Get Oprah out of my head NOW!

Recently, some pastors at Anglican Churches in England came up with an ingenious idea to raise some spare change to support their struggling parishes. They figured that placing cell phone towers in church steeples would enable them to be a heavenly beacon in a literal as well as metaphorical sense, and thus serve God and mammon. Well, the mammon part was ok until some wit came up with the revelation that with mammon came mammaries, and that churches would become unwitting broadcasters of not just the holy word, but dirty ones.

In the invisible mesh of static which represents the public airwaves, we are constantly being bombarded with stuff that thankfully our eyes and ears cannot pick up, yet nonetheless can be rendered by our imagination. Now, I am as aghast as anyone at the prospect of having the Oprah network beamed into my head 24/7 by some orbiting satellite, but I've learned to live with the metaphor, and not give it life.

But unfortunately, as creatures that use metaphor in lieu of logic, the very picture of nudie pictures being bounced off a metal reflector is cause for apoplexy, even though the same pictures are constantly being bounced off our very thick skulls. The problem though is that we often confuse metaphor with logic, and our arguments become slanted by the alliterative rather than the literal. Thus a mud fish becomes edible once renamed sea trout, gross negligence becomes forgivable when it is friendly fire, and helpful conversation becomes billable if its called psychotherapy. Unfortunately, we cannot live without metaphor so we are faced with the prospect of continually making decisions because of what things are like rather than what they are. As the metaphor goes, it's not a pretty picture.