The Landshark and I have a special kinship… our birthdays are a mere eight days apart. Now while I may have just hit my quarter-century mark, the dear li’l Landshark is but a wee tyke still, though growing rapidly as he just turned 3.

*Sniff* Gosh, they grow up quick, don’t they? I can remember it like it was yesterday… a small, modest post about the pending horrors to come. And of course, at that time, I had far much more time to devote to my blog practice. Though the times have changed and this li’l fella has taken to walking on his own, I still dote over it like a good parent… or a good parent that has a career, deadlines, planes to catch and leaves the care of his or her children to the beloved nanny Consuela.

Except I don’t know where my nanny is half the time. The little bastard has gotten into my hooch three times in the last week. Consuela, where the fuck are you?

Anyway, I still remember those precious few posts… the one regarding violence in video games, the ongoing rants about the grad school experience, the very first full post about Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez.

“Bennifer.” That’s the term. I had almost shut that entire ordeal out of my head for the last few years until staying home for Thanksgiving this past week, and flipping through the vast wasteland I call television, and in passing heard the term reiterated on one of those confounded top 100 lists that E! and VH1 feel compelled to milk to the never-mind. From what I could gather, it was something exceptionally lame like the top 100 “power couples” or “celebrity breakups” or something to that effect.

When I heard the term, it brought back all those horrid memories of 2003 and the sheer over-saturation of that confounded excuse for a “romance.”

But it didn’t end with “Bennifer.” I was then inundated with the apparent new “compound pet names” for these celebrity “couples” (yes, I parenthesize that, because if you can really qualify these sad human beings as “couples,” you need to redefine your concept of the term “relationship”).

First, there was “Brangelina,” obviously referring to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Then there was the atrocious “Tomkat,” in reference to Scientology’s favorite thetans, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.

I would love to get my mitts on the ruddy dirt rag reporter that coined any one of the above three names, simply because the pretentiousness and irritation factor in them are off the bloody charts right now. Granted, I have a deep-seated loathing for all celebrities except Christopher Walken and Edward Norton. That being said, I do consider most of them to be something less than human… every time I have seen them interviewed, my bullshit detector has blown a damn gasket. So, seeing as how we have now determined that most celebrities are less than human, I suppose it could be argued that amalgamating their names might be a way of dehumanizing them even more.

That may be true on most days, but here, I have to take issue.

These terms are not meant to degrade, and they really should. Even though these pairings tend to share a common brain that is a tenth the size of their combined egos, that doesn’t mean they should share a common name as well. The designation of a group of two or more people by a pet name typically is done to aggrandize them, not demean them. A good example would be the Rat Pack. Granted, at face value this may not seem like the most shimmering of names… nonetheless, at the end of the day, it became synonymous with talent and savoir-faire, and it became a term that the unit embraced.

The same can be said for these pairings. They embrace the term bestowed upon them by the media, and in turn revel in the absolutely needless attention it seems to garner them. Not for nothing, but if somewhere down the line, some nitwit ever refers to my wife and I by a common name, he can fully expect a high heel up his rectum (or possibly to his gumdrops) and a Deer Stag in the mush.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a good rant on celebrities, the world they live in and the abhorrent façade they call life. Truthfully, it feels pretty good. Again, I always look to out the overrated and overexposed with this baby blog of mine, and the truth is, these names are just absurd to begin with… but they have now risen to the next level we call “overkill.” I’m surprised that some clever asshole never came up with “Jessnicka” or “Kevitney.” I suppose I should also be thankful.

And dear reader, at this time of year, we should give thanks. I suppose that in reviewing this circuitously Zen post that harkens back to the early days and the irritants that caused me to light the fire here, I can at least be thankful that most, if not all of these celebrities will live boorishly empty lives that will end in substance abuse, scandal, divorce, bankruptcy, and God willing, leprosy. If these useless actors and actresses really want to make a go of their 15 minutes and engage the public via the sickening fascination with celebrities that most of us have coupled with the cleverness of a compound term, then I can take tremendous comfort in knowing that they’ll be getting a nice Karmic raping somewhere down the line.

Who says they live better than us?

Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.