Celebrity

When I'm riding in my limo
I won't look out the window--
Might make me homesick for humanity
--Barenaked Ladies, "Celebrity"

"There's something on TMZ.com that is pissing me off", my wife told me this morning.

Now, the mere existence of TMZ pisses me off, but I'm smart enough not to say that out loud around here. I know Eva doesn't give two shits for celebrity culture, but she checks that site every day anyway. I think she might do it for the same reason I regularly tour the right-wing blogosphere: just to make sure the lunatics are still in their cages and the locks are secure. She doesn't often bring up anything she finds on TMZ.com because she knows she'll get the same reaction I do I when I start spouting off about hockey. Married people, you know it, right? "That's nice, dear"?

I just went there for the first time in my life, and it confirmed every worst suspicion I had. It combines two hatreds of mine: Celebrity culture and Cosmopolitan magazine. Ever looked at a Cosmo cover? It's like the word "sex" must appear on it at least twice; the tone is breathless, as if the fate of the world depends on what lies within (and what lies within is more iterations of celebrity culture mixed with the strangest sex tips you've ever read. "Next time you give your man oral pleasure, spice it up with some jalapeño salsa!" Don't do this, ladies. For the love of God and scrotum, don't do this.  Friggin' Cosmo.

Anyway.

This is the story that has her knickers atwist: "We may never know exactly what killed JOAN RIVERS". it  begins (complete with capitals just so you know what's really important here), and at that point Eva stopped reading and announced her annoyance.

"Is there some reason why we have to know what killed JOAN RIVERS?" I replied. "See, this is why I love you, we think alike", she said.

High praise. Any time I'm told I think like Eva, that's high praise.

But it's true. I know what killed Joan Rivers: lack of oxygen to the brain, the same thing that kills everybody. In her case, it was the end result of complications from surgery, which is the risk you run any time you're on an operating table, especially if you happen to be, say, 81 years of age.

Why is more detail necessary?  Duh. We must know every last detail of a celebrity's life, and that of course includes her death, right? Odd there aren't cameras in the crematorium. But as to cause of death--the complication was "predictable", says TMZ, "which could mean preventable", which could mean that somebody screwed up.

Or it could just mean that an 81-year-old regrettably died in the aftermath of surgery due to a complication which could happen to anyone and that's not a provocative story so we'd better manufacture some vague accusation.

Ugh.

Let's just for a minute say that TMZ's right and somebody fucked up. Until that's proven, it's not news. Even if and once it is, it's only news because it's somebody famous. If that happened to Joseph Blow from Kokomo, chances are excellent it'd never be reported. And why is that? Because famous people are more important than you or I.

Screw that. Screw that until you strip the damn screw.

Have you ever noticed that the sexiest man/woman alive, as voted by Vapid Magazine, ALWAYS happen to be BOTH Hollywood celebs? What are the odds of that, anyway? Out of all the denizens of this planet, the epitome of male and female perfection just happen to be people who work in California?  Sorry, I don't believe that. In fact, I don't think they even looked anywhere else.

Yes, I will carry this disregard of celebrity cult to what many consider obscene lengths. "Elvis Presley blew his nose into this handkerchief! Reserve bid fourteen squillion dollars!" And somebody will buy the damn thing, too. Fossilized nose-drippings from the King, I must have this. I do not believe for one minute that a celebrity having owned something should make that thing any more valuable than it would otherwise have been. How much would you pay for one of my used snot-rags? My snot has exactly the same consistency, b(u)y the way. Also, you just breathed in a few atoms of what used to be Elvis Presley. They're mixing uneasily with the atoms of Michael Jackson, Adolf Hitler, Julius Caesar and your great-great grandmother. Bottle that breath, it's priceless.

This is another of those things that makes me very strange. I often wonder what kind of partner I'd make to a celebrity, whether she'd find me refreshing because I'd treat her like a human being or exasperating because I wouldn't exalt her based on her fame alone. Probably a little of both.  It tends to be the reaction I'm most confronted with: I'm refreshingly exasperating.

Meanwhile, we have TMZ.com trying its best to make something huge out of the death of a comedienne. I think she'd have some choice words for that circus, don't you?