It's been a rough few weeks in the land of celebrity. 

First David Carradine died. 

Then Ed McMahon died -- quickly followed by Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson and now, pitchman Billy Mays.

Of all the recent deaths, we will miss Billy the most.  He was real.  He was one of us.  He touched the moon and found the stars.

Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt -- of MTV's "The Hills" -- are, for some reason, clamoring to return to the Costa Rican jungle set of "Get Me Out of Here, I'm a Celebrity" after quitting the show twice.

We, as beloved consumers of all reality television, DO NOT WANT THEM BACK!

Please make Heidi and Spencer go away.  NBC's head of Reality Show Programming, Paul Telegdy, seems to agree with us:


We hope Telegdy is sincere in his loathing of them, but we cannot help but feel on some level this is all a setup to create false drama as Spencer and Heidi come and go as they please.  The two of them are such a borefest and we cannot wait to know that, if they return, they will quickly be voted off the island by the viewing audience and placed back into their nothingness.

We learned this week in gory and vibrant detail that Farrah Fawcett -- the love of many a young boy's life -- is fading from us as cancer cancels her body.

Over the arc of her public and private life, Farrah was defined by her good heart and by her misbegotten offspring.

We felt the ruin of her feelings of failure as a spouse and a mother and we wept with her when she revealed her cancer.

One cannot comprehend the irrationality of a hope that drives one to peck at the pebbles of life -- even though all modern medical wisdom points to a shorter end than a longer survival -- and, for us, that is Farrah's living legacy:  It is important to fight on as the darkness creeps inward; and you can never find the life if you allow the dying to override the living.

Manny Ramirez has been banned from baseball for 50 games. 

He can kiss $8 million and the Hall of Fame goodbye.

We wonder why so many professional baseball players value hubris over hard work.

What is it about their careers that command them to throw away their gifts for the chemical syringe?

We must not admire people only because they are rich or pretty or talented.

We must only look up to those are able and willing to shed the temptations of life to live freely and to honor morality and belonging on this mortal coil.

We hate the title of this article, but after a week of careful thought, we decided -- "Melissa Rivers Shits the Bed" -- is precisely what happened this week on Celebrity Apprentice.

We wrote about the Rotten Rivers Sisters here in a previous article -- and while we are thrilled to learn of Joan's red herring that Melissa made it to the end -- we are still left distraught and stinking by Melissa crapping all over everyone on the show.

Melissa Rivers is an ugly beast of a woman -- inside and out and all around -- and we can see how her mother spoiled her shitless and the rest of us have to clean up after her.

The reason Melissa shat the bed was simple:  She is terrified of poker player Annie Duke.  Annie is smart, brilliant and a hard worker.  She knows how to play the game.  She is tough. 

Both Joan and Melissa recognized Annie was their only real competition on the show, and so, they set out together to mother-daughter tag team her to death.  Unfortunately for the Rivers Sisters, Annie saw them coming and rebuffed them with calm and intelligence.

The Rivers Sisters exploded.

Annie Duke was untouchable.

The only thing left for the Rivers Sisters to do was to throw a stinking temper tantrum and neither one of them disappointed us.

We can only hope Joan honors her threat to not return next week after walking off the show with her putrid sense of a daughter.

We find the rise of television and internet singing phenomenon Susan Boyle confusing and disappointing.

What the world is confessing in their stunned sycophancy for her is ritualistically simple:  "Golly, we never suspected ugly, unkissed, people could have beautiful singing voices."

In publicly confessing that prejudice, the world strangely finds great satisfaction in welcoming Boyle into their mainstream mindset by "accepting" her for her beautiful voice while condescendingly deciding to overlook her hereditary ugliness and her obvious lack of social averageness.

We pity Susan Boyle and her sad, solitary life so far, but we firmly ridicule and rebuff the world that embraces her as a new populist sensation because that only confirms our preexisting -- yet still unconfessed and hypocritical -- embedded human prejudices.

We have loved Kathy Griffin because she is an outsider and a rebel.

What, then, happens when your favorite celebrity stone-thrower becomes a fawning morass of sentimentality instead of a biting, vicious, cutting-edge-funny razor?

You get Kathy Griffin's latest flop of a Bravo stand-up comedy special that aired this week:  She'll Cut a Bitch.

Instead of the cruel Kathy we have grown to admire, we get stories about sharing her birthday with Cher and being forced into mainstream acceptance by her refusal to tell "Jesus to Suck It!" ever again.  The Emmy is everything; her comedy and moral standards are negotiable.

