taken from the weekly standard article culture of celebrity:

How pleasing to learn that our own simpler, less moneyed, unglamorous lives are, in the end, much to be preferred to those of these beautiful, rich, and powerful people, whose vast publicity has diverted us for so long and whose fall proves even more diverting now. “As would become a lifelong habit for most of us,” Thomas McGuane writes in a recent short story in the New Yorker called “Ice,” “we longed to witness spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionless lives of the meek.”

celebrities are useful when they distract us from bad things happening in the world around us. movies, music, and sports serve this purpose well. we forget our prosaic lives and the occasional world chaos to rally behind our favorite teams and players, and to track the curious relationship with tom and katie. being celeb-obsessed is not all bad, just as long we realize that we are the lucky ones.

it’s hard for us, i think, to grasp the concept that we have the charmed lives. no, we don’t have the limos, shopping sprees on rodeo drive, or a reserved VIP table at an exclusive restaurant. we also don’t have the paparazzi snapping bad pictures of us for the next US weekly spread. if we have secrets to keep, the rest of America won’t know and won’t care. we also have the satisfaction of knowing that we have stable relationships we can count on, unlike many of the people whose faces are on magazine covers.

i would like to have a limo and a chauffeur. i hate driving. i’m not opposed to the acquisition of wealth and fame, as long as it’s attained honestly. i just think that the “frictionless life of the meek” sounds like a life i would be more likely to enjoy.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

-Thoreau

simplify, says thoreau. it’s good advice.

Technorati : celebrities

i decided to intentionally avoid one of my favorite shows tonight. did i miss anything? is vaughn still (allegedly) dead? please fill me in if you have a minute. and no, j.j., that blond guy is not a worthy replacement for michael vartan. you’re a fool for letting him go. in case you are clueless about this, we are still mad at you.

Technorati : alias, j.j. abrams, michael vartan

jonah goldberg posted this at the Corner on NRO:

“Apparently, lemmings don’t commit suicide. So if you have a lemming in your basement who wears too much black eye-liner, listens to too much heavy metal music, and is constantly drawing really disturbing pictures of Satanic scenes on his notebook, don’t worry.”

tony kornheiser on PTI: ” michigan sucks “. short, sweet, and accurate.

it has occurred to me that there is too much division in this country today. i have a solution to this large problem. i think i have found some common ground for most of america to stand on. most of us can unite behind hatred of the yankees. it’s the right thing to do. see my previous posts for the reasons why.

also, there’s those devilish smurfs. destroying smurfs is a good idea. IMAO has the justification for it here. yes, this won’t advance the cause of world peace very well, but destroying smurfs and the new york yankees will make a lot of people very happy. i know i would sleep better at night…

Technorati : jonah goldberg, smurfs, tony kornheiser

espresso sarcasm has some other “bold moves” by new orleans mayor ray nagin. good stuff.

in the food for thought category, there is a post about the beat generation and its relationship to current events today from avatar briefs. it includes excerpts from howl, an allan ginsberg poem. it’s a rather dark poem, in my opinion anyway, but the analysis here is right on target.

the wide awakes posts in Acts of God about our expectations of the government in the case of natural disasters.

read. think. enjoy.

if any of you had a day like mine, you might want to give yourself a mental break from the serious news of the day. i know i want to. before i get to that, however, i would like to thank the red sox for making me look really stupid for picking them to win. hopefully no one else made the same mistake (and put money on it). they just weren’t as good as last year. hopefully last year was good enough to keep red sox fans off of the ledge this year.

now on to the good stuff.

mr. miyagi wanna-be gets punk’d by students
russians on ice–a man who has been living in a refrigerator for 15 years
bank robber leaves an IOU in the safe
“make your own law” contest
the Welsh-language version of Scrabble
Oklahoma Man Wins $10 Million Judgment Against a Spammer–VERY COOL.

this weekend’s movie reviews (courtesy msnbc.com)

i highly recommend the following artists for a truly chilled out ipod mix –frank sinatra, ella fitzgerald, billie holiday, and miles davis. it’s perfect background noise for any relaxing activity. i can’t decide who is the best of these three: ella fitzgerald, billie holiday, and lena horne. any fellow jazz fans with an opinion on this, please make your case in comments/email. i’m leaning toward picking billie holiday.

happy friday. hope yours was better than mine. 🙂

Technorati : billie holiday, jazz, red sox

suspicions among fellow alias fans have been confirmed. if you just saw tonight’s alias, you know what i’m talking about. what kind of stupid move is this? grrrr. i would be lying if i said that i would quit watching it after tonight, but that doesn’t mean i have to like what happened. there are not many other ways to interpret that final scene, unfortunately. michael vartan will be missed…no question about it.

