I don’t mean to alarm any woman’s rights activists out there, or cause any left- thinking folks to start any petition campaigns. That being said, I would like to say something controversial. Now you’ve heard the disclaimer, so I will proceed to make a confession. I like to look at pretty girls. Not in any inappropriate way, but if there is a picture of a pretty girl someplace, I look at it. This revelation may shock some of you, but I think most people like to look at pretty girls. It is a very easy hobby to maintain, with absolutely no expensive equipment to buy. Quite simply, because pictures of pretty girls are just everywhere. On magazines, commercials, advertisements, greeting cards, even tool catalogs have pretty girls are all over them. They are actually quite hard to avoid.

I tried to avoid it once. I swore I would go for a whole week without looking at any pretty girls. IMPOSSIBLE! Not only did I have to sit alone in my room with no internet, television, or even a book, (they’re on book covers too). I also had to avoid my wife, who is very pretty. My beard grew, my eyes were bloodshot, and I set a new world record for thumb twiddling. It’s not in the Guinness book, because they sent a pretty girl to certify it, and I didn’t let her in the room. Then my niece came over to drop off the chocolate I bought for a school fundraiser. She knocked on the door, I opened it, and BAM. I was looking at a pretty girl, two days early. The only solace I had was eating the candy. Fifty bucks down the drain, you see it was supposed to be for a party next week. Oh well.

Now you may not give a fig, about all of this. Though you probably give very large figs, for pretty girls, but I assure it will make sense in the end. The point is I like pretty girls, but not the internet. Confused? Well so am I.

You see a while back, a certain basketball team published a video of their dance team, and it showed up as a link on my browser. The video had several pretty girls and a big guy doing a routine on a court someplace. It was quite funny, and I watched it several times. I also linked to other dance teams’ videos. At the time, I thought nothing of it. The next week there was an awards show. Yes, I looked at the red-carpet photos, the dresses were nice and there were pretty girls all over the place. I wish I hadn’t, but it was too late. The die was cast. Now Russian, Asian, and Brazilian beauties all seem to want me to date them. As if this weren’t enough, many of them want me to see them naked, and chat about my fantasies. I don’t know what attracts them about eating Oreos in bed for breakfast, (my fantasy), but they really really want to talk about it. Just today I got a link from a site promising, “Beautiful Babes from The World Over!! Want to meet me” Sadly none of them live in my neighborhood, but I digress.

You see somewhere, embedded deep in the extremely confusing, yet completely detestable, guts of my computer, lives an evil program tracking my every move. This uneaten, rotten cookie, which has been dipped in sour milk, then selects the things it feels are important to me and makes the appropriate, yet completely unwanted changes to my browser links. The thing is, it’s blind to most of what I actually am interested in. Mostly, I click on news and music links, with the occasional look at “This Day in History” sites. The geeky computer beast ignores all that.  But, it sure saw when I linked to those pretty girl sites! My computer thinks I’m a dirty old man, while I am neither old nor unclean in thought.

Every day when I log in, I am inundated with cheerleader site links, dance team links, fashion links, (which I am definitely not interested in), and cat videos. I watched one of them once too. Yes, I like looking at pretty girls. I like it a lot, only not exclusively to the neglect of everything else in the world. I sincerely want to know who programmed the little beastie in my CPU so I can exact some revenge. What were they thinking? My personal belief is he is trying to take over the world by destroying the last few intelligent people in America. He, and in extension his programmed servant, must be thinking, “Let’s see, hmm, these people are reading the news and have strong intelligent opinions. That’s bad. I need to keep them away from those. Wait a sec, they’re looking at animals. That could be good, unless… Oh crap, another tree-hugger. This one’s going to be tough. Hold on! Kittens are animals, and they’re really cute. Cute things make human brains turn to mush. I’ll eliminate all the smart links they like, and sub-in cat pic’s and videos. Several more IQ points down the drain. Oh, I’m such a genius!”

The thing is, everyone but me already knew about this corruption code. It’s all over the news. It is used to personalize my internet experience. What the heck is that supposed to mean? I sit at the computer. I log into the web. I find the sites I need to research. No one else is involved. Sounds pretty personal to me. Why do I need links? The fact is, I don’t. The all-powerful and ubiquitous ‘THEY’ need them.

They want me to link to these sites. They want me to buy stuff, by sponsoring cute kittens. I’m quite sure kittens are much more cost effective than, say, using LeBron James as your spokesperson. If the number of adorable pet videos are any indication, their plan seems to be working. There are millions of those things. You could spend days on line, and not even see one tenth of them. Remember, puppies and super-models are way more attractive than fat dumpy politicians. They don’t want me getting upset, and more intelligent, by watching the news. It might scare me away. Therefore, when I browse museums, they don’t set up a link. They want me to turn off my brain, and pay for stuff I can’t afford. Then after they sell me all that stuff, they can recommend a credit counselor, so I can pay more to settle my payment issues.

But I have beaten them at their game. I am a starving artist. Starving artists, don’t have any money and are not likely to get any. (Hence the name) I can look at all their pretty girls, and cat videos with impunity. My brain may turn to mush, but they won’t get any of my hard-earned cash. Their efforts are wasted on me, and I can tell you how to reach my status as well. And I promise I will, right after the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

Wait a sec, I haven’t seen that cute video yet. What was I saying?

If you have comments, want to discuss comic styles of Kermit the Frog, or want me to take a sideways view at your favorite topic. Send me an E-Mail at ohhssidewaysview@gmail.com I’d love to hear from you!