Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Remember when people's eyebrows moved up and down???

I love to watch political news shows like Meet the Press and This Week with Christiane Amanpour. In fact, it's pretty much how hubby and I spend every Sunday morning. I love doing this for two reasons, really. First, I like to be informed about what's been going on around the world during the week. This is especially true, now that I've gone back to work, because I fall into an exhaustion coma after the kids are in bed every day, and I am completely unconscious by the time the 11:00 news begins. (Hell, I'm completely unconscious by 8:30 most nights. Who am I kidding with this 11:00 news stuff???) Second, I get very fired up and mad and excited about it all, and then John and I get into heated debates and discussions that remind me, for just that short, precious time, that I do have a regular brain (not just that "Mommy Brain" that we all grow after becoming mothers, so that we can keep track of the million different little details we need to manage once we have kids) and that I am capable of intelligently discussing (or at least passionately yelling about) topics and issues that are going on in our country and in our world. It's also a great reminder to John and I that we really did have lots of things to talk about before we had kids, and that we were actually pretty good at this whole conversing thing.

But, I've started to take notice of how many of the people on these shows no longer have eyebrows that move. It's actually become so distracting that I have a hard time concentrating on what they're saying. Seriously. Picture this....The extremely serious moderator talking with three extremely serious political "experts" during an extremely serious round table discussion about the war in Afghanistan. The voices are intense. The hand gestures are dramatic. Mouths are turned downward into deep, serious scowls. But nobody's eyebrows are moving! At all. Only the bottom half of their faces seem to work. It's the weirdest thing. How are you supposed to listen to the information being delivered, when you're so distracted by the strange, expressionless eyebrows and foreheads of the people who are delivering it? And, have you checked out the newscasters and the meteorologists? If you're not looking at the screen, you can tell by their voices if the story is dramatic or exciting or sad. But, take an actual look at them, and there's this weird disconnect between the bottom half of their faces and the top. It's disconcerting. Kind of creepy, actually. Like old episodes of The Twilight Zone or Outer Limits.

This Botox and plastic surgery stuff has really gotten out of hand. I mean, I expect Hollywood celebrities to eventually look like plumped-up, smoothed-out, pulled-tight, freakishly expressionless versions of themselves. That's been the norm for a while. But, our newscasters? Our political commentators? I kind've thought that they were somehow supposed to be more representative of the rest of us, you know? The regular folks with real faces that have expression lines and freckles and saggy parts in the places where saggy parts are supposed to naturally occur.

What a world we live in, eh?

Cheers!

(By the way: One of the reasons I think Christiane Amanpour is such a great interviewer and moderator? Her entire face moves when it's supposed to!)

1 comment:

  1. I would agree, I dont care what my newds caster looks like, its what they say and how they say it

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