade to address these problems institutionally. And that makes us vulnerable. Ver much not ahead of the curve... I'll be direct. I've been clered to field an elite team for a black op, code named Hawk
to operate a more flexible and efficient cyberintelligence platform. I want you on that team...
"Hold on. I haven't given you the most difficult think you need to consider before making your decision. The mission of Hawk is to master information. to gather it at its source, to analyze it. and to act upon it at the precise time it is needed. The scope of this work may extend into areas many of our citizens and lawmakers would consider unacceptable. As a result, most of our missions will require us to operate completely off the books. That means we have to get all of the personnel for Hawk out of the agency. The team will be structured like a private contractor.
"Is that merely a technicality, or are you asking me to leave the agency?" Kera looked again to Lionel. There was no way he approved of this. She's only ever heard him curse agency people who defected to the private sector. His eyes urged her to keep listening. "Both. It's a technicality, but it has real consequences. If you're not comfortable with you, you're welcome to walk away...

~~~

End of Secrets

By Ryan Quinn

Let me be among the first to say this book should be turned into a movie! At this time, my top favorite television program is Person of Interest--there is much to correlate to that program within this book. The length and complexity, however, would have to go big screen to really make the impact that the book does! If you love books on the use and future use of computers, this is a must-read for you in my opinion.

Kera Mersal is at present a CIA agent. When she is approached for a new job that would take her out from under the government, she hesitates and looks to her boss and mentor who merely explains he needs her in the new organization. Although the book finished on a high, I'm also hoping that there will be at least one sequel. You'll understand why when you read it...

The words caught her eye by chance. Technically, this violated the spirit of the exercise, which called
for deliberate observations. Nevertheless, there they were--six words where she had never noticed them before. She'd just disembarked from the downtown N train, and the bottleneck in the stairway drew her
gaze upward over the hats and hair and bald heads toward the freedom of the sidewalk. The words
were made of small letters--the entire phrase sretched at most four feet--painted on the underside of a scaffold landing that shielded pedestrians from the persistent construction along Houston Street.
She cleared the bottleneck and climbed the stairs with her face tilted up, studying the phrase. The vandal's penmanship was plain, unlike the stylized tags graffiti artists threw up on walls and train cars and mailboxes across the city...

I can remember when I first started to work that everything typewriters and computers were IBM. Until the government declared that it had become a monopoly... Now, at this time, that seems to be the rule rather than the exception for large corporations....especially...

One... which was in the midst of acquiring any and every company that pertained to entertainment... 

Since everything was secret in the new Hawk company, Kera was identified as a journalist of Global Reports, which was essentially the front for the company. Thing was that Kera never wrote anything. She was put on the computer continuously looking for any type of intelligence from foreign sources...

Her immediate supervisor was the creator of Hawk! At first he was not willing to be bothered with her, but soon saw her value and came to depend on her...and more...at least on his part...

But one day a man contacted her about One--purely because he had read her article! First she had to pull it out and see what was said, then she contacted Gabrielle who was now called Gabby and told to go ahead and meet with Travis Bradley. She learned more about the fact that many high-level professionals in banking were moving to One. Then almost daily a different organization was bought up and merged under One.

Before she got more involved with what Bradley shared, they learned that a famous singer had disappeared! Then another, then an artist...

There are some really interesting subplots in the novel that complements the story, but also serve to tease readers as they try to figure out what is important in solving the multiple mysteries...

For instance, Kera is married to a man that seems to be questionable for her mate.  Indeed, her boss spotted him overseas with a woman and was angry on behalf of Kera. More significant is that Parker cannot get over the guilt and realized how much he loved Kera so actually appears to begin smothering her with questions about setting the date of the wedding, etc...

Then there is "It." He's an artist who is more than a graffiti artist since he makes large but very well done themed pieces and literally has pedestrians and traffic jammed up when he somehow places them without anybody seeing it! Nobody knows who the artist is, and the police just take the meaningful piece away...as junk!

Then there is Gnos.is. A private streaming of anything and everything without any type of charge to users...

The obsession over Gnos.is in the intelligence community took the form of panic. Many analysts concluded that the site was a front for a foreign, state-sponsored intelligence gathering program. Gnos.is didn't exist to make a profit, so their intentions must be hostile. Or so the argument went. Some of that paranoia found its way to Hawk, and Kera had briefly been assigned to a Gnos.is taskforce. Like everyone else, though, the Hawk hackers failed to locate the site's owners or to decode the algorithms that made Gnos.is work. But they also failed to come up with any evidence that Gnos.is was sponsored by a foreign state or that it was collecting the data of usersd and storing it for illegal or otherwise suspicious purposes...To Kera's knowledge, it remained the only case that Hawk had failed to deliver on...

But as more and more famous people disappeared, she and Jones were put on finding them... Kera immediately asked about the legal issue of investigating citizens, but that was pushed aside...Soon she was so involved and intrigued by what was happening, that she started taking to the street to investigate. A definite violation of protocol! I thought this was especially revealing as it showed that no matter how powerful were the computers, it still took intuition, gut-feelings, eyes-on work to begin to then use the computers to its full advantage!

That was five years earlier. Now Jalen West, the thin Detroit boy whose pop music career began at his best friend's funeral, was on top of the world...

Until he, too, had disappeared.

All entertainers signed by One...

And then she started meeting some of the people, who later disappeared...

And she and Jones were both under surveillance!

Given the age difference between the author and myself, I was thrilled to see that our cultural concerns were so in tune. I watched the finals of The Voice
last night. The philosophy of the Chair is so significant in choosing individuals purely based upon talent... But, then, as the process changes to a competition of popularity, I lose interest. Each of those individuals have been picked, but later the winner is chosen on much more than talent, one of which is whether the individual can go on to become a star that makes bunches of money. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be living in a world where all artists could be enjoyed, without putting a price tag on their ability to also make money?!

This book is Fabulous! Edgy! Remarkably in tune with today's America! It's Today's News! Don't miss it!


GABixlerReviews

About the Author

A native of Alaska, Ryan Quinn was an NCAA champion and an all-American skier while at the University of Utah. He worked for five years in New York’s book-publishing industry before moving to Los Angeles, where he writes and trains for marathons. Quinn’s first novel, The Fall, was a finalist in the 2013 International Book Awards. For more, please visit www.ryanquinnbooks.com.