Before We Elect Dorian Gray . . .

The New York Times makes everybody run to their mirrors this morning to see if they are beautiful. Sydney Brillo Duodenum is decidely certain that they are not. In this Fashion and Style story - mind you not the Technology, not the Science, not even the Psychology section of the Times (because one does not exist, if you can believe that!) - some "scientists" have developed a program that fixes peoples faces according to some bullshit algorithms based on a survey of beauty as discerned from the faces of the woman in the pages of the porn mags hidden in the back of their closets.

While perusing the altered images offered by the Times in the accompanying slideshow, of the 6 billion people who could have populated the 9 slots in the slideshow prepared by the Times, there was Woody Allen. Woody Allen! Sydney Brillo Duodenum looked at the before and after images of Mr. Allen and, try as he may, he still saw a disgusting old pedophile, suggesting perhaps that our God-given programming is a bit more complex than that written by the beauty code geniuses.

It further suggests that we must always strive to get down to the deeds of the individual before we become enraptured with them. What is their history, what did they spend their time doing, and who did they spend their time with? How has one's personal associations aged their soul? Beauty is expected to change our lives; it shouldn't make us stupid at the same time.

Often we take the broad, hopeful smile, sometimes matched strongly with soaring rhetoric and we never look into the soul of a person. It's too bad that someone hasn't written a computer program featuring an algorithm or two that factors in non-visual information about a person and then presents that image. Sydney Brillo Duodenum would love to run some people through a Dorian Gray program.

Of course, none of this applies to Sydney Brillo Duodenum. He has no desire to see that picture of himself.