simplify, simplify

I recently got a new computer.  Partly because it is new and partly because I am criminally lazy, my browser by default now opens to MSN.com.  This is obviously a tragedy because it forces me to read, even if for only a quick second, the moronic content that MSN.com publishes.

Yesterday I was treated to a terrible article about the Duggar family.  The Duggars are a fundamentalist Christian family from Arkansas boasting nineteen kids.  They have their own show on TLC even though as far as I can tell not one of them is a little person, hoarder or cakemaker.

I like watching their family on tv.  Each of the kids is home-schooled by their mom, herself a high school graduate who wed at age seventeen.  They selectively cite Scripture to justify their beliefs that girls can only wear skirts and never pants, or that not only sex but kissing should be saved for marriage.  In 2008 they campaigned for Mike Huckabee, who recently compared gay marriage to incest.  They believe that evolution is "totally unscientific" and that the Bible "proves" creationsim.  Oftentimes I find myself oddly jealous of the simplicity of their lives, wishing I could undergo some sort of targeted brain damage so that I could feel the same peace.

So what does MSN.com have to say about the Duggars?  The article was entitled "What the Duggars are Doing Wrong" and was written by a mom.  Yes, that was her actual credential:  mom.  Lately I've been noticing a lot of dubious credentials that people are for some reason not ashamed to tout.  Like this weekend when I contemplated ordering a NuWave oven after being nearly seduced by its tv informercial.

The commercial featured testimonials from people boasting the following actual qualifications and credentials:

- "certified clinical nutrionist"
- "certified sports nutrionist"
- "PhD, NC, MA (certified nutrionist and author)"
- "certified master chef/chef instructor"
- "TV cooking expert/ Long time NuWave user"; and
for one Michael Newman, "Former 'Baywatch' Star/Actor".  Sometimes a slash just says it all.

I for one would like to know how to contact some of these mysterious accrediting bodies so that I can throw an expert or certified qualification around with my name.  Certified Curmudgeon.  That would spruce up the old CV a bit.

Anyway, returning to the subject of the Duggar article, it was one of those typical MSN.com articles where the answer to the stupid rhetorical question posed in the title is so glaringly obvious that one wonders how the article itself can comprise more than one sentence. 

Example title: "10 Signs You Aced Your Job Interview"
Only necessary content:  "You got an offer." 

Example title: "I Did Not Love My Adopted Child" 
Only necessary content: "So I sent it back to the orphanage."

Because isn't it so patently obvious "what the Duggars are doing wrong?" 
The article simply should have read: "Allowing nineteen children to emerge from a single woman's vagina."

And maybe followed by a visual image:

 

Succint, concise.  To the point.  I didn't need a certified mom to tell me about the Duggars.  I could have arrived at the same conclusion scanning the insightful comments to another article the same day, about Reggie Bush's alleged new girlfriend.  My favorite of that bunch could easily apply to the Duggar matriarch:  

"she fine, but she been swam thru."