Technorati : alias, j.j. abrams, michael vartan

i just want to address the theory behind “outing” closet homosexuals who don’t vote the way that group thinks that they should. how counter-productive could a strategy possibly be? sacrificing one of their own to score political points and to punish such a person is not the way to encourage total disclosure. criticize the vote if you have the need to do so. if you are opposed to a certain piece of legislation, then you feel that everyone voting for it is wrong. the opposite of that is also true. so why should it matter what the person’s sexual orientation is?

i sincerely believe that the whole agenda here is to make homosexuality not only tolerated, but completely accepted in our culture. this should be the purpose behind “outing” people — to say, look, here’s someone else who is perfectly normal and agrees with our lifestyle choice. why are such examples important to this group? it’s simple, really. gays and lesbians seek validation from society. it’s not enough to live their own lives in their own way making their own choices. everyone else should accept them without question and without making any moral judgments.

i think this is an impossible dream for the gay/lesbian community. those of us who are not sympathetic to their lifestyle are not likely to be convinced otherwise. we want them to have successful, productive lives just like anyone else. they should not be subject to abuse because of their choices. just don’t ask those of us with moral problems with that lifestyle to accept it, because we can’t.

send flame mail here. i’m expecting it.

–movies–
among the movies to avoid if they are available in your area — the latest from the formerly MIA blonde airhead jenny mccarthy, dirty love. it seems that the bad movies are piling up. the reviewers are already nominating this for a razzie. wow. it might even be worse than deuce bigalow 2. also inexplicable — why they are making cheaper by the dozen 2. if i watched movies more often, it would annoy me that i had to pay so much for this junk hollywood is producing right now. i am also going to ignore corpse bride, the latest by tim burton. i liked big fish, edward scissorhands, and charlie and the chocolate factory, but generally burton’s visions of the world are too creepy for me to watch.

on my radar — oliver twist and proof. i’ve seen the musical oliver and i’ve read the dickens classic. it’s one of my favorite books. i hope that it’s at least as good as the musical.

–the other good stuff–

the attempted militarization of the jetsons–this is an interesting analysis of our modern society vs. the society of the cartoon jetsons. this guy has too much free time. don’t know who they are? link here.

perhaps you have heard the new catchphrase “stuck on stupid” by lt. general honore. there is now a stuck on stupid blog. if that wasn’t cool enough….you can now get t-shirts. God bless capitalists.

officials are miffed that a dog is actually registered to vote in new zealand. to them, i say lighten up. the dog is like a lot of americans in that he has no interest in voting.

that’s all for this post. enjoy your weekend. FYI, my email is down, so if you don’t get a response, that’s why.

this is such a great idea. get rid of all the wasteful government spending projects now. instapundit has further details on how we can help.

check out the appalling waste at the truth laid bear blog.

citizens against government waste has a database where you can search by state for these pork projects. they suggest $232 billion worth of spending cuts (sorry, tom delay) that can be made to help offset the katrina recovery costs.

let’s hold some feet to the fire here. we should not allow our money to be wasted any longer. it’s time to speak up.

while i was waiting for my official copy of the snoop dogg translation guide, i got distracted by several things on tv…

the producers of the emmys should be given a ton of credit for not politicizing the event, for keeping the speeches short, and for putting a lid on jon stewart. oh wait…nevermind. ellen’s usually funny…but tonight her writers were out to lunch. they totally fell down on the job. i wanted to laugh at her, but i couldn’t. she must have stolen john kerry’s writers. they weren’t funny either. is it too much to ask that these people slam bush and iraq on their own time?

“emmy idol” was an interesting concept. there is never a bad time to break out old tv theme songs and sing them. i have to say that i enjoyed the “green acres” theme by donald trump and megan mullally. donald trump in overalls is must-see tv. i would have to agree with the style guru who opined that overalls are never a good look for anybody. in all seriousness, i would like to thank the academy for not allowing william shatner to sing. he was much more interesting before he got fat and started doing priceline commercials.

speaking of commercials, that burger king “king” really creeps me out.

conan still has the same bad haircut after all these years. he must have the same stylist as the situation’s willie geist. horrifying. conan got some deserved laughs for his comedy bit during the show. if he was this funny on his own show, perhaps more people would watch. even so, he probably destroys craig ferguson’s show in the ratings.

i hate j.j. abrams, who happens to be the creator of lost and my personal favorite drama alias. the reasons will be explained later. he’s a talented guy, but he has obviously made some bad casting moves with alias. i will have much more on this as the alias season unfolds. jeers to abc for moving it to thursdays.

switching to pro football —

raiders fans are quite scary looking. if you want a society that encourages excessive drinking, possible drug use, and really strange attire choices as a result — these people would be examples of what that society would look like.

in theory, i agree with the idea that the NFL should do something to support the victims of hurricane katrina, but haven’t they suffered enough already? why must we punish them with a bad football game between the saints and the underwhelming new york giants captained by peyton’s brother? just wondering. i also think i would rather give money to the red cross or habitat than to funnel it through former heads of state. but that’s just me.

Technorati : ellen degeneres, emmys, j.j. abrams, jon stewart, willie geist