Cleri, Cleri, Way Too Eerie

Reality TV, unless you live under a rock, you know as filled with preening, uninhibited, often intoxicated loudmouths who are willing to do anything to get their 15 minutes. (Minus some far-too-uncommon blessed souls.) Once in a while, one of these inherently hateable people somehow becomes a person that people love to hate, or at least is viewed as such by the producers, and is brought back for future seasons, or even guest appearances on other shows, or for a rare obnoxious few, a show all to themselves.

This is a large part of why so many obnoxious people show up. Aside from the stated, primary goal of the program, many of them hope that by standing out enough, by being the famewhoriest of the famewhores, they too will get their own show, or at least another appearance on the one they're on.

What none of them realize, however, is that they can't all have that. The punishment for failure in acquiring the Famewhore Holy Grail can have disastrous effects once the cameras go off. Relationships at home can be strained or ended. Employers may be humiliated to have these people on the payroll. And if you're on a talent-search show for a common job- a cook, a businessperson, an interior designer- and you make a disastrous blunder, or get eliminated early on, your career in that field can easily come to a screeching halt. Never mind getting the dream job the show was offering. What aspiring cook anywhere is going to take lessons from the person who, on national television, can't tell sugar from salt?

(Colleen, Season 5, Hell's Kitchen. I know you were wondering.)

If you truly suck at what you do, or if you truly suck as a person, reality TV has a billion ways to make sure you get yours.

Take 'The Moment Of Truth', technically a game show but with all the spectacle of reality TV. The premise is simple enough. You take a lie detector test prior to the show, are asked a series of questions (some more personal than others), and are given many of the same questions on air. You are tasked with answering honestly. The more questions you answer honestly on-air, the more money you win, up to a top prize of $500,000. (In the American version, at least, and yes, there were international versions.) But if at any point you lie, you lose everything and the game is over. Refuse to answer, and the game is also over, although you (and your loved ones) are given one opportunity to swap out one question you feel is better left unanswered by pressing a button.

On its face, it doesn't sound so bad. But once you start asking the kind of questions you expect someone to answer for half a million dollars- or $200,000, as nobody ever made it to the top of the money ladder in the US version- things go south in a hurry, especially since friends, family and other people in the contestant's life were commonly brought in by FOX to spectate and sometimes ask a question themselves.

And this is prime-time television. They know how you answered before the cameras go on. You know full well they're going to make a beeline for the most humiliating and damaging answers in the whole test. Which is the other thing: the answers are out there once you give them, whether you win any money or not.

The most spectacular revealing of skeletons in someone's closet came by way of Lauren Cleri of Piermont, New York, who would later flat-out admit to the New York Post that she was solely going for the money.

Lauren left enough bridges burned in the process to span an ocean. Host Mark L. Wahlberg, who you'll note as the person who signed up to host this show in the first place, felt the need to make a preshow comment that the episode containing Lauren, had Wahlberg had his way, would not have aired at all, and that it was "the most uncomfortable I've ever been on television."

The episode is available on YouTube here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Here is the line of questions Lauren faced, with her answers in parentheses:

1: As an employee of a hair salon, have you ever told a customer you liked their hairstyle when in fact, you didn't? (no)
2: Have you ever flashed a stranger just for laughs? (yes)
3: Would you give food to a stray dog before you would give it to a homeless person? (yes)

This one got the first groans from the audience. If they only knew what was coming...

4: Have you ever derived pleasure when one of your siblings has gotten into trouble? (yes)
5: Have you ever been fired from a job for stealing money? (yes)

Please note, Lauren hasn't actually won any money yet. The first prize level, $10,000, comes only after answering the first six questions.

6: If you knew you wouldn't get caught, would you steal money from your place of employment? (no)

Now she's won money. The next level is five more questions for $25,000.

7: Since you've been married, have you ever pretended to be asleep in order to avoid having sex with your husband Frank? (yes)
8: Do you blame your husband for your lack of close friends? (yes)
9: Would you ever be a surrogate mother for your sister if she were unable to have children? (yes)
10: Do you think your parents are proud of you? (no)
11: Do you know things about your father that you keep secret from your mother? (yes)

$25,000 and some long talks with Frank are now Lauren's... for now. Next up, four questions for $100,000. And those long talks are about to get longer, as at this point Wahlberg appears for a second advisory warning, mentioning the following to be the part that made him not want to air the episode.

12: Do you secretly stay in touch with any boyfriends that your husband does not know about? (no)
13: Have you ever taken off your wedding ring to appear as if you were single? (yes)
14: Do you believe you might have been in love with a former boyfriend on your wedding day? (yes)

At this point, Wahlberg is half-facepalming and telling Lauren "I can't tell you to walk away" while in the process strongly suggesting it. When she elects to continue, he just shakes his head. Lauren's aforementioned ex arrives on stage to ask the $100,000 question.

15: If I wanted to get back together with you, would you leave your husband?

Wahlberg is almost begging Frank to hit the button and swap the question out, but by now Frank's reaction is 'no, no, now I kinda want to hear this'. So Lauren's sister hits the button instead.

Fate can be cruel, Lauren's sister.

15-A: Do you believe I am the man you should be married to?

Not only was that fight not avoided, it actually got worse. Lauren said yes with disturbingly little hesitation. Coming back true (and making the skipped question easily guessable), she made it to $100,000, which by this point seems not nearly enough money to cover the costs of even attempting to undo all the damage.

So of course Lauren continues on for $200,000, three more questions away.

16: Since you've been married, have you ever had sexual relations with someone other than your husband?

Wahlberg: "I wish the button was still there."
Frank: "You're telling me."

Lauren answered yes. The answer is true. Frank is now burying his face in his hands. Lauren's face has gone cold at this point. ...well, it was prior, but now it is flat-out emotionless. Forget the long talks. There's no longer anything to talk about. This marriage has died right there on-stage.

And then reality TV rears up to give Lauren a good hard smack:

17: Do you think you're a good person?

The entire human race and several species of lichen found only in Antarctica immediately scream the answer. Frank shakes his head no before a word comes out of Lauren's mouth.

Lauren answers yes.

The lie detector begs to differ.

Game over. Lauren walks away with absolutely nothing. This is the end of the episode, and Wahlberg makes one final note in front of an empty stage:

"I honestly believe that some truths are better left unsaid. Hopefully, Lauren and her family can make peace with what happened here tonight. I wish them all the very best."

In fact, the marriage may have been doomed from the moment she was cast. As the New York Post reported:

The show's executive producer, Howard Schultz, said Lauren Cleri told him later that "she doesn't want a relationship [with her ex or her husband].

"She wanted out of her marriage, and she wanted to . . . tell the truth," Schultz told The Post.

"Perhaps some of it was then, 'If I'm going to end my marriage, then if I can win a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars. I can start a new life with some cash in my pocket.' "

Asked if she went on the show to get out of her marriage, Lauren yesterday said "definitely" not.

In an update interview, Lauren noted that she and Frank split up. Or as she put it, "are no longer living under the same roof." An aspiring model, she also told the New York Post that no job offers came out of her appearance.

Considering the nature of modeling, and considering there has been no update on her since, she is in all likelihood still waiting. Her only stable job now is as a cautionary tale.

