Paying attention to the online world is getting to me. It’s not making me sad or crazy, but it is making me question why I would be interested in the whiny complaints of Jon & Kate? Honestly, the mere fact that she birthed eight of God’s little creatures and has to manage them with her dumb as f*ck husband while being filmed should be reason enough for me to bypass the DRAMA that is their lives. I guess what does interest me is who is buying ad time for this sh*t sandwich masquerading as entertainment. But not really. Because I refuse to commit any of my time to find out who is purchasing ad time on the show.
See?
I don’t care enough to go deep into the machinations of these two narcissistic breeders but I care enough to skim commentary on their lucrative yet insipid lifestyle.
That’s what is getting me about my web addiction. I’ve become someone who needs the quick hit of information about random things and people. Today, I sampled posts about the following:
And yet, I still feel like my life is not richer for having nibbled at these bits of information. Yes, I know that a former GOP Presidential candidate mistakenly called President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor the wrong name but shouldn’t I want to know why, as well? It’s not enough that I assume his gaffe means that Mike Huckabee is just sloppy and maybe thinks all Hispanic women are named Maria! I should be willing to step away from the keyboard to find out Mike’s extensive and thoughtful opinions on the nominee.
And the online by fantasy shopping! What’s wrong with walking into a store to ACTUALLY touch the finery that I cannot afford? It’s time to step away from this elective ADHD that’s taken over my life — no, no, that I’ve ALLOWED to take over my life. It’s been too easy to bury my dreams and troubles in a world that makes me feel connected in my isolation.
Starting today, I’m on hiatus from engaging with the world via laptop and a wireless router. Watch out world, I’m coming back!
In the meantime, here are some of my favorite posts for your reading pleasure/disdain:
Margaret Seltzer is a big fat… ***I had to write and laugh at an upper middle class woman who sold as autobiography a fictional story of her life as an LA gang banger. And fooled a lot of people including the NY Times. I need to look up Margaret Seltzer when I get back from hiatus!
The Tyranny of Ordinary***A review of Revolutionary Road, a movie that is never far from my thoughts.Yes, even six months after seeing it.
What’s a bonehead move? Poor decision making by people who should know better. Here is part 2 of the list, compiled with the help of friends, old and new.
Jesse Jackson getting caught on tape expressing an unhealthy obsession with Barack Obama’s testicles.
I guess July 2008 was the the moment in time that the entire world should have realized that Barack Obama had an excellent chance of being elected President of the United States. Jackson’s bitterness (It should have been me!) and jealousy (What’s Barack got that I don’t have?) at the ascendancy of Obama forced him to voice his desire to castrate Barack Obama on a live microphone in a Fox News studio. Fox! (An aside: wouldn’t the millions of interviews that Jackson has done have taught him that the microphones are always on?) Of course, Jackson apologized and wept like a baby when Barack was elected, but the visual and audio evidence of Jackson’s peevishness lingers on.
Heath Ledger’s unlicensed masseuse not calling 911 immediately after finding him passed out.
Don’t call one of the Olsen twins because they aren’t doctors. Don’t call a bodyguard who isn’t on the premises to give CPR. Call 911. Don’t panic. Call 911. Even if there are illegal drugs in the apartment. Call 911. Because rehab and a reduced sentence for drug possession are infinitely better than dying at 28 years old.
I imagine that he wakes up in the middle of the night every night screaming ‘Bonehead!’ and Silda replies ‘Damn straight’ while obsessively polishing a handgun.
Joe The Plumber
Rehashing the backstory of Joe The Plumber’s classy 15 minutes on the world stage is beneath me. Let’s just say that Joe was prepared to dismiss anything Barack Obama said about taxes and ‘redistributing the wealth’ because well — he’s an opportunistic tool. Here is John McCain’s hero in an interview with Alan Colmes of Hannity & Colmes:
Redistributing the wealth is wrong unless Joe The Plumber and his family needs some of the wealth. All the rest of us are lazy heathens who are scam artists asking for government handouts. Got it?
Ashley Todd.
Maybe she should not be on the list because clearly this little girl is unhinged. But how could she not be a bonehead when she chose to carve a B on her face when carving O would have made her tale of fictional woe a wee bit more believable?
