It happened on the toilet. I was reading a copy of the free magazine Sky send to all their subscribers. Visually inhaling crap at one end, rectally exhaling it at the other; my corporeal self a mere conduit for the elemental crapforce that binds the universe together. I have all the spirituality of a doorframe. This is as close as I get to a religious experience.

Anyway. The Sky magazine is one of those Heat-a-like graphical holocausts where every millimetre of the page is plastered with rowdy colours and exclamation marks that crane their necks to squeal at you. I say I was "reading" it, but in reality you don't "read" magazines like that. There is too much visual noise, so instead you simply "look at" them, having first disengaged your temporal lobe so you don't feel like you are being stabbed in the mind by an over-zealous Christmas lighting display. Even though that is precisely what is happening.

And I was dumbly gazing at the bit that tells you which films are coming up on the movie channels, when I noticed that at the bottom of each synopsis sat a group of tiny faces. Celebrity faces. Nestling at the end of the paragraph, like part of the typography, as though the editors had done some research and discovered their readers had devolved to the point where their brains can no longer parse text unless it is broken up with miniature photos of their famous imaginary friends grinning back at them. I slapped myself awake and tried to make sense of what I was seeing.

Slowly it dawned on me: this was a rating system. I flipped back a few pages, and sure enough, there was the key: a brightly-coloured box full of little celebrity faces, accompanied by a brief description of what they stood for. "It's fast, easy, and practical," lied the subhead. This is what each face meant:

· Brad Pitt - "Eye Candy"

· Peter Kay - "Laugh Out Loud"

· Michael Jackson - "Thriller"

· Sarah Jessica Parker - "Get the Girls Round"

· Christopher Lee - "Scary"

· Victoria Beckham - "Star Spotting"

· Chico - "Guilty Pleasure"

· Ant and Dec - "Family Fun"

· Vicky Pollard - "Real-Life Shocker"

Sure, it would insult the intelligence of a cod. Under this system, Schindler's List = Vicky Pollard.

But I knew it was worse than that. I just didn't know why, not yet. So I looked at it again. Somewhere in my head, a camel's back splintered beneath a straw. And I understood: this is madness. Genuinely: this is madness. Concepts replaced by faces. Grinning faces. It is not evidence of "dumbing down". It is the disjointed thought process of madness. That this is even vaguely acceptable is the most dizzying madness of all.

I wanted to run into the street, without even pausing to wipe, and hurl myself, boggle-eyed, at passers-by, flapping the magazine around, screaming: "HELP! WE'VE LOST OUR MINDS! I HAVE PROOF! I HAVE PROOF."

But I didn't. I stayed put; pooing and afraid.

And I thought: Our leaders lie, and we know they have lied, and there is war in our name, and the world kicks and boils itself to death and we do nothing but stare into the tiny grinning faces of people we don't even know; faces that are, apparently, more "fast, easy and practical" than language itself.

I give us six years, tops.

Ignopedia

Continuing our uniquely unreliable interactive knowledge resource

Celebrity

(Requested by reader Louise Allen)

A celebrity is a fellow human being who is better than you because lots of people know who they are. Everyone loves celebrities. Even people who claim to despise celebrities would, if they were honest, prefer to share a drizzly afternoon picnic with Kate Thornton than spend one more second in your revolting non-celebrity company.

If George Clooney called a globally televised press conference, then plucked out two of his eyelashes and announced he would donate them free of charge to the first viewer to turn round and murder their entire family, thousands would perish. Read that again. It is a fact.

Celebrities themselves are rarely evil. Several have talent worth celebrating. Curiously, this is rarely discussed in media coverage, which instead concentrates on how fat their thighs are in order to make regular people, driven to the brink of despair by their adulation of celebrities, feel momentarily better about themselves, and sufficiently robust to stave off suicide long enough to digest further celebrity coverage.

Any member of the public who voluntarily pays to read magazines stuffed with candid photographs of celebrities walking down the street clutching shopping bags is suffering from an acute form of mental illness that hasn't been diagnosed yet, but surely will if there is an atom of hope left in the world, because a civilian flipping through Heat in their lunch break is the human equivalent of a cow being stunned by a captive bolt pistol prior to slaughter - except the cow, at least, dies for a purpose.

· To look something up in the Ignopedia, submit a query to ignopedia@theguardian.com, assuming you haven't found this one so depressing it has put you off

Corporate nausea

Thanks for all your corporate nausea entries. I am compiling them into a special feature which will appear in these pages at some point before our inevitable collective demise in a frothing cauldron of our own boiling blood. Or March, whichever is earliest. In the meantime, you can email me heartfelt messages of support by punching the following co-ordinates into your email navigation system: charlie.brooker@theguardian.com.