We are left today mourning the loss of a true trailblazer and celebrity rebel.  The new Kathy Griffin is now nothing but a hopeless sycophant for celebrities and we don't need a stand-up comedy version of Entertainment Tonight.

NBC -- the "Nothing But Cowards" television network -- unceremoniously canceled the outstanding and exciting Marco Pierre White "Chopping Block" series last week.

We loved Chopping Block and we admired Marco Pierre White's shared genius even more even though he's responsible for giving us the awful Gordon Ramsay by starting him off on a cooking career.

The problem with canceling shows like Chopping Block is that they're a competition -- and you are invited to root for people -- but when a network loses its backbone and cancels a show in the middle of the contest, we the viewers, are left behind to wonder what happened and who won!

NBC isn't the only cowardly network to ask us to root for a team only to beat us back with the cancellation cudgel -- CBS also canceled their Pirate Master show midstream -- and these cruelties make us wonder how we can punish these networks for breaking the sacred covenant between viewer and time invested without ever finishing what was started.

Television networks should be required by federal law to finish a contest program if one is started or risk FCC fines and the unrequited wrath of ripped off viewers.

Survivor Tocatins is especially pleasing this season as we get our first exposure to the intentional color coordination of each team in the clothes they are wearing:


In previous Survivor seasons, the contestants wore whatever worn out clothing they brought from home.

Not this time.

On Tocatins, the survivors are dressed in the same hue and tone so they are immediately recognizable with their team alliance.

We like that sort of ongoing semiotic branding of the show.  The effect is subtle, but effective, and we don't care that CBS had to provide the contestants proper clothing to pull of the color-coordination. 

The "colors of alliance" make the entire series richer.

We were looking forward to Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice 2" until we learned that the "Apron Strings" tag-team of Joan and Melissa Rivers would be competing separately on the same team even though they're the same person.

The inherent unfairness in having "The Rivers" compete -- not an ocean apart, but rather in the same pond -- gives them such an immense advantage over every other individual competitor that they never should have been allowed to compete.

When Joan appeared to reveal in a radio interview that Melissa made the final two -- we were provided confirmation of the ruination of the show by her blabbermouthing and from the non-anecdotal notion that a Mother/Daughter Enabler/Enabled team is too powerful to beat.

We call on NBC Television to immediately cancel “Celebrity Apprentice 2” since the magic is lost as the celebrity is replaced with the familial and all its unfair underpinnings and advantages in the marketplace.

We previously loved American Idol 8, but now that we're down to the nut of it, we realize the show is fatally flawed.

American Idol has become Karaoke with the worst singers.  The contestants are painful to listen to and when they get eliminated the show drags on and on and on...

We liked Danny Gokey until we heard this week that he's a fundamentalist Christian -- we've had our fill with the fanatic Jesus-lover-winner in the form of Jordin Sparks, thank you.  No more, please.

What is most amazing and vastly disappointing is how good the singers think they are even though they're terrible.  The judges tell them they're awful, yet their egos have grown so large, they are unable to take an ounce of criticism. 

American Idol has become watching a narcissist convention from which there is no escape!

American Idol is old and showing its age and the frayed tatters at its edges are threatening to eat the core of its mission to find the best singer in America.  We no longer care who wins because we've already been bored to death by having to deal with so many losers.

We all know Marie Osmond has an obsessive-compulsive nature.

We've seen the results of her overeating and her over-dancing.

Now, as she pitches a weight-loss program tooting how she lost 50 pounds, we also see her in "real time" doing television interviews and she looks terrible.

Marie is too thin.  She looks like bones and skin.  She is missing all her muscle tone.  We plead with Ms. Osmond to:  PLEASE EAT SOMETHING!

Yo-yoing from one body extreme to the next is more dangerous to long term health than just staying properly plump.

We love Fringe.

We do not, however, love Joshua Jackson on the show.  He doesn't fit.  He isn't strange enough to mesh with the rest of the cast.  He must be cut.

Jackson seems to be acting in a style outside the outer edge of Fringe and that makes for an incomprehensible and uncomfortable performance.

Cut Joshua Jackson from Fringe and you have an unmitigated hit.

Let Jackson remain and Fringe stays tendrilic in plot and confusing in style.

Miley Cyrus was recently caught in a photograph making the universal, infamous, and insulting "Slit-Eye" gesture to condescend the form of the Asian eye:


Miley claims she is not Racist even though her preserved image suggests otherwise.

