A Thousand Words That Cannot Be Uttered in Public

Imagine that there are exactly one point six feet of space between you and your untimely demise at the hand of a steep cliff perched high atop jagged rocks battered by the foreboding seas below. You step gingerly along the way so as not to disturb any of the pebbles that might be the lynch pin holding together the teetering mass of earth beneath your feet. So far so good…now if you can just make it around this corner, you’ll have a wide plateau safely underfoot and you can relax and enjoy the view while you go to town on the ham and cheese sandwich warmed over in your backpack by a combination of sweat and sun. But just as you round the bend, you discover something blocking your way. Actually it’s two somethings. And it turns out that both somethings are wearing inappropriately tight pants cropped halfway down the shin. Both somethings are also sporting a healthy roll of flab under their inappropriately tight t-shirts and are held together by an inappropriate fanny pack strapped around their middle regions (and apologies for the redundancy…I know there is no such thing as an appropriate fanny pack…no need to write me letters). Then the most appalling cut of all, one something is holding a giant black camera in one hand and gesticulating vaguely with his other in order to get the second something to move just a hair to the right, that’s it, right there, perfect…don’t move. In fact, no one can move because this bizarre charade has taken up the entire path and an inch more to the right would have sent something number two to meet his maker.

For those who do not yet get the…ahem…picture, I’ll spell it out for you. I am fed up with tourists blocking crowded public streets to try to get a snapshot of their friend with the whole of the Manhattan skyline in the background. Invariably, one person will sidle up next to an important landmark. The other person, lacking opposable thumbs or a camera with a lens that can zoom both in and out will have to walk approximately one football field away to capture the breathtaking scene. The rest of us, who are just trying to make it to the Starbucks before we deck the next Greenpeace “intern” pestering us on the sidewalk, have to stand back a respectful distance while Ansel Adams consults with the art director in between frames. All of this effort wasted on a photo that is not worth anyone’s time, and more importantly, not worth my time. The same reason why people hate sitting through slideshows of your trip to the Everglades is the same reason why I have started to march right through these absurdly elaborate photo ops. The pictures are always terrible, no one cares, and I want some coffee.



Now we’ve cast the “somethings” in our little drama as European, but to be fair, this malady is not isolated to Europe. Indeed it has spread across the globe faster than either the Bubonic plague or a Coldplay-induced coma. We now see evidence of snap-happy, obtrusive shutterbugs everywhere from the northern (and southern, eastern, and western) regions of Japan to the icy tundra of Minnesota (at least this is what researchers have been able to gather from the t-shirts worn by subjects who appear to be suffering from the classic symptoms). This all begs a very crucial question. If we have learned anything from the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea, it’s that taking a picture of someone is a surefire way to steal his or hear soul and lock it away for eternity inside one’s camera. Why then do so many people persist in obstructing traffic to get the perfect shot of their jackass friend doing the YMCA in front of the Taj Mahal? What is it that turns amateur photographers into professional wastes of space?

Which brings us to Ashton Kutcher. I blame him for much of this epidemic. In particular, I blame the stunning features which make him so mischievously appealing in those Nikon commercials despite not having showered in several days (I’ll assume this is just to avoid awkward encounters in the hallway with his sixteen year old step-daughter and not due the fact that he could not find his way out of a wet paper bag unless Demi pinned instructions to his jacket). If he’s going to continue to peddle the fantasy that his particular camera takes off ten pounds of ugly, he better add a user agreement to avoid liability when I send the camera off the cliff right after something number two, just to make sure we capture the full impact.