Bring Me My Hasenpfeffer

The Looney Tunes gang is enjoying a rebirth as of late on Cartoon Network, with not only a new program, 'The Looney Tunes Show', but also the airing of the old classic shorts.

The thing is, though, the old classic shorts are, well, old. Some of the references made in the old cartoons may be downright incomprehensible to modern eyes and ears. The "newer" of the classics aren't any newer than the 1960's.

So, for the benefit of those just growing up with Looney Tunes now, let's go over a couple of them.

*Alum
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Fed to Sylvester, causing his mouth to pucker up. Also fed to an opera singer, causing his head to shrink.

The Straight Dope explained alum back in 1999. Alum is used for these gags because it's an astringent- that is to say, it shrinks tissue. Because it's Looney Tunes, though, you don't see alum's alternative effect as an emetic. What's an emetic? Something that induces vomiting. Also, despite being an ingredient in cooking and pickling, you don't want it on the final product, not only because of the vomiting, but because an ounce of the stuff constitutes a lethal dose.

Sylvester and the opera singer got way more than an ounce.

*Figaro
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Sung by the opera singer while his head shrinks. Also in a couple other cartoons that are basically music videos for classical numbers you mostly don't hear outside of those cartoons.

Obviously, it's an opera reference. Figaro is the name of the main character in a series of three plays by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Guilty Mother. The Barber of Seville would go on to be covered by Giovanni Paisiello and Gioachino Rossini; The Marriage of Figaro would be covered by Mozart. Figaro was the namesake barber.

*Come with me to the casbah
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Said by Pepe le Pew while he's being horny again.

Pepe uses it in reference to a 1938 film called Algiers, the first American film featuring Hedy Lamarr. Pepe himself took his name from the film's main character, Pepe Le Moko. It took four Oscar nominations, though it didn't win any of them. The 'casbah' is the citadel of Algiers and the surrounding area. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though degrading because of neglect and due to being a popular terrorist hideout. If someone offers today to come with them to the Casbah, run. Just run. Run far, far away in the opposite direction.

The film's in the public domain, so have a ball.

*Gas House Gorillas
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: The baseball team Bugs beats all by himself in the 1946 short 'Baseball Bugs'.

This is a play on the 'Gas House Gang', a nickname given to the 1934 champion St. Louis Cardinals. Leo Durocher coined the term, saying of the American League "They think we're just a bunch of gas housers." This was in reference to, well, gas houses, factories that produced coal gas, the forerunner to natural gas. They were dirty and smelled bad, much like the Cardinals' uniforms, which didn't go in the wash very often.

*A-card
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: When Bugs Bunny and a gremlin are in a plane that is about to crash and suddenly stops because it ran out of gas.

This was 'Falling Hare', made in 1943, during World War 2. At that point in time, fuel rationing was in effect. Cards- or stickers, really- were issued to American vehicles permitting them to buy certain amounts of gas. An A sticker was the most common and lowest-grade. It entitled the driver to 3-4 gallons of gas a week and that was it. A B sticker was for people whose driving was deemed essential to the war effort; they could get eight gallons a week. Further up the ladder, C stickers went to more critical people such as doctors and mailmen, T stickers were for truckers, and finally, there was the X sticker, meaning you were so important- police, fire, civil defense, a member of Congress- that it was essential that you get unlimited supplies.

The problem wasn't that we were short on gas. We were short on rubber. The Japanese had seized land in Southeast Asia that had served as our main rubber supply. More driving means more wear on tires means more strain on the rubber supply. Since driving faster also wore tires down, a blanket speed limit of 35 miles per hour was put into play for the duration. Also, you were not allowed to own more than five tires; any excess was confiscated for the war effort.

*Was this trip really necessary?
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Right after someone crashes into a wall.

The fuel rationing again. You were not supposed to be using the fuel you did get to take leisure drives.

*Wendell Willkie
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Whem Bugs wonders if that's a gremlin, the gremlin screams in his ear 'IT AIN'T VENDELL VILLKIE!'

Wendell Willkie was the Republican candidate for President in 1940- at the time of the cartoon, the most recent election. He was the guy standing in the way of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's unprecedented third term, and was steamrolled 449 electoral votes to 82. Were a similar joke made today, the gremlin would just plug in John McCain's name instead. Or, actually, as Willkie had never held political office before or since, and McCain has been a long-timer in the Senate, he might reference Sarah Palin, or maybe Donald Trump.

Willkie never really had a chance. His campaign was built on Roosevelt breaking the two-term tradition (and warning that Roosevelt would lead the country into war), but given the alternative of the party many still blamed for the Great Depression, the effects of which had not yet fully been shaken, voters were more than willing to try something different. According to his 1971 biography, Wendell Willkie: Fighter for Freedom, Willkie was met with people who threw rotten fruit at him. At one point in Pontiac, Michigan, someone connected with an egg, and the media gleefully splashed across the front page the image of an egg-stained Willkie, or at least his wife. At Grand Rapids, someone chucked a rock through his train car. Both images are shown in an issue of LIFE dated October 14, 1940, respectively on pages 25 and 24. (With bonus picture on page 23 of what someone who's just been skulled by a 5-pound metal wastebasket might look like.)

As for it being pronounced "Vendell Villkie" by the gremlin, that calls back to an incident at the Republican convention where the North Dakota delegate spoke with a Scandinavian accent. His accented pronunciation of Willkie's name went viral (or the 1940 equivalent of viral). As told in Boxing the Kangaroo: A Reporter's Memoir by Robert J. Donovan, the delegate said "North Dakota casts four votes for Senator Taft and four votes for Vendell Villkie." The speaker asked "For who?" The delegate repeated "For Vendell Villkie." The speaker told him to spell it. The joke evidently had enough legs to still be around three years later.

At the 71-year mark, though, it gets a bit stale.

Queen Sperm The First

I'm not inclined to watch the royal wedding, or care all that much about it really. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy for William and Kate, they seem like they'll make a good couple, but I classify it about the same in my head as I would a wedding of some random A-list celebrity, because given the status of the royal family these days, that's about the place they belong. We give reverence to the Queen, but when we get down to business, we're all looking at the Prime Minister. Let's not kid ourselves. Earlier in England's history, of course. The royal family ran the show for hundreds of years. But none of those years are this one.

Similar feelings pervade this story, concerning a proposal to change the law of succession, in which men take precedence over women; currently a daughter would take over only if there were no sons. On the one hand, absolutely a good move. Yay gender equality and all that. On the other, it might have been an even better move had it been made before the royal family became little more than the English media's personal zoo exhibit.

And besides, the Daily Mail here has now got us- or at least me- talking about the royal status of someone who hasn't even been concieved yet. We're basically sitting here furrowing our brows going "but what if it's a girl?" when right now it's not an anything yet. There's a good chance William hasn't even developed the specific piece of sperm that will become the baby yet.

So let's not get too ahead of ourselves.

(BONUS BACKSTAGE LOOK: When I write something, the first thing I usually do, unless the intended post is really short, is put it on Notepad before I commit it to the 'create post' window. Partially, this is to give myself the time I need to get my thoughts in order. You can save a Notepad file. But mostly it's to give myself a backup file. That, I would very much have liked to have, as I went to spell-check, misclicked, and went away from the page. I got lucky this time; the blog auto-saved somewhere along the line here.

