Trash Talk

I can't help it. I guess I need the pain to feel alive but I found myself watching 2 minutes of a show called TMZ last night. TMZ is the celebrity stalker/gossip website best known for out-papparazzi-ing the papparazzi (and may God protect me from ever having to type a sentence like that again!!) Now they have their own TV show that is so overly smug, bitchy, ironic, and sophomoronic that I cringe just thinking about it.

How have millions of people been manipulated into making celebrity worship into a multi-billion dollar industry? When I was growing up there was The National Enquirer and later People magazine which along with TV's Entertainment Tonight should be blamed for this mess more than anyone else. Now it's reached the point when I can only feel impending doom when a breathy fake-boobed reportrix gushes on about Sir Paul being seen with Rosanna Arquette or Jennifer Aniston taking her two dogs in the car as she left Malibu during the big brushfire (which spared her house BTW...phew!!!!). Have people's lives become so meaningless or depressing that this is the desired escape route? Maybe I should just turn my house into a plant filled oasis, throw away my television, and venture out of doors only to work or for the occasional social activity (on my terms of course!).

I think that along with those campaigns for Non-shopping days somebody should also try to institute an Ignore Celebrities Day. These people are attention pigs who have developed a strange type of symbiotic relationship with the parasitic gossip industry. Now I hear that People Magazine is going regional with dozens of new North American franchises specifically tailored to geographical niche markets. I suppose Quebec's will be called Peuple, New Mexico's La Gente etc. Here's one I dug up targeted towards the New England market. Obscure yes but I'm sure it'll fly off the racks.