I should put these in separate entries, but I wont.

[fancycwabs]

• Earlier this week, I was enjoying the schadenfreude of hearing irate parents call in to a morning radio show complaining about the ten-minute sellout of tickets to a Hannah Montana concert in Memphis, for two reasons: One, Hannah Montana is clearly a product manufactured by Disney, between that and High School Musical, it amuses me to see so many folks drinking the Kool-Aid. Two, she's clearly got a porn star name--I mentally remark on this EVERY TIME I pass her conspicuously prominently displayed CD at Target (seriously. Go to Target and see if the Hannah Montana CD isn't on the inside corner of the main aisle--the "racetrack," if you will--at eye level). I thought I'd enjoy some more of that sweet sweet feeling this morning when I was checking the local newspaper site and saw another article about irate parents, when I noticed, buried in the third or fourth paragraph, that Miley Cyrus (aka the aforementioned Hannah Montana) is Billy Ray Cyrus' kid, which throws my mind into a strange loop, as I've never heard a Hannah Montana song, so now I just envision a fourteen-year-old girl singing "Achy Breaky Heart."
  
  Further reading (into the comments for the article, which are grounds for EVEN MORE schadenfreude), informs me that Disney also apparently has created a group called "The Cheetah Girls," which was code for strippers (let's assume that link is NSFW) when I was in college in Atlanta--so a good number of Georgia Tech alumni could confess to being fans of The Cheetah Girls back before they were nationally popular. When folks talk about their "tweens" being really into The Cheetah Girls, I laugh and laugh and they think I'm crazy and back away slowly.


• I have, over the past six years, said things far worse than the phrase "General Betray-us," (mostly along the lines that Bush and Cheney et. al. are getting filthy rich off the deaths of our American fighting men and women, and have managed to turn the Katrina disaster into a profit center, as well) and yet I haven't gotten any condemnation from the Senate. Where's the no-love for me? I want a resolution condemning MY first amendment rights, too!


• Upcoming auditions in the next couple months: The Pirates of Penzance, Pride & Prejudice, Room Service, The Great American Trailer Park Musical, Scapin, The Underpants, West Side Story. I'd like to think I could get into something.

Comments

[hatgrlstargazer.livejournal.com]

That first point was all the more confusing to me because I originally read it as "irate pirates (for perhaps understandable reasons). I had no idea why so many pirates wanted to see some tween performer, and I thought the Disney thing was some reference to Pirates of the Caribbean. I thought you may find that amusing.

Also, every time someone mentions General Petraeus my brain launches into the Doctor Zaius song from The Simpsons.

[samethreechords.livejournal.com]

My sister used to love the Cheetah Girls when their original Disney Channel movie came out, but she was like 9 at the time and she's now 13 so I dunno if that still applies.

They're awful.

[redtheblue.livejournal.com]

"I have, over the past six years, said things far worse than the phrase "General Betray-us," (mostly along the lines that Bush and Cheney et. al. are getting filthy rich off the deaths of our American fighting men and women, and have managed to turn the Katrina disaster into a profit center, as well) and yet I haven't gotten any condemnation from the Senate."

I agree with journalism professor Roy Peter Clark on this one:

"The headline writer should have followed the advice, almost a century old now, of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who lectured his Cambridge students that "style ... can never be ... extraneous ornament ... Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it -- whole-heartedly -- and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.""

The Republicans united around the headline and the content of the ad was completely ignored. Victory?