Bloggin

Dead Icons


The “power of three” is not to be trifled with and is not subject to earthly explanation. In the celebrity realm the more famous or iconic you are, the more danger you are in of succumbing to the it.

Michael Jackson could attest to this were he not dead. He is the third in the Grim Reaper’s trio of famous recalls this week, Ed McMahon and Farah Fawcett having gone on ahead.

According to my husband, talk radio was ablaze with the news of Jackson’s death on his drive home from work late this afternoon.

“Shepard Smith sounded like he was about to burst into tears,” he told me in a bemused tone.

The Facebook and Twitter feeds were running about fifty-fifty between genuine grief and good riddance. I understand those who feel Jackson’s loss as deeply as though he were a friend or extended family member. He grew up with some of us. We remember he and his brothers. And he become a pop-icon to a generation or two as a grown man during the 80’s, leading him to self-christen himself the “King of Pop” and lead them along with his fantasy view of himself and the world.

I remember the cartoon.

I can still listen to Jackson 5 stuff without cringing – almost. But I can’t listen to Thriller. Although I think the LP is still at my mom’s, and I danced along with everyone else in college, Jackson was a pedophile and his music – for me – is as tainted as he was. Being dead doesn’t change that for me.

I read a tweet that summed it up nicely:

RT @Sarcomical: media/individuals seem to be mourning loss of what Jackson represented for them in 80’s. not the human he recently was.

Poor Farrah and Ed – people who probably deserve more memorializing than they will get now that the behemoth that was Michael Jackson has eclipsed them with his passing. I don’t think talent or a long past celebrity is reason enough to overlook the kind of man he eventually revealed himself to be.

Just saying.

Finished Updating my Archives


I have now officially moved all my posts from both Blogger and .Mac to this site. It has been somewhat interesting to look back at where I was a year or more ago, but not something I would want to do too often. In the past I have always destroyed journals of my daily life at some point. The ones I kept through high school and college were toast by the time I was on my own and teaching in Des Moines. The stuff from my early twenties to my early thirties (about 15 spiral notebooks) were purged when I bought my first house and moved from the apartments. I just don’t think that kind of thing is good to keep around. Of course as my husband points out there is no such thing as “delete” once you publish something on the web which is why I am grateful I didn’t have anything like this blog back in the days of my youthful stupidity. Men seem to be totally okay with having been “young, dumb and full of cum”, but I don’t know too many middle-aged women who are as serene about their teens and twenties. Perhaps those are the rough years for women and men don’t experience a similar thing until the hit middle-age? Just a thought.

Anyway the archives are as complete as I can make them and as categorized as I care to make them. I was a teacher, not a librarian.

What would Tyler Durden do, indeed?


I have a link to a celeb gossip site listed here called What Would Tyler Durden Do? (WWTDD). I found it. Read it and had a giggle or two at the expense of some of the shallower gene pool members of the Hollywood ilk, showed it to Rob and then moved on. Rob has no interest in celebrities and less in their tabloid exploits, but he does have a wicked sense of humor and eventually began following the site. Last weekend, he stumbled across a rant written by yet another blogger (god, we are like locusts) about the misuse of Tyler Durden as the symbol of something as vacuous and completely evil as celebrity gossip. I read the rant. It is mainly quotes from the movie (based on the better book by Chuck Palahniuk) with a few original thoughts thrown in. And it’s right on the money. Tyler Durden was the anti-consumerist. He would not only have disapproved of his name christening such a site but likely would have found the idea of blogging and the blogosphere as yet another way the system subtly enslaves us. Instead of being out in the world, living and interacting, we are here – writing about it. Reading about it. Surfing past it. Dipping in the occasional big toe via comments and then catching the next wave for sites known and yet to be discovered. Tyler would have scoffed at the idea that anything of true value could be found on the Internet and that Internet communities were a fallacy. There is no community in space. MySpace. Facebook. Undestinations where unpeople don’t gather and therefore can’t become friends. Tyler is a bit of an extremist, but the point of the rant was well-stated.