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Alright, this one’s been simmering for a little while. Prepare to go to full rolling boil.
(Incidentally, you have my S.O. to thank for this one, who regularly sends me links to Go Fug Yourself.)
Lady Gaga. She’s this generation’s Madonna. I will even admit, some of her music is pretty catchy. (And some of her music that isn’t even completely her music is also pretty catchy: let me direct you to DJ Tripp’s mashup of Just Dance and Don’t Stop Believin’.)
(An aside: What the fark with this whole “mashup” business? What the hell was wrong with calling it a “remix”? Where’s my onion? Get off my goddamn lawn.)
Anyhoo: Gaga’s gimmick seems to be to do her thing (and “her thing” seems to range from “performing in concert” to “going to the store for oatmeal“) wearing the most unwieldy, whacked-out outfits imaginable. (Yes, that second one isn’t a ‘Shop. Platform hooves.) Some suggest this is some kind of real-time performance art on her part, an ironic commentary on the tragic state of celebrity in the public eye or some silly nonsense like that. Others suggest she’s just an attention whore. I figure, hey, she’s not hurting anybody, if she wants to go out dressed like she’s hoping to hell Monty Hall will walk up to her out of the blue and offer her $500 or whatever is behind Curtain Number Two and call it a social statement, more power to her.
In the last week, though, I think we’re starting to see the Implosion of Gaga. Which brings us to the grand revival of our 7-Eleven Golden Slurpee Award.
Let’s start here:

“Another whacked-out outfit, so what?” you say. This is how she showed up a couple of days ago…to HER SISTER’S HIGH-SCHOOL GRADUATION. Nope, couldn’t just go and be normal JUST ONCE and let her sister enjoy her special day, she has to show up looking like a sexually-confused Raiden. Klassy-with-a-Kapital-K.
But this one is the kicker: Just yesterday, she decides she wants to go take in a baseball game. Wonderful, nothing wrong there. Apparently nobody told her that she was seeing the Mets and not the Dodgers, since she rolled in during the fifth inning. Fine, she’s a busy girl, probably at the podiatrist getting her arches checked out or something. Let’s look in on her, shall we?

Yep, that’s what ol’ Gaga wears to the yard.
And, as you would expect, photographers at the game immediately turned their attention to her. Time for today’s quickie quiz: How do you suppose she reacted? Did she:
a) Ignore them
b) Smile demurely, showing off her oh-my-god-I-am-so-outrageous outfit, or
c) Get pissy, retreat to a luxury box, and spend the rest of the evening flipping off anyone with a camera
Well, with apologies to Peter Sagal, one of the erstwhile photographers in attendance provides us with the answer to that question:

