Dumbest in the World

A CNN article calls the question asked to Ms. Angola by Lea Salonga the dumbest in the world: "If you could change one of your physical characteristics, which one would it be and why?"

The article made two sterling points:

1) "After standing under the magnifying glass of millions, this 25-year-old, 5-foot-10 ½-inch knockout had to publicly contemplate if she was physically good enough."

2) "Maybe it's absurd to be dismayed that a question like this would be posed at a beauty pageant. In my worldview, the mere fact that pageants exist is absurd."

On the first point:

Beauty contests love "what if" questions. They love asking "almost perfect women" if they would want to be someone or something else or be anywhere else but where they are. You have in front of you the supposedly most beautiful women in the universe, not just on earth, and you would ask them dumb question like trading places with mere mortals? They are the envy of insecure, not-so-gifted, horizontally-challenged, pale as chalk, dark as night women the world over and you would ask them if there is anything else they would want to change/replace in themselves? If that isn't the height of insensitivity, if not stupidity, I don't know anything else which is worse.

On the second point:

Using women as objects should have been banned the day Virginia Woolf proclaimed that women to be empowered should have a room of their own. Beauty contests are taboos still happening in a world of petabyte technology. And since nothing is called taboo anymore because it will be politically incorrect to question other people's rights to stupidity, anything that falls under this label I call dumb. And I can list three other dumb things people do and enjoy doing and engaging in even at this day and age:

1. Play golf. You have a vast well-manicured lawn with nine or eighteen holes. The goal is to hit a tiny pock-marked ball by swinging a golf club from across a golf course with lagoons, sand dunes, and grass into these series of holes using the fewest number of strokes. If you are so darn excited to be putting your small balls into small holes, then play billiards. You don't waste precious land that may be put in better use.

2. Live in houses as big as ten football fields. Just how big a living space can one need? You have an Olympic-size swimming pool in your backyard and ten 100-SQM bathrooms around the "BIG" house. Just how dirty can one get to be needing such amenities? And you have a hundred luxury cars and fifty race cars in your garage... Fine. You have money, but is that an excuse?

3. Boxing. It is good if all boxers were like Mayweather who ducks opponents to avoid blood and counts on points to earn millions on pay-per-views. But boxing is a game we can accept if we are still living in caves and men still wear g-strings. (Guilty as charged I am for I love boxing.)

Oh, why am I so bitter tonight?

I've just checked the night sky out my window. There's nary a star nor a moon in sight.