I was watching some news program with Dennis Kucinich speaking. (He's STILL in politics? I remember him from Ohio politics when I was a kid. And I'm OLD.)
Anyway, I thought, "He reminds me of someone now."
And then I realized who. (Except Kucinich looks more like the guy does NOW, not in this photo from the 70s)
Ken started it.
Oddly enough, I didn't need to make too many changes. Spooky.
And no, I'm not really targeting any one person, whether they are a true celebrity or someone who thinks they are such. It's just hard to get things to scan sometimes. What is it they say? "Any resemblance to celebrities living or dead is purely a coincidence"?
Every crap I take
Every law I break
Every tear I fake
Every risk I take
You'll be watching me.
Every single day
Every word I say
Every yes, every nay,
At home you'll stay
You'll be watching me
Oh, can't you see
You belong to me
How my ego grows
With every ET! show....
Every phrase I state
All I do is great!
Every time I date
All my baby's traits
You'll be watching me
I really should run a political race
I have lots of thoughts to spiff up this place
Lots of laws I think I could replace
Lots of changes, hope, and grace
People would love me, love me, yeah....
Oh, can't you see
You belong to me
Your boring life to escape
You watch me on TV....
Wanna know what was the story that received the largest chunk of time in the 5 am news-broadcast on the radio station I listen to while working out?
It wasn't the price of oil.
It wasn't the economy.
It wasn't Obama's trip to the Middle East.
It wasn't that the missing soldier was found alive but hurt, and her husband is probably the culprit.
It wasn't a hurricane developing in the Gulf.
Oh, all of those were MENTIONED, but in terms of time-devoted-to-story, the most prominent one was:
Two female race-car drivers have a cat fight.
(And no, it is not a sports channel I listen to. And I had to search a good bit to actually find an Internet version of that story.)
I kind of hate the news outlets. Why is this important? Because it's two women generally considered to be "hot," engaged in a dispute....it's the closest thing to mud-wrestling in the Penthouse Forum allowable on the public airwaves.
And yeah, I suppose I should be grateful for slow news days, because they mean nothing too bad is happening...but why devote two and a half minutes of a four minute newscast to that? Why include the (barely comprehensible) dialog with bleeping?
I'd be willing to bet if Petty or Andretti or whoever of the men are racing these days got into a fight with someone, it wouldn't be such big news.
I wonder how many years away we are from importing that Russian news concept where the newscaster progressively takes off a piece of clothing with each story.
(And I know...women over 30 or so don't "matter" in the demographics, because our money's apparently no good, but it irritates me that if there's going to be titillation, it's almost always titillation for those who enjoy thinking about half-clothed women or women engaged in a cat fight. [don't get me wrong: I hate that there's titillation at ALL...I don't want to have to watch/listen to pieces of beefcake trying to present the news. But it does irritate me, the whole "woooo! Cat Fight!" tone with which the story was presented.]
Come to think of it? Thank God Condi Rice and Hillary Clinton aren't the ones running for president; I can just imagine what some news outlets would do with that.)
No, I'm not making any kind of snarky plumbers-butt joke here.
Apparently the singer Amy Winehouse has emphysema. At 24. Twenty-friggin'-four.
The doctors are relating it in part to her smoking (uh, tobacco, and then some, uh, other stuff) habits.
On the news this morning apparently someone (one of her doctors?) was quoted as saying something like, "She's going to have to decide what she loves more...being alive and able to sing, or the drugs."
And you know, that just makes me sad. I know, crack is supposed to be highly addictive. I know people have pain in their lives. But I cannot imagine someone at 24 being in that boat...I think of ME at 24, what I was like - still fairly full of hope, still kind of young and silly (I mean silly in the good way). I didn't have whatever demons seem to haunt Ms. Winehouse.
I just can't picture that level of self-destructiveness. Oh, I know people DO it, we have a long line of musicians (especially) who died young. But I still have a hard time accepting it.
I don't know. Self-destructive behavior just in general makes me sad. I can't quite imagine the kind of demons that would drive someone to find solace at the bottom of a crack pipe. (And I don't want to.)
I go back and forth on the whole drug issue, tending to be a bit of a little-l libertarian. But I do think, at times like this, that maybe the death penalty for any dealer who is shown to have gotten someone hooked - especially if that person died as a result of the addiction - might not be too harsh.
(And her family - I presume she has family? What must they be going through.)
I hope this is a wake-up call for her, I hope she can manage to kick it and to continue and to have some sort of happy life. (Somedays I wonder if there isn't something a little ghoulish about the way we treat famous people, the whole "dance monkey dance" always needing them to be "on" and the way they're always in the public eye.) I'd rather see her retire from the scene than die.
(That's my mom's impersonation of how some of the - shall we say, more backwoodsy girls from where she lived pronounced it. "I'm goin' to Da Probm!")
I happened to be a bit late leaving the house this morning - normally I'm over here and at my desk by 7, but I had some bills I wanted to get paid and out, so as I was writing them, the local news I had on switched over to one of those morning shows (I think it was CBS.)