Sorry, sweetie, no. If you want to sit in Row B of Citi Field, right behind the plate, dressed like you’re about to attend the annual Hell’s Angels Beach Getaway, you do not get to complain when people want to take a picture of you. This has nothing to do with you being famous, and everything to do with you looking like a goddamn freak at the ballpark.
At least pick up a Mets hat at the concession stand first.
Lady Gaga, You Just Suck. Enjoy your Golden Slurpee.
See that over there? On the right? That’s the Golden Slurpee. Nice, isn’t it? We’ll come back to that in a little bit.
This morning, I wake up, and turn on the TV, and discover the Mariners / Indians game is on TV.
So, top of the sixth, and the leadoff batter is Adrian Beltre. He takes the first pitch down the left field line, fair ball, and as it heads into the corner a fan reaches over the fence along the line, with a mitt on one hand, and a cellphone firmly attached to his ear in the other.
And the ball skips out of his mitt and skitters away. Since a fan interfered with a live ball, it’s a ground-rule double. No problem so far, and no real harm done in the game, since Beltre was very likely going to pull into second with a double anyhow. But here’s what makes it Chez Fred-worthy:
They go back to the guy who interfered, who is now pleading with the cop there for security to toss him the ball that he muffed. To his credit, the cop ignores him. And the guy sits back down, visibly miffed that this cop is denying him a souvenir.
And through this ENTIRE incident, the cellphone never once leaves the guy’s ear.
So, it is with great fanfare that I present the first winner of the Golden Slurpee, Chez Fred’s new “You Just Suck” award, now sponsored by our friends at 7-Eleven.
This morning, while I was getting dressed for work, I flip on the TV, and there’s The Today Show on NBC, and Matt Lauer is introducing Jose Canseco, live and in person at the NBC News studios at 49th Street and Rockefeller Plaza.
For the non-sports fans, Jose was a baseball player who enjoyed some success in the late 80’s and early 90’s, most notably in 1988 for becoming the first player in baseball history to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season, before losing in the World Series to the Los Angeles Dodgers in five games. (As a former Dodger fan, I had to get that shot in. :)) Unfortuntately, those ubiquitous “personal demons” caught up with him, and the twilight days of his career were spent in relative obscurity, if not notoriety.
And now he’s written a book, which I refuse to plug by name (if you really wanna know, search Amazon, I’m sure it’ll pop right up), a tell-all where he not only admits to having taken steroids during the majority of his playing career (and if you’ve seen him, you can file that one directly under “N” for No Shit), but he also outs several other players, including Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi, and Bret Boone, as being regular steroid users themselves. And, of course, the media being what it is, this is causing some controversy, and Jose’s doing the talk show circuit to drum up some more sales.
No shock here. This is the same Canseco who ran a 900-number in his heyday where you could find out what he had for breakfast, who has sold off a great many of the momentos of his playing career, including MVP trophies, equipment, milestone baseballs, and stuff of that nature. Jose’s always been about the Benjamins.
Now, the great thing about writing a tell-all book is that you can pretty much make any accusations you want and the people being accused don’t get a floor to respond. So, of course, Lauer lays in with the questions. “How do you respond to their denials?” “Is it all about the money?” “Why are you selling your World Series ring?” (He was a member of the 2000 Yankees, I believe by trade. One at-bat in the Series itself. He struck out.)
(Oh, now, THIS is interesting. I was gonna link to the ring on Jose’s online store, but it’s no longer there, and at $40,000, I doubt it found a buyer. But you can get a game-worn autographed jersey from when he was with the White Sox (I don’t even remember him BEING with the White Sox) for the low low price of $745.95.)
Of course, Jose neatly dodges everything thrown at him, and, with some blather along the lines of “Something’s gonna happen in a month. I can’t talk about it, but you’re gonna wanna keep watching. ‘Cuz something’s gonna happen. That I can’t talk about. In a month. The something, that is.”, strongly hints that he’s gonna take a lie detector test to prove the veractiy of his claims…on Pay Per-View.
You see it coming, of course. In cooperation with our friends at Oreck Vaccuums, we proudly offer a “You Just Suck”…to Matt Lauer. For letting Jose get away with it.
If Matt really wanted to, he could have put the screws to Jose, but he didn’t. Every time Jose started dodging a question, Matt just took it, and moved along to the next question. Yeah, sometimes he pressed for an answer, but he never once called him out outright for not giving one. Big fat softballs, right across the plate. Might as well have been Larry King.
(And a second one should go to whoever booked Jose’s dumb ass on the show to start with. Because if you had done ANY research at all on the guy, you should have been able to tell that this was EXACTLY where the interview was gonna go.)
I guess Steve Case feels that his untrained kittens have filled the great sandbox that is USENet with enough shit that it’s time to move along. America Online announced yesterday that they would discontinue support of USENet newsgroups for their customers.
I love the quotes from the spokesdrone: “We are seeing that traffic on newsgroups is pretty minimal at this point.” Gee, could that be because your idiot members turned it into such a festering pile of crap that nobody can stand to deal with the signal to noise ratio?
Proof once again that AOL is the scumsucking parasite of the Internet. I am proud to offer them what I hope will become a regular feature here at Chez Fred, the inaugural Oreck Vacuums “You Just Suck” award.
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