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"he not busy being born/ is busy dying" -Bob Dylan

PAPARAZZI: pl. n., sing. PAPARAZZO: one who lacks a moral compass; also, a parasitic photojournalist. [from Ital., "daddy rats"]

Ok, that's not the real derivation, though it probably should be. In case this folk etymology goes viral, remember, you heard it here first. Anyway. . . "The Day I Trailed a Paparazzo," a feature piece for Jezebel by Dodai Stewart, recently wafted out of the miasma and appeared on my computer screen. I think it came out of the pipes or something. There are no surprises in it, except for the fact that there are no surprises. If you're picturing a Fellini-esque circus of pop stars, crotch-shots, split-finger telephones, and well-dressed fistfights, well you've got it all wrong. The average day in the life of a paparazzo is, to put it bluntly, boring. And reading about it is profoundly boring. Life is too short. I can never recover those grains of sand; they've gone down the hatch of time, never to be recovered, dead as Elvis, dead as Michael Jackson.

There's an old Twilight Zone episode, ever since widely parodied and referenced, where a bibliophile (played by Burgess Meredith) who could never find enough time to read ends up as the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, discovers the ruins of a library, and happily settles down to spend the rest of his existence reading his way through every word that was ever written. And but then, he stumbles, drops his eyeglasses, and finds that they've shattered. As the camera pans out, he's left blind, despairing, among the rubble.

It could have been worse. He could have stumbled upon an US Weekly warehouse, or a truck full of People.

Please, don't waste your time with this crap. The human race needs you.