Media meets Reality

A trio of stories in the Washington Post highlight the blurring media and reality.

In the first, Hank Stuever reports on an Extreme Makeover: Home Edition house in the suburbs of Atlanta that has gone into foreclosure because its owners used it as collateral for a $450k loan which went into arrears.

According to the article:

The mayor of Lake City, Willie Oswalt, who said he'd helped lift a beam into place in the Harper's living room, told the press that "it's aggravating. It just makes you mad. You do that much work, and they just squander it."

I have to agree with Willie. What idiots! I can only imagine if the loan defaulter was a participant of the original Extreme Makeover program. It'd been awful tough for the bank to repossess silicone implants and porcelain veneers...

If that little piece of schadenfreude isn't enough for you, check out Peter Marks' review of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Ah, yes--forget Wicked, we've got Springer and the epic tales of trailer trash and the morally and mentally challenged coming to an opera house near you:

Thus do sopranos and baritones, stripped down to bras and panties and, in a couple of cases, far kinkier outfits, sing coarse odes to misogyny, scatological perversion and pole-dancing. The rabidness of Springer's show is tailor-made for the emotional intensity of opera. In angelic-sounding arias, the guests spew torrents of profanity; in one inspired sequence, the enunciation of a monosyllabic barnyard epithet is stretched hilariously over several minutes of music.

And finally, police in Michigan arrested a man who they say tried to steal posters and other items related to the new Batman movie from a cinema lobby
while dressed up as the Joker. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery--but the Joker as a petty thief? You'd think the guy could have come up with a cleverer caper than stealing movie posters while dressed up as the character who said, "This town deserves a better class of criminal...and I'm gonna give it to them!"

Soon all our lives will be one big reality show...