Just to show you what kind of fly-by-night operation we run around here. Sometimes I hit a groove and turn out something I really like in the span of an hour or two, sometimes I'm Craig Ferguson slapping the camera to get it to work.)

Re, A Very High-Impact Drop Of Golden Sun

The movie Tangled (now on DVD in all your favorite stores!) tells the story- or at least Disney's interpretation of the story- of Rapunzel. You know the one even without the film. Girl in a high tower with hair so long you can climb it and amazingly not make Rapunzel scream in agony because there's a full-grown adult climbing up her hair.

As the movie tells it (which, being Disney, is a whole lot different from the actual story), a drop of golden sun grew a magic flower which had healing powers. After various shenanigans involving a witch, it wound up in the tea of a local pregnant queen, who gave birth to Rapunzel, whose hair carries the same healing powers.

All this from a drop of golden sun.

What would happen, you may be wondering, if--- no, not if your hair was like that too. What would happen if a drop of golden sun actually landed on Earth?

A drop would be about the size of a pinhead. If it landed near you, suffice to say that you would be thoroughly screwed. In fact, if it landed within 90 miles of you, you'd be dead from the radiant heat.

Which is why the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena decided they'd only bring back some particles. They launched a capsule, Genesis, sent up in August 2001 to gather particles ejected from the sun due to solar wind, in order to find out what those particles were made of and otherwise poked and prodded for all manner of purposes. In September 2004, Genesis was set to return. They hoped to grab Genesis out of midair by helicopter on its way down, in hopes of preserving the particles.

It sounds very unlikely to be able to pull that off, but we'll never know for sure. All of Genesis' parachutes failed, and the capsule slammed into Utah's Dugway Proving Ground at 193 miles per hour on September 8, and it only came in that slow due to air resistance. Nobody had discussed that possibility much, or at least, not in public. The capsule broke open on impact, damaging most of the particles were contaminated. The good news is, some did come away undamaged, and in addition, some of the contamination was actually removable. Despite the crash, there were enough ultimately usable sun particles to do all the research they wanted to do.

A month later in the postmortem, it was found that the accelerometer was installed backwards, causing it to fail. This, interestingly enough, backwards accelerometers were the exact type of design flaw that led to the creation of Murphy's Law. A rocket-sled test was conducted in 1948, designed to impose 50-G forces on a test subject and then subject him to rapid deceleration. This caused significant physical trauma on the subject. Dr. John Stapp. The tester, Edward Murphy Jr., then had to announce the test was voided because all the accelerometers had been put in backward, causing them all to fail to produce any measurements.

Genesis did get a measurement. However, 'how big a crater can we make in the Utah desert' wasn't the measurement they intended.

Sanmao

Many if not most countries have their share of long-running pop culture icons. They might wax and wane in popularity, but they always seem to stick around, often reaching a point where they remain alive, in one form or another, partially because of tradition. Canada has Hockey Night in Canada. The United Kingdom has Doctor Who. The United States has Bugs Bunny, Superman, Batman, Saturday Night Live, a number of others. Europe in general has Eurovision. For much of the Latin world, it's Sabado Gigante. Japan has, among others, Ultraman, Gundam and Lupin III.

China has Sanmao.

Sanmao ("three hairs", as that's all he's got) is an unusual kind of pop culture icon. He spent his formative years as a homeless orphan, barely able to feed himself. But through the power of reader sympathy, Sanmao has lasted as long as anyone, being a part of the Chinese pop culture universe since 1935.

Shanghai-based Zhang Leping in part was drawing what he knew; he grew up poor as well. He got into drawing after being encouraged to go to art school, found he liked making comics, and came up with Sanmao. It wasn't total sympathy that got Sanmao over- humor helped- but what really did it was when Japan invaded China in 1937 in the Second Sino-Japanese War, which would ultimately be rolled into World War 2. (If you need your memory refreshed, the Rape of Nanking also happened in 1937. It wasn't the start of the conflict, but it wasn't long after it.) Zhang was recruited by the government to draw up propaganda posters for the war effort, and he made Sanmao part of some of them.

At the close of the war in 1945, Zhang went back to working on Sanmao, starting by telling the story of Sanmao's war experience in a series called 'Sanmao Joins The Army'. The humor began to fade, though there was still a place for it in the same way there was a place for army humor in Bugs Bunny wartime cartoons. By the end of it, he wasn't just a pop-culture hit, he was a Chinese hero. But at the end of the series, when Sanmao leaves the army, he is faced with a choice: go back to the country where he came from, or move to Shanghai. In both directions, there were graves everywhere.

He chose Shanghai. At this point, things turned dark. According to the linked article from The World of Chinese...

“On one snowy night, Zhang Leping was walking home from the office,” Hong Peiqi, Zhang’s publisher, remembered. “He passed by an alleyway and saw three street children huddled together. For shirts, they wore used grain sacks. For pants they had old, threadbare trousers. They warmed themselves around a fire. The next morning, when Zhang passed the same alley, he found two of these orphans had died overnight.”

This kind of thing was not uncommon. “Was there really such a child as Sanmao?” Zhang reflected later. “Homeless children were in every street and alley you walked along in Shanghai.”

Zhang incorporated it into Sanmao's next series, 'The Wanderings of Sanmao'. Sanmao would survive, of course, but not without immense difficulty and hardship, in a postwar city filled with them. Now Sanmao wasn't just a Chinese hero. Now he was a Chinese hero that needed love and support.

He had plenty of places from which to receive it. Sanmao has been an easy comic to follow, because it doesn't use words if at all possible. The aim with Zhang was always ease of reading by anyone, even an illiterate, which has been an important factor if it was actually to be seen by China's impoverished. As Zhang's son, Zhang Rongrong, explained to China Daily in 2005, upon Sanmao's 70th anniversary, "Sanmao was created for all the people, including the poor and the illiterate... Every time when my father finished a cartoon, he always showed it to us first to see whether we could understand - if we couldn't, he would restart."

Zhang took heat from the Central Daily, a paper run by the ruling Nationalist government, but that was rather the point. Zhang was going after them for corruption and for creating too much of a rich-poor gap in Chinese society. Sanmao wasn't really for them anyway, and besides, Zhang's hometown was attacked by the Nationalists in 1927. Sanmao was for the masses. Sanmao was, it would happen, for the Communists. And when the Communists took power, Sanmao took part in the celebration.

Given his 1935 start, you may have asked, how did Sanmao survive, oh, say, the Cultural Revolution where so much of Chinese culture did not? That's why. Sanmao may have been an impoverished orphan, but he knew the right people to get in with. Sanmao would never be quite such a picture of desperation again, and for his fans, it came as a joyous relief. He'd suffered enough. Today, Sanmao is healthy, well-educated, and most importantly, no longer homeless. But to his fans, he will always be the poor, starving orphan boy.

Zhang died in 1991, but as in so many comics in America, the mantle was passed on, specifically to Zhang Rongrong, who has put his energies into placing Sanmao into other forms of media.

Here's a sample of Sanmao comics. You'll note little numbers in the bottom-right corner of each panel; that's the order they're meant to be read in. Left to right, top to bottom, just like you'd expect.

Random News Generator- Indonesia

The Oscars are coming up, and you know what that means: the annual speculation on who will win the Montage of Dead People. (Come on. You know you do it.) Also there will apparently be some awards handed out for whatever people thought was halfway decent this year.