Margaret Seltzer, Faye Bender, Riverhead Books
What if I wrote a book saying I was the long lost love child of Donald Trump and Nina Simone? What if I included numerous tales of how my parents traveled all over the world using pseudonyms to maintain their secret love affair and our own special little multiracial family? Literary agents and publishing houses would laugh in my face. Most likely, they would send out an industry wide email warning about my fraudulent claims. But when Margaret Seltzer let the publishing world know about her poor little white girl becomes hardcore gang banger tale, the publishing world ate it up. Anyone who watched an episode of The Wire would have caught the red flags in Seltzer’s “Love and Consequences”: the cliched use of Big Mom for the name of her loving, all healing black foster mother (why we always got to be big, loving and healing? What’s up with that fantasy?) and the list of murdered black men that represent Seltzer’s newfound family but whose murders are never ever covered in any LA media. Bonehead shout outs to Seltzer for being so certain there would an audience for this tripe , to her agent Faye Bender and Riverhead Books for conveniently believing every lie she told.
New York’s new governor liked to party (NY Observer)
Quote of the week: “The East Village is established — we Japanese prefer Harlem as a new frontier. And in Tokyo, dating a black person is like a trophy for girls Coming from a single-race country, they exoticize foreign races.”
Maybe being able to watch your brain in action will stop you from going home from that sleazy singer-songwriter after the show the next time you think about doing it? (Ted.com)
I’m still laughing at the scam that Margaret Seltzer was able to pull on a (gullible) agent, publisher and anyone else who believed her reverse fairy tales. Haven’t any of these women watched Boyz In The Hood? Paid In Full?
But imagine if you were one of the authors who enthusiasticallyblurbed about Seltzer’s tale of made-up woe and redemption. Big shout out to the author who said the memoir reminded him of S.E. Hinton’s classic The Outsiders.
Good call, friend.
A must-read for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of contemporary American culture. Love and Consequences is a moving love letter to those who didn’t survive gang life, and a well-crafted inspiration for those who still have a chance to escape. Margaret Jones uses her own life to tear down the walls between South Central and the world beyond.”
— Rebecca Walker, author of Black, White and Jewish and Baby Love
“An important book, full of pathos and wisdom. Margaret B. Jones, contesting every bit of the way, catching at everything that might save her and those she loves, writes with pitiless intelligence and scathing honesty.”
— Susanna Moore, author of The Big Girls and In the Cut“
Written with tenderness and grit, Love and Consequences movingly describes the struggle for family, against Sisyphean odds, in South Central Los Angeles. It reminded me of S.E. Hinton’s classic The Outsiders.”
– George Howe Colt, author of New York Times bestseller, The Big House
“I spent every minute that I could steal with this book, and the morning after I had reached the last page, I felt lost, as if a trusted friend had suddenly moved away. Margaret B. Jones slices into the heart of South Central Los Angeles and spills her tangled life onto the page. Love and Consequences is raw and harsh and lovely. I’ve known poverty and hardship, and yet reading Margaret’s story was like visiting a parallel universe, one emboldened with hope and shot with danger. My God, Margaret is brave.”
- Barbara Robinette Moss, author of Change Me Into Zeus’s Daughter
According to the NY Times, Margaret Seltzer (pseudonym Margaret B. Jones) convinced Riverhead Books that she was a half-White/half-Native American foster child who grew up in South-Central Los Angeles and ran drugs for the Bloods.
Margaret seemed to know that her life experience of being 100% White, growing up in Sherman Oaks with her biological family (she isn’t even adopted!) and attending private school wasn’t her ticket to published author.
(An aside: There is the possibility of a half-White/half-Native American foster girl in Sherman Oaks running drugs but the certainty is that it wasn’t her.)
Now, she fooled a lot of people including the NY TimesPulitzer Prize winning critic Michiko Kakutani with her made up tale. The part that gets me is that people fell for stuff like this:
In the book, she describes her foster mother, Big Mom, an African-American woman who raised four grandchildren and a foster brother, Terrell, who was gunned down by Crips right outside her foster mother’s home.
This would have been a flag to me because Tallulah grew up in the South (don’t worry where) with her maternal grandmother and great grandmother. I called my grandmother Grandma and my great grandmother Big MOMMA. The distinction was made that although my grandmother was the boss, Big Momma was the one you truly had to fear and respect or it was your ass. Big Mom sounds like something Ms. Seltzer thought sounded right and knew would fool her target audience: publishers who want grit more than they want the truth.
And Terrell?
She probably got from watching too much of The Wire.
Also, Ms. Seltzer clearly wasn’t the orphan hustler she was pretending to be. Didn’t she consider that someone in her family would rat her out once she started doing interviews about this alternative life? (Which is what happened.)
What is so enticing about fame and accolades that someone would risk the world knowing they had zero integrity?
