In the tradition of Hemingway’s Six Word Novels and David B. Dale’s 299 Word Novels, we present a new classic of Irish Literature
Act One:
Act Two:
Category Archives: Etiquette
Casey Johnson and Brittany Murphy: Obit Crit in the Age of Celebrity
By the time they’d Made It, they were already dead.
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Casey Johnson may have been a dazzling firecracker of a socialite, and Brittany Murphy a talented, popular actress, both of them rich, attractive, and famous, but there is nothing they achieved in their short, glamorous lives that could have brought them anything approaching the level of fame they reached in death. Once they had fame, they had cultural significance, and in this age of iNarcissism cultural significance is nothing more nor less than the opportunity to examine ourselves.
Brittany Murphy: 18,400,000 Google hits, but only 9,630,000 if you remove results with “Dead” or “Death.”
Casey Johnson: 5,460,000, or 4,930,000 if you remove the ones with “Dead” and “Death,” but she’s gaining on Brittany. She moves fast, for a necronaut.
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“Just noticed that @caseyjonsonJnJ gained roughly 3000 followers since dying. She’s dead you idiots! Thus, she won’t be tweeting anymore.”
Some people will do anything for attention. And boy howdy, do they ever get it.
“It’s so boring to do nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried it. It’s, like, how many days a week can you actually go shopping? You get burned out. And you feel like shit. You think, What have I ever done to alter this world? What will people say? ‘Oh, she had a lot of shoes’?”
Casey Johnson, September 24, 1979 – January 4 (estimated), 2010
Well, now we know what people will say. They will say, in fact, nearly anything, as long as it skews strongly toward the poles of vicious snark or pie-eyed sanctimony. Both offer the warm embrace of community. In the orthodoxy of the church of celebrity, one is either a Gonzo Heretic or a True Believer, and there is no room in the commentariat for sweetly becoming discretion or Victorian scruples. The Silent Majority remains aloof, silent and safely out of the fray, betraying themseleves only by a faint phosphor trail as they page quickly past the comments. It’s mutual. We don’t want their kind ‘round here.
A quick glance through the comments on gossip blogs leads one to conclude the mainstream news sites have been smarter or at least luckier than blogs, free as most of them are from the yawning, existential abyss of the comment box and the braided streams of saccharine toxicity in the trailing threads, dangling off the posts like a comic villain’s seemingly-endless, sputtering bomb fuse.
On the one hand:
OH the pathos of having too much.
OOOOHHHHHH the pathos.
and
[S]he was raised to do one thing: spend money. She had no other contribution to offer the world. […] She was raised as veal with a black Amex.
Her life was a dollar sign and a camera flash.
And on the other:
I know, I know, but Brittany Murphy had diabetes. It turns out, diabetes is a perfectly manageable health condition today. It becomes considerably less manageable when you’re doing lines all day. […] [E]veryone I talk to seems so shocked that Brittany Murphy could have actually died of a drug overdose. It’s all I’ve heard all day: “She was so pretty! She was so cute! I loved her in Clueless! She couldn’t have really died from drugs.”
And, yes,
“[…] [O]ut of respect I wouldn’t rant about her being a cocaine addict. I love King of the Hill and she is the voice of Luanne. I love Brittany Murphy, she was so talented. I find it so shocking that she is dead. As weird as her marriage seemed, I thought that she would end up living a happy life with her husband.”
And why did you think these things, my friend? Because you need to think them. We need to think them.
Depending on who we think we are, if we care at all about the The Celebrity-Industrial Complex
a) that celebrities are out there living beautiful lives that give us hope that somewhere Prince Charming and whichever Disney Princess he ended up with (wasn’t that all of them?) are living happily ever after, probably in Brad and Jen’s old house in Beverly Hills
or
b) that celebrities are out there, lolling, dazed, on Charon’s yacht, being serviced by fifteen pox-ridden Gucci models while chopping Marie Antoinette’s tiara into glittery white lines and snorting them up a straw made of their own hollowed-out femurs.
As a lifelong and semiprofessional Snarketarian, I’d love to smugly conclude that the dividing line between the two groups is an IQ of 100, with the snarksters on the plus side, but unfortunately for my ego that’s just not it. One of the most intelligent men on the internet is Stephen Fry, and he’s notoriously gentlemanly, even to professional vulgarian Jade Goody, who could hardly have been said to have deserved it.
“Jade lived life under a magnifying glass. Magnifying glasses magnify (obviously) but they distort and they burn.”
That they do. And if you look at them just right, they also reflect.
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Beaver Shots: how to eat beaver
Yes, this is a post about how to eat beaver. Not just ANY beaver, you understand; we have us some STANDARDS around these parts (these ones right down…here) and will not show you how to gnaw on gristly old beaver, the kind like an old baseball mitt made out of bbq jerky.
The wife coyly tried to explain her purchase of a new pair of expensive imported panties. “After all, dear,” she said to her husband, “You wouldn’t expect to find fine perfume in a cheap bottle, would you?”
“No,” her husband replied. “Nor would I expect to find gift wrapping on a dead beaver.”
No indeed!
We’re all about the fresh, young beaver here. Although perhaps not as much as the lesbians down at Lick might like, now that we think of it.
Where were we? Oh yes, speaking of ourselves in the second-person plural, for no reason we can fathom other than it’s practice for when Randy Andy comes to his senses, loses some weight, and gets his butt off the golf course and marries me. Or Hot Ginge, I’m easy.
Anyway, it does look like some people could use instructions for the most basic things, like the great Canadian (yes, it’s Canadian, check out the website) art of beaver-eating. Why, we’ve even got 1/24th of each day devoted to beaver!
