Note: The following post has been meticulously hand-crafted to provide no backlinks to its subject, because the last thing the subject needs is more backlinks. And now: Please enjoy.
So, yeah: Some of you may know that there's this chick called Justine who bills herself as {Justine with an 'i" in front of the name}. For those others among you who haven't yet shared the {Justine with an 'i" in front of the name} experience: Justine is a youngish blonde who has a million-plus followers on Twitter (no link) and a massively popular blog at, let's say, a site {no link}, and her celebrity is, and this has been verified by Science, 100% unattached to any shred of actual achievement, even the kind that made, say, the Dramatic Chipmunk famous. What's that? You say you've never seen the Dramatic Chipmunk? Oh, I can fix that:
I know. I KNOW. Awesome, right?
Anyway, {Justine with an 'i" in front of the name} has none of the talent of the Dramatic Chipmunk. What she has is a bloodthirst for fame that makes Jennifer Aniston look shy and retiring. And she's figured out that there are no limits to where a hot blonde with a webcam can go in America if she can make a whole lot of adolescent guys think that at any moment she may throw caution to the winds and whip her top off. Only, and this is the thing about {Justine with an 'i" in front of the name}, she will never ever throw caution to the winds. She lives in this Matrix that's composed of equal parts calculation and fame-lust and shamelessness and blondeness, and she's had the ratlike cunning to figure out that if you have certain natural gifts (see blondeness) you can become famous just for being famous, and the more people try to peel the onion of your fame, stripping it back and back and back in a search for the nubbin of achievement they want to believe lies at its core, the more they will end up crying and choking and debilitated, because there's no there there. Hey, did I mention the shamelessness? Because this is a key ingredient in the calculus, and that was reaffirmed a couple of days ago when {Justine with an 'i" in front of the name} posted a video called {VIDEO NAME, including the words "Shakin'," "iPad" and "Booty," but not in that order, followed by about 37 exclamation points}. It consists of {Justine with an 'i" in front of the name} sitting in an Apple store explaining earnestly that she hasn't "done a dance in a while" (that while probably consisting of thirty seconds) and then turning on some terrible club jam and getting up and writhing around the store while customers and employees look on in embarrassed puzzlement. It's the kind of thing you watch with slack-jawed horror until you realize that the subject has reversed millions of years of human evolution and deadened the lobe of the brain that controls humility and proportion, and at that point, honestly, it becomes sort of morbidly fascinating, like the naked talk show they used to run on Channel J in New York. Eventually {Justine with an 'i" in front of the name} stops bopping around the store like Joey Heatherton on meth, and sits back down and waves wanly into the webcam, her terrible blank eyes blinking once or twice like an alligator's, and it's over. It's a good day's work. She's marginally more famous. And the rest of us are just a little bit more dead inside.
Unless we don't watch.