Forget "Born with It"

I've begun watching television for the first time in seven years, and while there is a motherlode of fakeness on TV about which to write, few shows or advertisements have announced to their own deception as loudly as Maybelline's "Falsies" mascara, which purports to make your real lashes look like false ones. Woman has moved, then, from wanting to look like "maybe she's born with it" to wishing to look like she's got fake facial alterations. Are we to celebrate the fake now, embracing artifice and shunning the genuine? Is anyone attracted to the woman on the left solely because her eyelashes are enormous-looking?

Teach Your Children Well

The "Google alert" I have set up for the words "forgery" and "impostor" give me hundreds of news articles every week, and I don't even begin to read all of them. Most involve forged checks and forged legal documents on a minor scale, and the perpetrators are usually sentenced to two or so years of prison, depending on the charge. The stories I find more interesting are those that don't involve literally making money, but have more subtle ends. In "Qatar's top-selling English language daily newspaper" I found this story about a teacher/father's forgery of his children's documents to be accepted into a PRIMARY school in England. Perhaps my public school education makes me especially disdainful of this kind of action, but the fact that the story made it to a newspaper in Qatar points to the fact that others must be interested as well. One hears of all kinds of fraud happening at the high school and college level in terms of document falsification and illegal test-taking, but rarely does it happen at the primary school level (as far as I know). I pity this man's children, forced to leave their school because of their father's fraud, unsure whose actions to emulate. I am rarely a "think of the children" kind of person, but I wonder how these kids will learn the value of honesty and hard work, if they can't learn it from their father who is also a teacher.