Dude, it’s too late for us to help you. Whereas, in my country beaver-eating is a competitive sport.
And the Aussies are no slouches at taking care of beavers, as you can see in this video that Metro has been waiting almost exactly one year for me to steal.
The Brits, on the other hand, have to go to great, bureaucracy-enveloping lengths to be reintroduced to beavers. What, they don’t have Lavalife there? Apparently, they killed every one they could find, thus bringing to life the old cliche about, If I see something I’ve never seen before, I’ll shoot it. Boarding school has a lot to answer for, I’m telling you.
Russia, of course, being somewhat desperate and all out of ponies and small children since Yeltsin sold every mammal larger than a husky, has developed its own way to prepare beaver for eating, and here it is, with photos. Warning! Very wet and lots of bare flesh!
The Catholic Church, surprisingly, has no issue with the Beav, and encourages people to eat it on Friday. Well, it’s a start, I guess.
The 17th century Catholic Church actually declared beavers to be a fish according to dietary restrictions, meaning they are ok to eat on both Fridays and throughout Lent.
Well, this should be more widely known, is all I have to say about the matter!
Some organizations can be so forward-thinking. Look at the Boy Scouts, for instance:
Did you know that the US Cub Scouts give a Silver Beaver award? I nearly got thrown out of the leader’s meeting for laughing so much when they gave it to a retired woman with grey hair.
Hmmm, it’s given for Outstanding Service to Youth. I know more than one or two beavers that would qualify under those criteria!
In the spirit of these fine organizations and countries comes a post from Bug Girl on her serendipitous discovery of a tome of wisdom devoted, at least in substantial part, to instructions on pleasing one’s wife with wild games and, of course, the preparation and consumption of beaver.
The author claims the meat is “dark, moist and tender”; Hmmmm, sounds like somebody’s got a touch of Jungle Fever.
I wonder if it has some tips on how to stuff a beaver? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten.
Nineteen Years Ago in Spy
That’s nineteen. Not Ten Years Ago in Spy. Yes, it has been that long. Feels like it when you really think about it, don’t it? Especially if you’re reading Graydon Carter’s magazine now.
I’m stealing this because not only is it a precious jewel plucked from the greatest glossy setting of the last century, but also because it is a perfect demonstration of the Canadian character; not only the policy here elucidated, but also the urge to explain our passive-aggressive policies in a manner half apologetic, half ironic. In fact, every truly Canadian action is undertaken in a spirit half apologetic, half ironic, and that includes looting and burning the White House: we were, after all, only knowingly referencing the burning of York. Always following the lead of the bloody Yanks, that’s us.
Anyhoodle, here it is, a letter to Spy in the January, 1990 edition, from the benighted, but polite, dominion of Canuckistan.
Dear Editors,
As an ex-flight attendant for Air Canada, I can tell you that whenever the Grim Reaper made his way through one of our cabins, the procedure was a little different from Delta Air Lines’ [“Bound for Glory: What Happens When Your Last Stop Comes Before the End of the Line,” by Jay Blotcher, September]. We still notified the family and had the plane met by an ambulance, but we didn’t just leave the deceased for dead during the flight.
Maybe it is just the Canadian way, but we were basically told to lie and pretend that the passenger was not dead, only ill. It seems the airline though if we ran down the aisles screaming “Oh God, he’s dead, Gloria!” the passengers would become alarmed and subsequently be too afraid to visit the in-flight duty-free shop. So we were told to vacate the seat beside the deceased, put a fake oxygen mask [they HAVE those on planes? I am becoming alarmed] on him, turn his face toward the window and cover him with a blanket. (So he wouldn’t get cold?) The rest of the flight would be spent offering the dead man drinks and complimentary earphones [which Air Canada now no longer offers, even to living passengers] to continue the charade.
The thing I could never understand was that a flight attendant was expected to sit beside the body for landing. It’s not as if they expected you to date the guy afterward or anything, but really…how can a corpse have anything but a safe landing?
(I wasn’t with the company very long and never personally had a passenger die on one of my flights; however, there were quite a few I wanted to kill.)
Annie Game
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Sunday Night’s Alright for Fighting
What the hell, there’s nothing else to do.
If nothing else, you can see the value Twitter adds to the world of flamewarring: instead of hitting Refresh, Refresh, Refresh and waiting to see if your opponent has updated his blog/left another comment on yours, Twitter now enables people to make asses of themselves in realtime!
It all started…with this innocuous little post:
So far, so what? you’re probably thinking. Well, nothing. It’s just a link to some video of a fluffy white doggy trying to stay upright on a slidey plastic surface with four doggie shoes on.
And it ended like this:
And in between, now sadly deleted on MM’s part in the Slow Sunday Night on Twitter version of the missing 15 minutes from the Watergate Tapes, there was this:
@MortgageMark I wouldn’t either. That’s just cruel; saddle shoes are SO last year!
@raincoaster mellow out my friend
@MortgageMark I work for Shoeblogs LLC. I take these things seriously!
@raincoaster Listen, my son’s girlfriend bought them as a gift. We tried them on once. Don’t really care what blog you work for, suck it up
@MortgageMark “Suck it up?” Great people skillz, dude. I was JOKING. Chill thyself!
@raincoaster “dude” I guess my people skills aren’t that great. Just kidding, they’re fantastic ; )
and, after the above was deleted, this from me:
@MortgageMark If you trust your people skills, why don’t you apologize instead of just deleting those tweets?
Some things go without saying, you know what I’m sayin’?
raincoaster 