Celebrity Semiotic

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.