Picking Through People

The magazine, pervy person!

It's a full Moon night, so just picture what we've had already. One call with that was enough. So onto the trashy stuff!

Normally I pick through the People Magazine in order, but this one gets the out of order approach. The Brett Michaels one pager was more interesting to read immediately. We saw the last episode of Celebrity Apprentice and we were delighted that Brett Michaels won! He was amazing and while he is absolutely the poster boy for ADD - or ADHD - he had a positive effect overall on everyone. The man's creative abilities were so good that teammates who started out finding him to be too difficult to work with were won over in the end. No one ever actually uttered the acronym ADD or ADHD (which was surprising because you'd think someone there would have been savvy enough about people in general to realise why he and Cyndi Lauper were so easily distracted and "difficult". They weren't really difficult, they were just so distracted and of course hyper-focussed), but it wasn't a hard thing to see.

Holly Robinson Peete has a good cause but I found her abrasive and cut-throat. While that used to be the winning attitude on both The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice, someone has evidently figured out that heartlessly throwing others under the bus (she clearly wanted Cyndi Lauper off the island) isn't the right road to popularity. I suspect that when Trace Adkins lost to the rotten person who won - whose name I can never recall - brought on the realisation that being a complete and utter cad was not a hot selling point.

I never hear about the cad anymore but Trace Adkins appeals to everyone.

Last Celebrity Apprentice had Joan Rivers who won over some absolutely gods-awful woman whom I detested. I meet people all the time that I don't particularly like or bond with, but there are very few people that I loathe or detest. And I would be the first to say that seeing actors and actresses on the telly or in movies doesn't make us qualified to judge them, but these are real people and the more ugly side shows up as the competition gets whittled down. And the two finalists always seem to come down to the nice guy and the rotten guy (or women) and in this case, the good woman (Joan Rivers) won over the bad one.

Joan Rivers is not normally someone I would have described as the good person - she's a very strong personality, there is nothing particularly objectionable about her (I find the plastic surgery results disturbing, but her personality doesn't figure into that). She had a huge blind spot when it came to her daughter whom I've never liked and who wasn't a good contestant, but that just makes her a normal parent. And the woman that she was competing against was just awful.

I've really strayed from the point. The piece on Brett Michaels was mixed in that it was about both his recovery and his returning to Celebrity Apprentice after having the embolism. He certainly wasn't healthy when he went onto that stage and it was clearly an effort to be there. I was blow away when Holly Robinson Peete mentioned that she had gotten bad news that somehow never came up throughout the show but then had to be mentioned when they were on the live set for this. She couldn't pass up playing the sympathy card when it might save her from losing. Cheesy.

Moving on, the next piece that gets mention out of order is the review of Sex and the City 2. It got 1 1/2 stars - ouch - and the critic wrote: "It's beautiful that these women still have each other--especially since it's getting harder to see how anyone else can stand them. Granted, Miranda's (Nixon) boss issues and Charlotte's (Davis) mommy meltdown are relatable, but Carrie's (Parker) self-manufactured drama and Samantha's (Cattrall) willingness to drop her panties whenever, wherever, aren't charming anymore. Trouble blooms in Abu Dhabi, where the ladies enjoy eye-gouging opulence thanks to Samantha's client, then repay him by being ugly, entitled Americans. This tone-deaf travelogue (all two hours and 23 minutes of it) disappoints, though hardcore SATC fans may want to risk it for Liza Minelli's brilliant cameo."

Oof. Not a glowing report. I also read about John Corbett's reprised roll of Aidan and I knew immediately where that would be heading. Who wants to see a depressing movie about the road not taken and being torn between two men when Aidan had been the one to leave and rightfully so.

I was happy to pass on it and this merely confirmed that.

Moving on from that and back to the more linear approach I prefer to take with my weekly issue of dirt, the first thing that jumped out after the Bret Michaels piece and the review of SATC 2 was actually an advert. Yes, not typical for me. The two-page spread shows Ellen DeGeneres and then an image of some Cover Girl pot (you know, a container). And it's called Simply Ageless. I'm not the right person to comment or criticize because I don't use make up of any kind, but I really despise the cosmetics industry for this exact reason. Women are sucked into using this absolute junk playing on their fears of not being beautiful and/or aging by putting out this stuff and charging an extraordinary sum for these worthless products. My mother was a prime example. She always fussed that she couldn't leave the house without putting on her "face" which was an hour-long odyssey. I hated that she couldn't see how beautiful she was without that whole production.

No one looks younger or better with cosmetics and yet it is staggering how many people - mostly women - are sucked into believing that they cannot be seen in public with their own faces. BBBBAAAAAAAA. (People are sheep.)

The TV section showed one main article and five small tidbits about upcoming summer shows (now that networks are hip to the fact that having off-season shows are a benefit with so many zombies who do nothing but watch the telly. What scares me? Out of the six shows mentioned, five are reality shows. GROAN. The listed shows? Some horror called Jersey Couture, a show called Cake Boss (Ray had told me once about it and you can imagine my reaction: a WHOLE show about making cakes?!), Wipeout Blind Date (yikes), America's Got Talent (I would disagree with that statement in a second), and Hell's Kitchen (another abusive chef propagating the idea that mistreating people is acceptable).

My biggest objection has to be with Jersey Couture. Once again the telly is pushing the idea that we are all shallow horrible Sopranos knock offs in New Jersey, when most of us are really just normal people. Very few of us have that abominable accent, the big hair that disappeared with the 80s and the supreme stupidity of the Jersey Shore losers. Why is it California is aggrandised and we are just the armpit of the nation? These shows are not indicative of the average New Jersey native.

Sting is 58 years old and still hot. Enough said.

And a book review that caught my interest: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: by Aimee Bender. "You are what you eat takes on a radically new meaning in this haunting novel by Bender (Willful Creatures). At 8, Rose Edelstein discovers she has a horrifying talent: In every food she consumes, she tastes the emotions of the people who prepared it. This means encountering hidden darkness, including her own mother's sorrow and loneliness. As Bender follows Rose from youth to postcollege, Rose's skill reveals more fissures in her family's life, such as her genius brother's desperate need to disappear. But Rose also realizes the her brother and her stoic, detached father possess their own surreal abilities--each, like hers, as much gift as affliction. Bender's prose delivers electric shocks (Rose's brain is "a glass of water I needed to carefully balance"), rendering the world in fresh, unexpected jolts. Moving, fanciful and gorgeously strange, this is a novel that asks the unsettling question: How much do we really want to know about the ones we love?"

"I imagined a girl who could taste the feelings people don't know they're feeling." -Aimee Bender

This sounds really interesting!

Then, "A Royal Shame", about the former Duchess of York who sold access to Prince Andrew for 40,000 Pounds Sterling in cash and then a wire transfer of 700,000 Pounds. My gods. I usually feel for the royal family - they are not even the real political force of Great Britain, but they have to put up with so much crap - and now they have to deal with this!

Fergie has reached a new low in grubbing for money. Not that she was ever a saint, but this is low. Of course she confesses to all kinds of remorse but I strongly suspect that this has more to do with being caught than any real feelings of remorse. She makes me look like a penny pincher.

Oh, my least favourite famous person: Kate Gosselin. I'll save that for another post.