One thing you might hear about is people who use the nomination list for Best Picture as a kind of homework assignment: they feel obligated to watch everything nominated that they have not yet watched. In Indonesia, they would love to have this problem. Right now, however, they are fighting for the ability to be able to watch any of them, as the MPAA is ordering Hollywood films removed from Indonesian cinemas.

There are two reasons for the MPAA taking this step. First, the taxes on importing the film to Indonesia has more than doubled, from 20 cents per meter of film to 43 cents, plus an import duty tax and a cut of the profits. This is too expensive for Hollywood. Second, it's not like they see much of the profits anyway, as piracy is rampant. European and Asian distributors have thought along those lines as well.

So okay, maybe Indonesia is watching the movies. Just not the way they're supposed to.

'Why not just watch the locally-produced films', you might ask. Because, by their own admission, the locally-produced films suck, nobody actually watches them, and there aren't enough of them to meet demand anyway, that's why. In response to immense pressure from all corners, distributors, theaters and filmgoers alike, the tax has come under review; it will take about two weeks to render a final verdict.

Indonesia's Finance Ministry, for their part, has called it a misunderstanding, claiming that the taxes were simply being moved from the back end to the front end of the import process. It doesn't appear to be convincing anyone.

The Disney Aging Process

Last July, we discussed here the struggles Miley Cyrus was having in her transition from a child into an adult. It was theorized that a major contributing factor to her difficulties was the fact that her formative years were stunted via Disney imposing a heavily-regulated teenhood in order to maximize her marketability.

She is not the first teenager to be put through the Disney teen idol machine and not come out quite right on the other side. Nor is she the last.

Just ask Demi Lovato, one of the next teen idols in line. Her vehicles are the series Sonny With A Chance, and the movie series Camp Rock, in which she co-starred with the Jonas Brothers. In October, during a world tour with the Jonas Brothers, Lovato cracked. Lovato had been bullied so badly in school that she pulled out and took up home schooling. Self-image problems had led to her cutting herself, an incident that her camp passed off as candy jewelry leaving an indent. Further teasing during the tour, in which she was called 'Demi Drama', plus the fact that she had recently broken up with Joe Jonas but still had to share a concert tour with him, plus a promotional blitz for Camp Rock 2, eventually all proved too much, culminating in an airport in Peru where Lovato reportedly got into an "altercation" with a backup dancer and made threats to Joe's new girlfriend.

Unlike other Disney teen idols, though, Lovato did not sweep the incident under the rug so as to continue the tour and the show. Instead, she pulled out of the tour, cleared her schedule completely, and on November 1, she checked into a treatment center in Chicago, spending three months pulling herself back together, remaining at the center even while she won two People's Choice Awards in absentia. Yesterday, Lovato completed her stay in the treatment center and will now begin an outpatient program back at home in Los Angeles; she reportedly appeared fairly chipper upon her return. There is no timetable for her return to Sonny With A Chance as of yet; it's not yet certain that there will even be a return.

I'm proud of her for sticking to the program, and more importantly, I'm proud of her having the guts to admit she needed help. That's an extremely hard thing to admit for a lot of people. But at the same time, I can't comfortably stomach the prospect of her returning to Sonny With A Chance. She'd be going back into the Disney machine that put her into the treatment center in the first place. I don't want them to do that to her again. It's a bit scary that, in their story about her release, the Examiner asked "How happy are you that Demi is back in a more accessible position yet again?", a question that carries some troubling connotations.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm not a kid anymore myself. When you're the age that Disney is targeting with these shows- when you're the age to star in these shows- you don't know any better. You're really not supposed to. You're just asked to sit and enjoy the childhood escapist 'what do you want to be when you grow up' fantasy of being a rock star or a wizard or a psychic or the object of affection for a cute guy or girl. You're asked to cheer on these little kids who are big stars, made possible through Disney. But when you grow out of it, when you enter college or the workforce, those fantasies fade. You can't be a teenage rock star. You're not a teenager. What do you want to be when you grow up? You're grown up now and you're some schlub flipping burgers at McDonald's.

I remember when I had that epiphany. For me, it was Chuck E. Cheese's. Back in my childhood, we'd go there for my birthday, unless I got sick, which was fairly often because my luck with such matters was awful back then. We'd go a couple other times as well, and when we did, it was the most fun in the world- the ball pit, the pizza, the arcade games, and there was Chuck E. Cheese himself singing on stage.

Then after a hiatus, we went one last time in my early-mid teens, I want to say around age 15. This last time, though, things seemed... different. The ball pit seemed too small. That's odd, it seemed so much bigger last time. The games seemed fairly expensive. That's strange, I never noticed the price before. Chuck E. Cheese wasn't singing anything good, and also, he was some stupid animatronic robot. And this pizza is terrible. How do people eat this stuff?! The prizes you could buy with the tickets you won at the games weren't even any good, even though they were largely the same kind of prizes as last time.

I may have only been in my teens, but I spent the next few days feeling very, very old.

In a similar way, with age came altered feelings about teen idols. Once, they were the stars of shows I knew and... well, not really loved; I was more about Nickelodeon back then- Salute Your Shorts, Clarissa Explains It All, Hey Dude, Secret World of Alex Mack. The basic concept is the same, though. I knew them almost by heart at the time. But as time progressed, the older names faded (quick, who played Alex Mack? What's she done since?), and I became more aware of the kind of all-consuming vortex that a child had to step into in order to achieve that kind of ultimately temporary stardom, I went from cheering them on as a peer, to finding them annoying as a comparative elder, to ultimately feeling sorry for them, hoping less that their respective vehicles do well and more that the stars can merely hang on and come out of the other end of the machine as well-adjusted adults.

They're kids. They never had any idea what being a teen idol actually entailed. They didn't know any better.

They were never really supposed to.

The Other Other Hollywood

If you're reasonably up on your trivia, you might know that there's a Hollywood in Florida. If you know that much, you have almost certainly, at some point, used it as part of some lame joke in which Hollywood, Florida is mistaken for Hollywood, California.

You've probably also mistaken it for some trailer-park backwater, probably somewhere in the panhandle. In fact, it is the twelfth-largest city in the state, housing over 140,000 people, and is quite firmly part of the same South Florida metropolitan area that includes Miami. A first-time visitor to Miami could get sufficiently lost to stumble into Hollywood without even realizing it.

Were you to get even more lost, and travel north out of the metro completely, fairly soon you might find yourself in Hobe Sound. At only 11,000 people, and with a much less-developed oceanside, Hobe Sound might come a lot closer to your initial vision of Hollywood, Florida, though it's still not a trailer-park town.

What you would never guess is that Hobe Sound put a lot more effort into becoming the next Hollywood, California than Hollywood, Florida ever did.

Thomas Edison, as you had better be well-aware, was a very proficient inventor. One of those inventions was the motion picture. He was the first to get it to work, patenting the 'kinetoscope' in 1888, even though the groundwork had been laid as early as Leland Stanford. However, he was not the only one with a patent relating to motion pictures, and since this was a new, major thing, not a small bit of chaos resulted. Imagine if Microsoft had a patent on video game consoles, Nintendo had a patent on video games themselves, and Sony had a patent on the CD's the games were printed on. It's not a perfect analogy, but it'll hold up long enough for us to proceed. The rivalries were largely sorted out in 1908, when many of the competing companies banded together to form the Thomas Edison Motion Picture Patents Company with an eye towards creating a monopoly, and made everyone in the budding film industry pay them licensing fees in order to remain in business.

