The shameful bit aside I have to report a certain degree of success. There was a comment. Archaeoastronomy, I salute you – despite being pretty well unable to spell your blog name properly – and thank you for your good advice. Your blog is really good, as well, as we’ve already said here.
That was not the royal “we”, by the way, it referred to the collective writers of these blog pages.

This encouraged, and with my conscience appeased, I will have another stab at more of the same. I reserve the right to be as flippant as before but this time I will try and avoid being flippant at the expense of massacred people.

However, when I say a certain degree of success, this has got to be mightily qualified. The pages didn’t actually appear in Technorati lists. Agreed this may turn out to be a major stumbling block to the whole scheme. My new plan of attack is therefore to limit the references to one or two at a time. Here I will talk about gossip central. Just don’t tell me there is a serious subtext to that. (There is probably a US TV programme or something with that name but you will have to bear with my ignorance if you want to extract any reading matter from this page.)

Gossip is dull when it’s not malicious and evil when it is.

The one thing that makes it even remotely compelling is actaully knowing the unfortunate person that the gossip is about. Gossip about people you have never met is just a story with a very short narrative and rarely has a decent punch line. I can’t even begin to guess why there are dozens of publications that contain nothing but “gossip,” produced by publicists, about people that you have not only never met but who you would cross the street to avoid if they weren’t celebrities.

The gossip consists mainly of whether they are too fat or too thin. If you are unlucky enough to know anyone who obsesses about their own weight like that, you probably steer well clear of them. If you really do know someone who discusses other people’s weight/cellulite/ clothing choices in the sort of prying and judgemental detail that the magazines discuss z-list celebs, you have probably already injured them in some excruciating way. If not, why not?

And if you actually spend your own cash on these magazines, why not buy some of the Guest Publications featured on Have I Got News for You instead? Mattress Manufacture News or Lawn Ornament Collectors’ Monthly would easily outstrip the readability of Heat magazine and would give you a much-needed new interest.