June 26, 2009

            A seventeen year old girl in Romania is dead because of her need to tweet.  Desperate to have her Twitter followers know minute-by-minute details of her life, she took her laptop with her while she was taking a bath.  Unfortunately for her, the battery was low on power, so she plugged the device into a wall outlet.  Well, water and electricity don’t exactly mix, and now she’s dead, and we’ll get no 140 character updates from the great beyond. 

            Then there’s Dina Lohan.  Now why anyone other than her friends and family would follow her, I can’t understand, but apparently people do.  Anyway, she checked into a hotel earlier this week, and horror among horrors, they ONLY PROVIDED HER WITH TWO TOWELS!!!!!   So what does she do?  Call the front desk?  Notify housekeeping?  Talk to the manager?  Suck it up and cope, realizing that two towels in adequate? 

            No.  She sent a tweet, asking her followers to call the hotel on her behalf.  And I guess that turned into a thing between her and the staff, but by this point in the story, I lost what miniscule interest I had.

            Perez Hilton (His real name is Mario Lavandeira, BTW, and I resent the fact that I know that—It’s not a factoid I sought or wish to retain, but there it is) made what passes for news these days because of a beatdown from a manager of the Black-Eyed Peas.  The openly gay celebrity blogger hurled the “Other F-Word” and Hilton ended up getting his face punched in. 

Using that slur and throwing the punch were both wrong, but to me the wrongest thing about were the tweets Hilton sent following the altercation.

            Wouldn’t it be more important to talk to the police and take care of yourself before updating the sad, sad people who follow you?  I don’t know about you, but I could have waited for that information.  Indefinitely, in fact

 I guess I just don’t understand the celebrity culture.  Without my consent, Perez Hilton became famous by blogging about other famous people.  And I can’t blame him; it’s our fault for allowing it to happen. 

Why do we create these icons, famous simply for being famous, only to put them under a microscope as we hope that we get to watch them crash and burn?  Are we modern day Romans, hoping to see blood and gore as we sit in front of our computers rather than at the Coliseum, substituting the Paparazzi for the lions?  And when do we wake up to the fact that as long as we continue to follow the doings of a Hilton, be it Paris or Perez, they’ll jAust keep giving us more?  But like monsters under the bed, if we simply close our eyes, they’ll just go away.  And wouldn’t we be better off if they did?

 Meanwhile, there’s chaos in Iran, (and we’re getting a lot of that information through Twitter, so you can’t blame the device for the people who misuse it), gas prices are on the rise, the debate on health care rages, the economy isn’t exactly healthy, and, oh yeah,  North Korea is threatening to launch a missile towards Hawaii on July 4th.  But let’s not focus on that.  The marriage of Jon and Kate is ending, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson are dead and these are things that apparently deserve non-stop coverage and breathless discussion.