Some paid, and play no further part in this story. Some didn't. Those that didn't, the "independents," chose to run far, far away from the prying eyes of Edison, or any other authority that might make them pay up.

But where to go? It had to be far from Menlo Park, obviously. Another factor that went into the decision was local climate. Since they are picking out a preferred location, it might as well be friendly to filmmaking. Someplace warm. Someplace with nice weather. Someplace with a variety of settings they could use.

Someplace like Hollywood, California. Here, the independents could work with plenty of lead time on the authorities and develop their craft-- producing, distributing and exhibiting. When Edison threatened the supply of film used by an exhibitor, the exhibitor would just start making their own films and proceed merrily along. Eventually, the courts struck down the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1915 as part of the trust-busting movement, but by then they were more or less rendered moot anyway.

What does any of this have to do with Hobe Sound? In the 1920's, Florida, then a very rural state, experienced a land boom. As part of this land boom, Hobe Sound, like the rest of the state, got some fairly grand ideas in their head. They wanted to become the next Hollywood. Led by the Olympia Improvement Corporation, streets were renamed after the Greek pantheon. The town was renamed "Picture City." Fancy lightposts were built. Building construction was started all over town.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers would never get a chance to arrive. While construction was still underway, the land boom collapsed in 1926. Two years later, the Okeechobee hurricane, currently the 9th-deadliest Atlantic hurricane of all time, slammed into Florida. There was no way they were going to be the next Hollywood now. Picture City was changed back to Hobe Sound.

Not that fate was done with them yet. A year after that, as if to rub salt in the wound, the Great Depression hit.

No studio ever got built. The street names remained, the lightposts remained, but that was about it. To this day, the town has remained virtually untouched by the filmmakers they were trying to attract, with the only released feature film ever shot there being the 1972 movie Charcoal Black. Hobe Sound went back to being the sleepy oceanside town it was before and remains today.

Meanwhile, Hollywood, Florida, primarily by virtue of being a Miami suburb, has attracted a number of filmmakers, among them Martin Scorsese, who used the town as part of the backdrop for his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange. So was The Hours, a 2002 Best Picture nominee. Among the other productions that have used Hollywood, Florida: Midnight Cowboy, 2 Fast 2 Furious, Striptease, and episodes of Burn Notice and Dexter.

Some cities have all the luck.

Disposable Celebrities

Earlier tonight on the radio, I heard news that there was a rumor of a second Paris Hilton sex tape. This rumor, upon returning home, I found to have been squashed and a lawsuit threatened.

Let us review.

Someone heard that there MIGHT be a sex tape floating around with Paris Hilton- and not the first sex tape, either- and this is news to someone. Someone cares enough that there might be a second Paris Hilton sex tape that someone else took the time to report a rumor about it as news. Someone thought enough of it to present updates on it. And here I am wasting my time bringing it up at all.

Why am I bringing it up? Because this has been eating at me a bit. Paris is a prime example of a disposable celebrity.

Now, celebrities are all well and good. It's only natural that some people will be more recognized than others for whatever reason. Here's the thing, though. My home of Watertown is and has been very blue-collar. A blue-collar background instills a bit of a work ethic in you, and you tend to expect others to follow suit. If someone wishes to be a celebrity, well and good. But I want to see them do some work to gain or maintain that celebrity status.

Can you act (e.g. Eva Longoria)? Great. Can you sing (e.g. Lady Gaga)? Great. Can you dance (e.g Carrie Ann Inaba)? Great, though we don't have very many pure dancers in the celebrity universe right now. Can you do more than one of the previous (e.g. the cast of Glee)? Great. Are you an athlete, or are you otherwise involved in the athletic world (e.g. Bruce Jenner, decathlon gold medalist in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, who I really don't wish to drag into this mess)? Great. Do you create or try to affect the creation of policy (e.g. Sarah Palin)? Great.

Do you go about living your life as normal while cameras follow you around (e.g the cast of Jersey Shore)? We've got problems now. Does your fame revolve around mating: attracting a mate (Heidi Montag), selecting a mate (anyone from The Bachelor/ette), deselecting a mate (ditto), mating with your mate (Kim Kardashian), reproducing with your mate (the Duggars)? We've got problems. Have you been on a competitive reality show (e.g. Survivor)? Unless you are still actively on that show, or have done additional things to work for your fame (e.g. Kelly Clarkson), we've got problems. Is your primary identifier "socialite" (the rest of the Kardashians)? We've got problems. Are you only famous because another family member is famous (e.g. Bristol Palin)? We've got problems.

And this is really rather damaging: again, there will always be celebrities; there will always be some amount of time devoted by people to celebrities. That's one thing. But every second spent following a disposable celebrity is time taken away from someone that might be more deserving of that fame; someone who has actually done something to earn it. Time spent on someone who was on The Bachelor/ette three seasons ago and hasn't done anything since is time that could go to any number of people of actual talent or consequence that could use the boost- actors, singers, authors, those in positions of power who might need a little extra scrutiny. Or maybe other deserving people we don't normally think of as famous who might, given a couple extra free cameras roaming around, get a little moment in the sun. Like this guy.

Who exactly qualifies as 'disposable'? Which celebrities do we need to excise from our national consciousness? You've probably gotten to this part of the article already having come up with at least ten different names, all of which are people you deem annoying. Justin Bieber's on your list, right?

Bad news on that. Bieber sings. He works for his fame. Nobody said you personally had to like his music. Enough people do to where he is famous. The celebrities that need disposing of can be figured like so:

Imagine that the entire celebrity-gossip industry vanished overnight. US Weekly, InStyle, People, TMZ, Lucky, Star, the tabloids all gone. Perez Hilton is taken back to Joan Rivers' home planet. Every camera owned by a member of the paparazzi bursts into flames and they all have to go get real jobs. All of that is gone tomorrow. As a result, all the coverage that any celebrity receives in this fashion vanishes along with it.

Who's still famous outside of that which they directly control?

Anyone currently famous that suddenly sees the attention paid to them drop to virtually zero is a disposable celebrity. They are only celebrities because the entertainment industry says they are. Celebrities of merit have other outlets through which they can receive their coverage. Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber can make songs. The English royal family may be a figurehead, but the head of household still gets to be on a bunch of countries' money.

Paris Hilton, without the entertainment industry, drops off the face of the Earth.

Nothing tomorrow. Enjoy your Christmas.

EDIT: 'This Guy', Michael Sharpe of Spruce Grove, Alberta, originally didn't have a link. My bad. Boy, that's... a bit embarrassing, particularly given the subject matter. Sorry about that, Michael.

Letters To God

Back in April, a movie came out called Letters To God. In the movie, a boy with cancer writes, well, letters to God. People crack open the letters and heartwarminess and sappiness ensues. The Christian community liked it; everybody else wanted that hour-fifty of their lives back. The movie failed to recoup its $3 million budget.

In the movie, the letters are opened by a substitute postal worker in town. In real life, letters to God often have a different fate.

