Valentine’s Day is over; next stop, St. Paddy’s Day. So, as winter clings to the Northern Hemisphere like a drunk clinging to a lamp post, and Mother Nature and Old Man Winter fight it out to see who marks the calendar this month, let’s find a cozy place out of the wind and rain, take a page out of Puck’s book and wonder “what fools [we] mortals be!”
Celebrity tattoos are as common as hen poop in a barnyard, so it’s no big deal that Orlando Bloom got a new one the other day. You remember Orlando Bloom: he’s the “actor” who played Legolas, a Middle Earth elf with an emotional range of .07 on a scale of 1 to 1,000. Anyway, it seems Mr. Bloom was having a little trouble remembering his son’s name (Flynn) and, rather than constantly bother his entourage about it, he decided to get it permanently inked into his arm. Problem solved? Not quite! First of all, Standard Written English wasn’t cool enough for Bloom, so he had it printed in Morse code, a form of communication that’s been dead since Roy Rogers roamed the Earth. Unfortunately, something got screwed up in the translation, and they spelled the name wrong. Okay, a “dot” here, a “dash” there; it was an honest mistake. But here’s the good part. Nobody noticed! Obviously, tattoo artists are not known for their cryptographic skills and there’s no app I know of that spellchecks Morse code, but … here’s the deal!
You’re an A-list (high B-list?) movie star.
You’ve got a ton of people around you every day with nothing better to do than suck up to you.
Every single one of them has an iPhone, iPad, iWatch, iWhatever.
Yet, not one of them, from your publicist to your personal assistant, cared enough about you to take 30 seconds and say, “Siri, what’s Flynn in Morse code?”
That, boys and girls, is a cold and lonely life.
Anyway, the ink dried, and there’s Orlando on Instagram, proud as a puppy with a chewed-up slipper. He’s selfie-d a forearm shiver with what looks like a surgical diagram drawn on it, and the teasing caption reads “new #tattoo can you guess who?”
And here is where we veer off into the land of WTF!
Apparently, Orlando’s Instagram audience includes more than a few people who took the time and trouble to figure out his body art was Morse code (Remember: it’s not a written language.) and then were willing to spend even more time translating it. (I doubt if many people can do Morse code from memory, these days.) Plus, they know enough about the life and times of Orlando Bloom to realize that this was his son’s name and that the dolt had misspelled it. Then, they felt morally compelled to publicly point that out to him – a number of times.
At last glance, Orlando and son are doing fine, despite the looming years of therapy. But honestly, folks! Our world has a bunch of people with way too much time on their hands.
Many of my friends believe I hate celebrities. I don’t; I just think most of them are assholes. Actually, I don’t even have a philosophical problem with the cult of celebrity. Like it or not, it’s a serious part of our social structure and always has been. For example, in the 1840s, the pianist, Franz Liszt, was mobbed wherever he went. People fainted at his concerts, and fans fought over bits of his clothing. Heinrich Heine called the phenom ” Lizstomania.” (Sound familiar?) My point is we worship celebrities ’cause it’s fun. It’s sexy. It’s a chance to dance with the kind of charisma that’s normally just doesn’t occur in our day-to-day lives.
WD Fyfe 