The world needs Lo-Rez Ipsum

A few weeks back, whilst I was conducting an impromptu if spirited inventory of the trashcan behind Fourth Dwarf's place, as us coyotes are wont to do of a warm summer evening, he lifted the lid and invited me to get the hell out so he could dispose of his garbage. Then he invited me inside to watch a little cable, so long as I stayed on the newspaper on the floor, and away from his couch.

We lit the screen just as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo sashayed onto, ummm, The Learning Channel. It was like witnessing the wreck of a train full of obese, neckless passengers in real time -- no slo-mo about it, bubba! I was horrified in moments, but the Short Guy is made of sterner stuff.

"We're watching it!" he ordered. "It'll be educational!"

It was. I learned that the evil trolls who produce Honey Boo Boo have, against the odds, managed to tamp the ever-lowering cultural bar into a fresh grave somewhere beneath sub-sub-basement level. I hadda take a midnight swim in the Ottawa River to clear the air after. And I ain't impugning the reputation of the Dwarf's trash, either.

It was a harbinger of things to come. A couple of days ago, certain of the Irregulars noticed a net-based lorem ipsum generator modelled after Fifty Shades of Grey. As soft-porn cultural phenomenons go, Fifty Shades is a really, really badly written one. And selling like cheap chocolate bunnies right after Lent.

Lorem ipsum, for the uninitiated, is a body of random-pseudo Latin text that graphic designers put where text should be, when the real words aren't written yet. It's a way to mock up what the finished page looks like. So a Fifty Shades-based lorem ipsum generator is probably some kind of smart marketing move in certain circles. Some of us might even applaud, if we'd thought of it.

In fact, some ESIs even wondered whether we could use it to automatically write one-click posts for this blog, so we'd never ever have to look at, or think about, the damn thing ever again. When cooler heads prevailed, we decided that so long as we're blighting the webscape, we'll stay an original blight.

But what to do about all the cultural bar-lowering offenses that aren't ours? Honey Boo Boo and Fifty Shades prove they're epidemic! And they burn our eyes! They burn! How the hell do we get rid of 'em?

Then the genius idea: An ESI Lo-rez Ipsum browser plugin, to blur out everything that offends. We'll get rich! If we ever figure out a business model...