The morning network shows - like the current incarnation of "Today" and such - make my head want to explode. They set themselves up as SO IMPORTANT. They do Very Special Stories on things (like "the rising rates of autism....what does it mean?") and then follow it up with some kind of super-idiotic fluff piece. Or they barely scratch the surface of some story that might be important if it was actually, you know, investigated, and then it's "And next - see what's hot in shoes for spring!"
Well, today, they doing a series on Reliving Their Proms.
Flippin' heck? Reliving your prom? Who does that?
(Wait, wait - don't tell me: "People whose lives peaked in high school.")
Anyway, apparently the anchors (and when I think of Today I think of Brokaw and Pauley; that's how long it's been since I actually watched the thing. I don't know who's running the show now) are reliving their proms.
Except, instead of doing like any other person in this country and sitting around and TALKING about what happened at Prom, they are having the extra-special Rich Kid Birthday Party version of it - one guy got to play baseball with some members of some national baseball team the year he went to Prom (yeah, that's real prom-my), one guy got to dance with the stars of A Chorus Line (I am withholding ALL the horrible un-PC jokes I could make about that), and one woman - and I actually looked up for this, because it said she went to prom in 1987, which would have been the Prom Year for me - got "made over" to look like she did at Prom.
In an eye-searingly electric blue dress and that horrible spiral-perm hair girls used to get.
Now, yeah - I know, I'm being cynical here. But I do think this kind of thing merits a bit of ridicule - they call themselves a "news" show and they are playing "dress up like we did when we were 18." And they're trying to be the Voice of the People and yet they are "reminiscing" in ways that the average person wouldn't be able to afford, if they even COULD get their foot in the door to talk to the people from A Chorus Line or somesuch.
And I'm probably a bit cynical as I didn't go to my own prom. I really had no interest. I wasn't "going with" anyone at that time, and the one guy I would have been interested in asking, by the time I had screwed up enough courage to consider going to ask him myself, I heard the gossip..."Did you hear that Mimi asked Jay to the prom?"
As for going alone - which would have been an option - I didn't want to. For three reasons:
1. I couldn't see paying that kind of money to go alone (And I think they also had a sort of "single supplement" charge, where you paid more to go stag than you would as half of a couple. Which is unfair, but then life is unfair.)
2. Of my two best friends, one had recently been dumped and was very anti-prom, and the other was going with a male friend from another school - and going to HIS prom. So I wouldn't even have had the two most important members of my team to back me up and to joke about the horrible dresses the popular girls were wearing.
3. I figured it looked less pathetic to stay home than to go to the prom by myself. I was very self-conscious in those days.
Honestly? I probably would not have enjoyed myself. I don't like the "music of my generation" (probably a lot of INXS and Depeche Mode got played at that prom - as I remember, they had a DJ instead of a band). I don't like crowds, especially when there are people I sense as being hostile to me in that crowd (i.e., the popular kids). I'm sure a lot of drinking went on both before and after the prom, and I wasn't into that. (Nor was I into the groping and feeling that probably took place, even DURING prom.)
But it does kind of baffle me, someone wanting to relive their prom 20 years or more from the time it happened.
Am I just being churlish, or does it seem that someone who's all down with the heavy-duty reliving (and I don't mean just reminiscing about "remember how we thought Tom and Andrea were going to love each other forever?" or "Do you remember how Max tripped and fell into the punchbowl) is someone whose life hasn't had anything really very INTERESTING happen since they were 18?
I mean, if I were into reliving a part of my life, it would be other parts of it. Like successfully defending my dissertation. Or getting the phone call to let me know I had a job. Or the time period right after I found out I had tenure. Or even just sitting around the lab in graduate school with my lab-mates, shooting the s*** until our adviser came in and told us we needed to get back to work. But high school? Something I'm just as glad is behind me.
The "People's Choice Awards" is on in the other room (I had been watching NCIS and got a phone call and didn't get back to switch the set off*)
Robin Williams (or so I'm guessing by the voice) was on.
Did he REALLY do the old "Rick 'em, rack 'em, ruck 'em, ruck 'em, take that ball and really ffffff...ight!" cheer? And get a big laugh for it?
My MOM used to tell that joke. This writer's strike is really screwing things up, I guess.
(Though seriously, my mom is pretty cool.)
(*I know a lot of people love awards shows, but I just cannot get into them. Part of it is I get disappointed at how inarticulate some of the entertainers I like really are, and part of it is I'm mildly disgusted by the concept of "swag bags" where people who are already making very large amounts of money are given a large amount of spendy stuff for free, just in the hopes that they might be photographed wearing the sunglasses they were given, or mention the free moisturizer in an interview. But mostly it's because awards shows just simply don't interest me)
Something I am very tired of in our culture is the apparent increasing need to air one's dirty laundry in public.
