Key to a joyous life it seems is solitude, cheap romance

Some days it truly feels like I am about to wake up to the music of the Twilight Zone.

Some highly upset viewers of course thought they were in the Twilight Zone when they heard the new 7de Laan jingle.

How else to explain Grey – the latest edition of the 50 Shades of Grey series – selling 385 972 print copies in the UK during the three days until June 20. This makes it the fastest selling adult title ever in the UK.

Yes, you read it right – it seems the world loves cheap, romantic porn and children running around with wands (we are talking about the Harry Potter book sales here).

What is the fascination with this series of erotic books – the literary version or the film?

If this happened 40 years ago in SA (censorship was long gone in Europe) then, sure, one can understand that the masses were starved for some naughty stuff, but really, we live in 2015.

The fact that people are gobbling up this cheap porn is baffling if one considers that Mills & Boon – a romance imprint of British publisher Harlequin UK Ltd – has been around 1908.

Remember the outcry over Lady Chatterley’s Lover – a novel by DH Lawrence? The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical (and emotional) relationship between a working-class man and an upper-class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable words.

Fast forward to 2015, and the world – thanks to mass communication provided by the internet – has been flooded with books on shallow romance and cheap porn – and no one frowns upon naughty words.

So why then is this novel so doing well? It remains a frustrating mystery to infuriate any literary maestro, just as when the masses flocked to see the movie (something that I skipped with a smile).

Really? Porn in all shapes and sizes is freely and easily accessible, so why the fascination? Long before the 50 Shades of Grey movie the world was introduced to heated stuff like Fatal Attraction, 9½ Weeks, Basic Instinct, and Wild Orchid, to name a few.

Nudity and explicit sex is all over TV – to be viewed in well-known series like Game of Thrones, and are becoming the norm in music videos and advertising.

What then is the message behind 50 Shades of Grey’s popularity? Maybe it is just a sad reflection of a society that is emotionally and intellectually malnourished.

We are, after all, far removed from the brilliance of the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment. Mozart will turn over his grave if he has listen to the nonsense called music these days.

There is another hilarious story that caught my eye.

Heard of the woman in Australia who collapsed in the park after losing feeling in her lower legs?

The skinny jeans she was wearing were to be blamed. They had apparently caused significant damage to her muscles and nerve fibres.

Skinny jeans are now targeted for being bad for your health. Come on!

People are responsible for their own demise. Alarm bells should be ringing if you try to squeeze into those pants – reason dictates they cannot be good for health.

Blaming skinny jeans is like blaming excessive violence on a lack of gun control.

Gun control is in the news following the shooting at a black church in Charleston, which left nine people dead. Too many guns on the street has been partly blamed, along with the Confederate flag that still blows in the wind.

Take note: a person has a free mind and a free will. No gun has forced a person to pull a trigger, and neither has a flag forced himself to mow down members of a church (yes, even Apartheid has been blamed for this massacre).

Neither has a car ever forced a driver to drive recklessly, unless the car is Stephen King’s Christine.

Man remains his own worst enemy and we should be far more concerned with our moral decline and lack of true, wholesome values than blaming jeans, flags, cars, guns and the evilness of butter for our demise.

Just as a point of interest: heard about the Swedish study that suggest excessive noise from traffic, aircraft and trains makes us more likely to become obese?

Don’t choke on your coffee, it’s true.

The first research into the effect of noise pollution on waistlines, scientists say, reveals that those who live near particularly busy roads or who often have aircraft flying overhead, can see their sleep adversely affected.

This lack of sleep makes people less willing to exercise and, therefore, more likely to become overweight or obese.

The moral of the story is, therefore, simple if you wish to believe and adhere to these strange times: if you wish to be happy and apparently aroused, read cheap porn, retreat into solitude and stop wearing skinny jeans!