God, as one would tell you, has no Earthly address. That's a bit of a problem for post offices, who can only deliver to Earthly addresses. Letters to God, therefore, end up at the dead-letter office.

In Jerusalem.

Post offices worldwide, while they can't deliver to God, figure that Jerusalem is the place one is most likely to find him, at least according to the Jerusalem postmaster back in 1990. The fact that many letters to God explicitly carry an address including Jerusalem in it helps that belief along. So unless you've addressed it to some other city (or haven't included an address at all), your letter to God will go to Jerusalem. Some go a little nuts with the addressing, but 'To God, Jerusalem' is enough to obligate the letter to be sent as per international law.

Once there, letters are generally bound for cracks in the Western Wall. The vast majority of the letters are from Christians- not all, they do get some Jewish letters and even a Muslim letter in 2008- however, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem's holiest Christian site, does not receive them. Only letters with the Church's address go to that church. The Western Wall has an address as well, but really about half of one. Just 'Western Wall Plaza'. It's enough of a non-address to get the God letters.

Letters to Jesus or Moses or the Holy Ghost don't get delivered. The Chief Rabbi of the Western Wall only permits the letters for God.

Of course, they do get opened and read, and all manner of people write. Some letters are heartwarming, some heartrending, some are political, and then there are those who just want lottery numbers or want to get- or be reincarnated as- hot dates.

How would that movie have looked with those kind of letters?

RIP, Leslie Nielsen

Leslie Nielsen died last night at age 84.

In tribute, have some Naked Gun.

Tinkerbell Is A Jerk

Yes, I wrote that. Today, you and your children- your children, surely- view Tinkerbell, and her conveniently ethnically-diverse friends, as cute, nice, friendly, slightly ditzy wads o'fun and wonder.

Cute I'll give you. But do not be fooled by the friendly persona. This is actually Tinkerbell's community service. In actuality, left to her own devices without her girlfriends present, Tinkerbell is a jerk.

You don't believe me? Take a look at the first minute and a half of this...



...and then pick up this clip at 50 seconds and go for the next minute or so.



You might think this a bit on the shocking side to watch. Tinkerbell wouldn't do that!

Oh, yes, she would. In fact, that's about par for the course, maybe a tad on the mild side for her kind. You have to remember, this is a fairy on the payroll of Disney. When you hear about something being 'Disney-fied' or 'Disneyed up' or something to that effect, you take it to mean that whatever it is has been toned down, glossed over, and made more family-friendly.

Fairies- and other mythical magical beings- are more accurately depicted as beings that view humans largely as playthings. As Terry Pratchett once wrote...

Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad.

By the way, it should be noted at this point that Peter Pan doesn't come off very well in those clips either.

You know the 2008 Angelina Jolie movie 'Changeling'? The one where she loses her son, then gets something back that isn't actually her son and then the trailer ends with her yelling "I want MY son back!" That's what a changeling is. In folklore, it was used to explain any child that failed to grow up properly due to what we'd recognize today as sickness or mental disability or even bad temper. It was believed that the real child had been taken away by the Fair Folk and replaced with one of their own.

Naturally, if this happened to you, you'd want your child back. If the parent didn't opt to merely do something spectacularly strange, such as carry water in eggshells, this is where things tended to get ugly for the changeling, which as we today know, was still actually their real child. One folk remedy instructed a parent to "Take it out to the meadow where you left your previous child and beat it hard with a switch." Other solutions took similar liberties with the changeling's welfare.

Of course, we no longer engage in this practice, right? Someone might want to tell Egypt, or at least Egypt circa 1982, as a folktale book from that year by Hasan M. El-Shamy reports localized beliefs involving jinn (genies) as "widespread".

Oh, yes, jinn. Consider them Middle Eastern Fair Folk.

A small sampling of their other exploits:

*In A Midsummer Nights Dream, you have fairies. Fairies that took the nectar from a flower which, when applied to someone's eyes, would cause them to fall in love with the next person they saw, and the fairy king, Oberon, first used it on his wife to get her to be attracted to someone else in a love triangle on the other side of the plot. 'First'. There were additional uses.
*Sleeping Beauty begins with a king and queen that have a daughter. They round up all the fairies they can find, and the custom is that each one gives the child a gift. The first six give the daughter beauty, grace, wit, and the ability to sing, dance and play instruments. The seventh, who you know as Maleficent, gives the gift of pricking oneself on a spindle and dying at age 16. The eighth softens it to merely sleeping for 100 years.
*Another fairy tale, Katie Crackernuts, sees a prince rendered sick unto death because fairies make him get up at midnight, travel to a hall, and dance to exhaustion.
*In more recent writing, Charles de Lint's 2004 book The Blue Girl features a character who is a ghost. The fairies here befriended him, told him they could make him fly (which they could; the Fair Folk can't lie), but when he tried to by leaping off the school roof, just for a laugh, they went ahead and let him fall. Then they wondered why his ghost was ticked off at them.

In conclusion: don't cross Tinkerbell. You don't know when she might slip back into old habits.

American Idol, Sort Of

American Idol is running ads for the upcoming season regarding the fact that they represent, well, a broad cross-section of America. Fair enough, they certainly go to a broad enough cross-section of audition cities.

This would have passed by unnoticed and uncommented on, except for one little mistake: they started to show some of the actual winners and their hometowns. And the states seemed to... cluster. Texas. Alabama. Arkansas. Missouri. Oklahoma.

My brain sometimes latches onto the strangest, most inconsequential things. This turns out to be one of them. And with me, sometimes the only way to get it out and make room for something else, something more important, is to just go with it. I warn you in the profile over there to your right. I never said what kind of knowledge you'd be getting around here. Just knowledge of some sort. Sometimes you get election coverage, sometimes you get economic disaster in Albania, sometimes you get me turning my full investigative fury on an innocent American Idol commercial that did nothing wrong to anyone. Back in the glory of statistical masturbation.

This is probably how those studies end up happening on things like the pattern in which a skunk sprays when it gets run over by a Mack truck. People like me happen.

The show can let anyone it chooses through the audition process, any combination of people at all, but once they turn control over to the viewers, they lose almost all control over what cross-section of America survives to the end. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to pull out a map of the United States. We will then mark off, on that map, the locations of the hometowns (at the time) of every contestant in American Idol history that has placed in the top five.

First, we'll list them off.