This morning, I stayed home a little later than usual - I don't teach on Thursday, and with the new "designated faculty parking" I don't have to get in at the crack of 7 am in order to be able to park within a half-mile of my building any more. And I had to do some packing for some meetings I'm going to this weekend.
I had had the local NBC affiliate morning news (which is marginally less stupid than the local CBS affiliate's; the NBC folks have one of the "morning mouths" from one of the local radio stations in regularly to vent his poorly-formed opinions or make drooling comments about the hottie-of-the-moment, but the CBS affiliate devotes an inordinate about of time to the "Pathologically Worried Mom's Corner" or to the "Relationship Advice that if you Don't Know it Already, You Probably Don't Deserve to Be In a Relationship." And they tend to have fewer actual, you know, NEWS stories).
Anyway...the network morning show (ummmmm...Today? Is that the NBC one? I'm usually at my desk by 7 am so I kind of forget) was on, and Paul McCartney's most recent ex was all over the screen - I heard a soundbite about how she was apparently being vilified in the press and really really wanted it to stop.
And you know? I do not care. I am not interested. Okay, maybe the press IS being unfair to her - but I have no grounds to evaluate it as I do not live in Britain and do not read their newspapers. And if she is being vilified as bitchy or unpleasant or a gold-digger, wouldn't it be best to kind of fade from sight, and let the press latch on to the next convenient target? Or something?
I mean, it's kind of like Larry Craig in a way: he got caught very possibly doing something he should not have been doing. But instead of starting off issuing a simple denial and then refusing to comment, he's just been all over the place. It's become a joke.
I was raised to believe that the best thing to do when you're in trouble is to quietly fess up, fix what can be fixed, and then shut up about it.
People seem to have forgotten the shut up part.
and the "quietly" part.
and the "fix" part, at least a lot of the time.
But I don't know...If I were married to some famous guy and we decided it wasn't working out, I'd probably ask for a settlement big enough to buy a very small house far, far out in the country (if I didn't have enough money of my own, and if there was some reasonable reason for me to ask for a settlement - like I put my own career and earning-potential on hold to help him, or something) and go there and just hang out until the next flavor of the month came along.
That said: why do there even have to be flavors-of-the-month on what is ostensibly "serious" or "semi-serious" news? Don't we have an "E" network that's devoted to this stuff? And three- yes, three- of the local affiliates here run "Entertainment Tonight" during that break between early-local news and prime time. So it's not like we're starved of our celebutainment.
But I look at all of the stories about Britney, about Craig, about what's-her-butt-McCartney's-ex and I wonder if it's kind of a bread-and-circuses thing - something we're being fed to keep us distracted from what's really going on in the world.
On Joel's blog the other day I commented that I was getting so tired of stories about a certain individual whose great-grandfather founded a famous hotel chain.
(Maybe I'll Homerize her name and call her Paramais Hilamaton. Kind of like Pig Latin.)
I said that I thought I should modify the old "drinking game" (where, if something happened in a movie, people had to take a drink). I'm not a drinking woman (and even if I were, I think, knocking back a shot at 8:30 am would still disgust me). So I said I'd either buy another book, buy a skein of yarn, or eat a square of Lindt chocolate every time she was mentioned in a news story I happened to hear.
(Several commenters suggested the Lindt truffles instead. I've had them, and I guess this is one of those, "There's no disputing taste" matters, but I find them a bit unctuous for me. I'd rather have a square off of one of their good dark chocolate bars.)
Anyway. Took my car in for its regular filter/oil change this morning (and asked the mechanic to check the brakes - they had been grinding and squealing and I had fearful visions of Impending Brake System Failure. He came back in and said the brakes looked perfectly fine; the grinding was probably because it's been so wet these past few weeks. Thank goodness for that - that's $100 or more I don't have to spend.)
Anyway, while I was waiting, the tv box in the customer lounge. (And I also have to add - this is a dealership and one of the salespeople went through and foisted her card on everyone, telling us if we were in the market for a new car, to look her up. One of the other guys sitting in there waiting, after she left, said sotto voce, "It's probably not the best place to sell Fords when people are sitting around waiting for their broken Fords to be fixed." Hah.)
Anyway, the tv box people (I think it was Fox news but I was grading and only listening with half an ear) were discussing the woman who shall not be named here and her "pending release" from jail.
"Pending release?" Whaaa? WTF? Didn't she just go in, like, on Monday?
They also said she's doing a print interview and making $300K for it.
Now, I try not to begrudge actors and actresses and sports stars their high salaries, but this still seems wrong to me. I realize I don't have the interest of ever having been in jail, nor the titillation factor of ever having disembarked a car while wearing a short skirt and going commando, but if someone asked to interview me - and then offered to pay - I'd turn it down. Isn't the point of an interview that you're getting publicity?
I don't know. But I do think I will now entitle myself to the purchase of a book or yarn of my choice, having been subjected to hearing that. (And if you're playing along at home, I guess your having read my blog post now entitles YOU to your indulgence-of-choice. This could get very recursive...)