Celebrity watching

Over the last week or more I have had the distinct displeasure
of watching the media talking heads drooling over both living
and dead celebrities.

Mostly the dead ones…

Oh, where to start… ?

Farrah Fawcett? Micheal Jackson? Billy Mays? Ruth Madoff, yeah, I
know she’s neither dead nor particularly famous save for her criminal
husband’s efforts to make Ponzi look like an amateur.

As a rule, I generally don’t pay celebs much attention but it is
hard to ignore something when the news media wants to go on and
on about things when they have only a limited amount of information
to report. And as a rule they will and do gleefully beat a dead
horse until they are quite sure it will never get up again.

Farah Fawcett and Billy Mays got only the briefest of mention by
most of them. In truth I am rather surprised Billy Mays really
warranted as much mention as he did. I’m sorry but the man was
little more than a used car salesman that found out he could use
his same basic sales pitch on just about anything. Farah
Fawcett was, well, to sound sexist, a 70’s pinup model that managed
expand her career beyond being just a poster on teenage boy’s walls.

Now I move onto the proverbial dead horse they’ve been beating.

Micheal Jackson, the so called King of Pop. In the 80’s he was
actually cool but at some point he went from cool to eccentric
and from there into the realms of just plain weird. When I was
growing up, I was taught two very key things; “If you can’t say
something nice, say nothing.” and Not to speak ill of the dead.
Over the last few days the media has pretty much thrown those two
general guidelines out the window by putting every detail under a
microscope and telling us about things that have absolutely no
bearing on any of our daily lives. Have we become so shallow that
the media thinks this is the kind of critical “news” we
need to know about?

North Korea threatening nuclear war, Swine Flu, General unrest
worldwide don’t rate our attention anymore?!? So they need to
manufacture news and turn into a cheap paperback drama???

Mmmmkay…

Now I’ll ease along to Mrs. Madoff’s “plight”. Her husband got
himself room and board for the next 150 years, most of their
fortune impounded and soon to be redistributed to the people he
swindled and she has been banned from most of the ritzy joints in
New York.

And she has to live on a mere two million dollars now.

Take the time to reread that last sentence. Go on, two or three
times and let it sink in.

As I recall it, they caught her trying make off with a good chunk
of the loot herself, yet I heard one of the talking heads refer to
her as the “loneliest woman in New York”. We’re supposed to feel
sorry for someone that has more money than most people will make
in their entire lifetime and managed to avoid prison time?!?

Ok, I’m done…

For now.