We urge Miley to confess her Racism, ask forgiveness, and become a cudgel for human goodness and light instead of remaining a denier of her darkest, innate, insensitivities.

The news this week that Michael Jackson's music video was on its way to Broadway as a new musical was the Death Knell of the modern theatre as the final nail was hammered into the coffin of imaginative new works in the legitimate theatre.

Broadway has always been dully derivative, but reaching back 25 years to use a stale music video as the basis of a new musical is just mind-numbingly awful.

The Thriller musical also speaks to the lack of new talent on Broadway -- and that isn't the talent's fault -- that's the fault of a current crop of producers and theatre owners who are all unable to recognize new genius and so they always recycle what other great minds previously discovered.

We held our fingers a couple of weeks just to make sure we were really back in love with version eight of American Idol.

We are pleased to announce today that, we are, in fact, back in love with American Idol.

The miscreants and the mentally unstable have generally been exorcised from the show -- we're holding Mudd Man and Lung Lady in abeyance -- and Simon has stopped using his pre-written put-downs to concentrate on giving cogent critiques.

The secret to the success of American Idol 8 sits squarely on the gorgeous shoulders of the delicious and doe-eyed Kara DioGuardi.  She is funny, talented, smart and a tremendous help to Paula Abdul. 

Paula now as an ally on the show and Kara and Paula are a great team:  They blend, they abide, they babble in unison like hollow beads in a rattlesnake's tail.

American Idol is back; and it is greater than ever!

We were sad to learn this morning that our favorite "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" -- hausfrau DeShawn Snow -- will not see the dawn of the second season because she is too good, too real, and too ordinarily human to appear on the show.

In many ways we are happy not to watch DeShawn lower her human values for fleeting celebrity profit.  She didn't fit in with the wildly wicked ways of the other women.

DeShawn was kind and thoughtful and a peacemaker -- and that's a problem when the show deals with degenerates, intentional cruelty and wildly on fire dysfunction.

We know DeShawn will find a better life beyond the ashes of her television show and we look forward to celebrating her freedom from the misery of her previous company.

Valkyrie is dead at the box office and it's all Tom Cruise's fault.

As someone wiser than us recently said about the former superstar: "No movie star has been around so long and has yet been so hated as Tom Cruise."

The disintegration of his goodwill started a year or so ago with his rants against Brooke Shields, Matt Lauer and modern psychiatry.

Tom, by his own hand, made himself look foolish, petty and cruel and he has yet to recover. 

The Oprah couch-jumping episode is forgiven because we've all had our uncomfortable, public, moments of insanity.

Our next fascination will perhaps be watching the rest of Tom Cruise's career careen into flames -- the means to an unjustifiable end of false flattery and planned executions.

We were alarmed to learn of Jett Travolta's untimely death at age 16.

We are even more disturbed to learn the lad may have been an untreated Autistic:

Jett had a long history of seizures and other medical problems, including complications resulting from Kawasaki disease, a rare lymph-node disorder that causes severe rashes and fevers, Travolta told investigators.  Authorities will conduct an autopsy to determine the exact cause of death.

But those who have seen Jett in public, most recently in Paris two months ago, speculate the boy was autistic. Some contend that Travolta - who never talked publicly about Jett - refuses to acknowledge the condition because of his belief in Scientology, which frowns upon mental illness and rejects psychology and psychiatry. ...

Jett was put on a special detox program as prescribed by Scientology, Preston said. "He ended up getting better," she said, but noted the boy still "has lots of allergies." In 2007, one of Travolta's Florida neighbors, whose son is autistic, said he was shocked that the movie star could let his beliefs stand in the way of helping the boy."They see it as a weakness. That's what the space aliens are telling him, I guess," Tim Kenny told Hollywoodinterrupted.com after approaching Travolta as "one autistic father to another."

We certainly hope these allegations of Jett's unattended Autism are not true. 

We are resigned to thinking Jett may have found more peace in his death than he found during his life.

We have all been sickened to the point of wanting to shoot the loudmouths at the movies.  They blather and laugh and shout and scream all at the wrong times.

We haven't, however, pulled a gun and shot them -- yet:


When a significant lack of public caring for public behavior disintegrates, chaos ensues, and the rude people take over the movie theatre and the shooters rise to shout down the high talkers and the entire world implodes as memories fade. 

We're in trouble in America and there's no way out of the popcorn darkness.