SEASON 1
1st: Kelly Clarkson, Burleson, TX
2nd: Justin Guarini, Doylestown, PA
3rd: Nikki McKibbin, Grand Prairie, TX
4th: Tamyra Gray, Atlanta, GA
5th: R.J. Helton, Cumming, GA

SEASON 2
1st: Ruben Studdard, Birmingham, AL
2nd: Clay Aiken, Raleigh, NC
3rd: Kimberley Locke, Nashville, TN
4th: Josh Gracin, Westland, MI
5th: Treynce, Memphis, TN

SEASON 3
1st: Fantasia Barrino, High Point, NC
2nd: Diana DeGarmo, Snellville, GA
3rd: Jasmine Trias, Mililani Town, HI
4th: LaToya London, San Francisco, CA
5th: George Huff, New Orleans, LA

SEASON 4
1st: Carrie Underwood, Checotah, OK
2nd: Bo Bice, Huntsville, AL
3rd: Vonzell Solomon, Fort Myers, FL
4th: Anthony Fedorov, Trevose, PA
5th: Scott Savol, Cleveland, OH

SEASON 5
1st: Taylor Hicks, Birmingham, AL
2nd: Katharine McPhee, Los Angeles, CA
3rd: Elliott Yamin, Richmond, VA
4th: Chris Daughtry, McLeansville, NC
5th: Paris Bennett, Fayetteville, GA

SEASON 6
1st: Jordin Sparks, Glendale, AZ
2nd: Blake Lewis, Bothell, WA
3rd: Melinda Doolittle, Brentwood, TN
4th: LaKisha Jones, Flint, MI
5th: Chris Richardson, Chesapeake, VA

SEASON 7
1st: David Cook, Blue Springs, MO
2nd: David Archuleta, Murray, UT
3rd: Syesha Mercado, Sarasota, FL
4th: Jason Castro, Rockwall, TX
5th: Brooke White, Van Nuys, CA

SEASON 8
1st: Kris Allen, Conway, AR
2nd: Adam Lambert, San Diego, CA
3rd: Danny Gokey, Milwaukee, WI
4th: Alison Iraheta, Los Angeles, CA
5th: Matt Giraud, Kalamazoo, MI

SEASON 9
1st: Lee DeWyze, Mount Prospect, IL
2nd: Crystal Bowersox, Elliston, OH
3rd: Casey James, Fort Worth, TX
4th: Michael Lynche, St. Petersburg, FL
5th: Aaron Kelly, Sonestown, PA

Man. If this isn't a testament to a talent show's credibility resting on the actual quality of the talent it finds. Riding high earlier on with Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood and Chris Daughtry and Bo Bice and Tamyra Gray, and then you look at more recent years and... Danny Gokey. Lee DeWyze. What the hell. The talent pool fell off a cliff after season 5.

But anyway. We will map the hometowns (as best as possible, anyway) to see what kind of pattern emerges, if any. Winners are shown in red, runner-ups in pink, 3rd place in blue, 4th in green, 5th in grey. The seasons are noted. So Burleson, Texas, hometown of Season 1 winner Kelly Clarkson, is denoted by a red 1.

Here's the map. Linked because it's way too big to fit here.

As the commercial indicated, it stacks up in the South, particularly in the top three. When fourth and fifth get added in, you start to see the Rust Belt pop up a lot as well. The Dallas, Atlanta and Los Angeles metro areas seem particularly prone to getting people deep into the competition, though Los Angeles didn't start making these showings until Season 5 while Dallas and Atlanta began placing immediately. And Birmingham, Alabama has come up with two of the winners, Ruben Studdard and Taylor Hicks, something no other STATE has managed.

Meanwhile, New York, city or state, hasn't put a single singer in the top five yet as we head into Season 10 (and not for lack of trying on the part of the show; auditions have been repeatedly held there). New England is also entirely absent. The Mountain West only has David Archuleta of the Salt Lake City metro and, if you want to be generous, Jordin Sparks of the Phoenix metro.

South Carolina and Mississippi are also absent. And with the series in well-publicized chaos, they may want to hurry. Besides, they're in the part of the country that seemingly has all the singers who are actually any good.

Alpha Dog of the Week

Stephen Colbert is off this week prepping for a week of shows in DC and what is now the Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear. So I shall pick up the slack for him today, which means I must declare an Alpha Dog of the Week.

(woof)

My Alpha Dog of the Week is Jessica Simpson's dad, Joe Simpson.

(arf)

Jessica is going to be doing a Christmas special, or, more accurately, she did it on Thursday and it will be shown on Christmas. A vocal group of veterans, 4Troops, was set to appear alongside Jessica in the special, who stated over and over on stage how much she supports the troops.

Joe, however, decided to cut their number from the program. According to Page Six, he didn't like the fact that they were in camo pants in blazers- the same dress as they were in when they did a routine on the USS Intrepid- as opposed to tuxedos. They spent six hours in a basement before being told this, while Jessica, who according to her representatives had just returned from a tour of the Persian Gulf, her inspiration for the special in the first place- appears to have been oblivious to what was going on.

Joe deemed the veterans "too scruffy".

Well, that takes some balls right there, Joe, keeping your daughter in the dark and then kicking out a major part of the reason anyone's on stage that day. So what if they're veterans? They spent a year or more in Iraq and Afghanistan getting shot at so you don't have to; what's six hours in a New York basement not getting shot at? They even have all the amenities down there, up to and including nothing that will randomly explode. It may have been appropriate dress for David Petraeus, but you're in the civilization you've been protecting now. We have standards.

Besides, what singer dresses in fatigues? ...you know, besides 50 Cent. And Rihanna,a resident of Barbados. And Elvis. And the star of the movie Private Valentine, Jessica Simpson.

In fact, for helping to save a support-the-troops Christmas special from any actual troops, I say the military should probably get Joe Simpson, my Alpha Dog of the Week, a Christmas gift.

Head down to West Virginia, and seize all the coal.

How Rich Can You Get? (Please Don't Answer That)

Richie Rich is a character that only really pops up in the public consciousness in a good economy. And for good reason. People don't really want to see anything in pop culture about what it's like to flaunt wealth almost beyond human comprehension when they're struggling to put food on the table. G.I. Joe can sympathize; his fortunes are subject to America's views toward the military and was retired for a time in the wake of Vietnam.

I shall demonstrate. Look around your house, take a look at your current budget.

Now please view this.



You have now very likely expressed such a desire to shoot out your computer screen that a gun has appeared in your hand out of thin air just for the purpose.

The original comic came out in 1953, with updates in 1980 and 1996, with a movie in 1994. All pretty good economies at their respective times of release.

Which makes it all the more bewildering that somebody thought 2011 would be a good time for a reboot. Seriously, nobody looked out at the economy, looked at their comic book character described as owning "two of everything money can buy", named Richie Rich, who lives in Richville, considered the possibility that Rich's personality- which is, admitted, that of a very nice person- might be overshadowed by the age-old Richie Rich trope of LOOK AT ME AND ALL THE MONEY I HAVE? Nobody said 'No, really, this is really not a good time to put Insanely Rich Guy Is The Big Damn Hero in front of people'? Nobody? Nobody thought of any way this might be taken badly by anyone?

Ducks Rock

Stan Lee and the NHL have entered into a partnership to try to create superheroes based on NHL teams. Each of the 30 teams will get their own superhero.

I am a child of the 90's, and therefore, I have only two words with which to respond to this:

Roll 212.



The team in question is now called simply the Ducks, in an effort to remove themselves from the above identity.

Barbie's Resume

Barbie has had a lot of careers since 1959. Some very prestigious ones at that. Just in the year 2000, she became not only President of the United States (you don't remember that election? Funny that), but also a Starfleet officer and a paratrooper. In 1991, she served as an officer simultaneously in the Marine Corps and the Navy, one year after she became an Air Force jet pilot, a commercial pilot, and a UNICEF diplomat.

In 2008 alone, she was a swim teacher, a pediatrician, a veteranarian, a baker, a hairdresser, a designer, a pet stylist, a TV chef, a Presidential candidate, and a cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys.

And all this is in addition to her ongoing jobs as fashion model, ballerina and princess.

She has to sleep, right? And consider that just about all the jobs Barbie takes are full-time affairs, many going far beyond the 40-hour-a-week standard. You can hold one, at MOST two at a time and have any time left for eating, sleeping, living in a house, or anything else.

And yet she still finds all this time to play around with Ken in her Malibu dream house, or the beach, or the mall, or whatever.

There is only one conclusion: she is terrible at every single job (at least every job that isn't model, ballerina or princess) and Mattel doesn't mention that she is constantly getting fired. This explains why, for example, she was President in 2000, but merely a 'candidate' in 2004 and 2008. She was thrown out of office, either by the voters in a re-election bid or by being impeached and removed in the middle of the term, and she hasn't taken the hint yet.

Perhaps this is why she is currently resorting to burglary.

Urgent Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest Update

There are contract disputes and holdouts for more money... in a hot-dog eating contest.

God bless America.

What's With Miley Cyrus?

If you are a parent, or knows someone who is, or in fact have eyeballs, you are probably aware that Miley Cyrus is rather emphatically casting off the Hannah Montana persona for one of a definitely not Disney-approved nature. Her latest (and as she tells it, last) album, 'Can't Be Tamed', is full of barely-veiled shots at the House of Mouse. There were some warning signs beforehand, most notably the 2008 Vanity Fair shoot where she was photographed barebacked and topless- but as of late she has projected just about as wild and sexual an image as one can do prior to their 18th birthday (which comes November 23).

So what's going on?

In 1987 Daniel Wegner of Trinity University conducted a three-part psychology experiment. In the first part, students were asked to just say whatever they thought for five minutes. This was easily done.

Then in the second part, they were told to do the same, except they were told to try not to think of a white bear. Every time they did so, or said 'white bear', they were to ring a bell in front of them. Of course, now all the students could think about was the white bear. They'd try to block it out, but it was easier to do when they just, you know... didn't think of one. Now that they were told to suppress it, here it is and it won't go away. They'd end up ringing the bell rather often.

Then in the third part, the students were given permission to think about white bears. The result was that their thoughts just became 'white bear white bear white bear'. The white bear utterly overwhelmed them.

Compare to Miley. Early in life, Miley was pretty much any other pre-puberty girl, except that she happened to be the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus. She'd go to a Baptist church, wear a purity ring.

Then she moved to Hollywood in 2005 and became Hannah Montana, and along with it an army of Disney makeup and wardrobe people, and a rock-star persona. She also got a Disney personality construct: no overt sexuality, no excess showing of skin, nothing about boys that's not Disney-approved (she wound up dating a Jonas Brother). All white bears that Miley now had to suppress, while being made- and developing her own accord- into an attractive young woman.

The Vanity Fair shoot came about amidst all this. Ding. Prior to that, pictures surfaced of her flashing her bra strap and draping herself over an unidentified male. Ding. She broke up with Nick Jonas and decided to "just figure out who I really am." Ding.

But now she nears her 18th birthday, Hannah Montana will soon wrap, and now she, like all Disney teen idols, must strike out into the entertainment industry without Disney's assistance. Or to put it another way, she is now free to express herself however she sees fit.

White bear white bear white bear white bear white bear.

What does Miley need to do? Well, now that the white bear is here, it's pretty tough to make go away. But she does need to dial it back. Dolly Parton may be fine with the image, but she's had years of her own to properly develop, at her own rate. She started thinking of the white bear naturally, and just generally knows what she's doing. Miley didn't and doesn't. She is at risk of having it consume her at a young age, and needs some sort of proper guidance that, clearly, she is not getting.

None of this is to say Dolly is not worthy of advising Miley. In fact, Dolly Parton is probably the best mentor Miley could possibly have concerning this kind of thing. Like I just said: Dolly knows what she's doing. She knows how to convey a sexual image without having it consume her. She's actually a corollary to another aspect of the white bear experiment: some subjects were told from the beginning that they had permission to think about white bears, without any prior suppression. They thought of the white bear less frequently than those who had been suppressing it.

If sexual expression is the direction Miley wishes to go, Dolly's just the person to tell her how to go about it properly. But all the sound advice in the world does no good if it is never given in the first place.

It's a very delicate time in Miley's life, as it is with any child star, particularly Disney child stars. The most dramatic example is Britney Spears, a former Mouseketeer. Her mental derailment after leaving the safety of Disney is well-documented, which progressed to the point where she began making prominent appearances in death pools, in which people make predictions on which celebrities they believe will die in the next year. She recovered, but only after her father asserted legal control over every aspect of her life, control that is currently ongoing.

Miley, obviously, is nowhere near that point, and this should not be regarded as a statement that she will ever reach that point. Christina Aguilera was a Mouseketeer as well, and made the transition expertly. But Spears is to be regarded as a cautionary tale. Control the white bear, or the white bear will control you.

A Partial list of Hello Kitty Merchandise

To my knowledge, every last one of the following Hello Kitty-branded items has been approved, at some level, by Hello Kitty's parent company, Sanrio. This is a partial list.

Antivirus software
Baby perfume
Backpack
Banana cover
Band-Aids
Bathroom mirror
Bathtub
Bed
Beer
Beer stein
Bento box
Bicycle
Bicycle tires
Binoculars
Blood pressure gauge
Boiled egg shaper
Bottled water
Bowling ball
Bowling shoes
Box cutter
Bra
Brick
Bubble bath
Burqa
Business card
Calculator
Car
Car seat
Carabiner
Chainsaw
Chopsticks
Circuit board
Clothes hanger
Coat
Coffee maker
Computer keyboard
Condom
Credit card
Crocs
Darts
Deodorant
Desk
Douche
Earplugs
Eye mask
Fire extinguisher
Futon
Golf ball
Golf ball holder
Golf club
Gumball machine
Handbag
Hat
Headphones
Hole punch
Ice cube tray
iPod
Jelly Bellies
Karaoke machine
Kilt
Kite
Kitty litter
Knife
Lady Gaga (various)
Lawnmower
Louis Vuitton bong
Loveseat
Luggage
Mahjong set
Memo pad
Microscope
Microwave
Mittens
Mop
MP3 Player
Netbook
Notebook
Pajamas
Pants
Panty liners
Paper shredder
Pastie
Piano
Pillow
Pinata
Plush doll
Portable body fat meter
Power sander
Press-on nails
Razor scooter
Rectal thermometer
Roll-up piano
Roomba
Rubber duck
Sandwich shaper
Sewing machine
Shirt
Shoes
Shower radio
Skin meter
Skin water
Skis
Sleeping bag
Slinky
Snowboard
Snuggie
Space heater
Spoon
Stamp
Tattoos
Tea
Telephone
Television
Thermometer
Toaster
Toilet
Toilet paper (meant as display item)
Toilet seat
Tongue stud
Toothpaste
Toothpick
Tote bag
Ukelele
Underwear
Urinal target
USB fish tank
USB lap warmer
Vegetable cutter
Vibrator
Vitamins
Washing machine
Water cooler
Wedding dress
Wig
Wii
Wine
Writing utensils
Yoga mat
Yogurt maker

For documentation of some of the more unorthodox items, please direct your attention to Hello Kitty Hell. That blogger has my deepest sympathy.

Please note that his wife is the one collecting all of the Hello Kitty merchandise, far past the stage of 'hobby' or even 'obsession' but rather into 'hoarding'. Like, call TLC.