One of the more tortured voicemails from Meri Brown to her invisible/nonexistent paramour, Sam Cooper. Cute devil, he is, for a man who doesn't exist. It's deeply sad and a little frightening to think of the emotional abyss this woman must have been living in to fall for such a ruse, though it's still less terrifying to contemplate than the abyss in the heart of a woman like Jackie.
It's been a while since I've written about the polygamous soap opera Sister Wives, which is undoubtedly the most poisonous reality program ever to air on TLC (often called The Loser Channel, though once long ago it was devoted to "learning"). And I should never write about Sister Wives again, because not only has the youngest/most recent wife Robyn popped out a couple more pups, the first/oldest wife Meri was recently CATFISHED by a sociopathic middle-aged woman (who lives in her mother's basement, no kidding) named Jackie Overton. This Jackie posed as a handsome, wealthy man called Sam Cooper for months and months, while poor Meri, jilted by the family and feeling oh-so-barren after her one-and-only kid flew the coop, ate up all his flattery with a spoon like an entire container of Cool Whip non-dairy topping.
Still with me? I'm not, but I'll go on. Sister Wives has become a sort of addictive agony for me now, and so far this season they've run TWO episodes that were two hours long. That's a mind-numbing four hours of dysfunctional polygamy. The whole thing has become so staged that you can see these folks looking around for their cue cards, and several times per episode the director speaks to them (captioned, yet) from off-camera. Breaking the fourth wall, or breaking the barrier of indifference in the family?
Kody, the clueless patriarch with the very unconvincing surfer-dude hairdo, always sits there talking, usually about himself, as if he doesn't even know WHO or WHAT or WHERE his wives are. Unless he's in the bedroom impregnating one of them (that would be Robyn), that's probably true. Three of the four wives, too old to have any more kids, have been pretty much shelved. Meri was even required to divorce Kody (as if they were ever really married!) so Kody could then marry Robyn (who used to be married to someone else, explaining how she had three kids - but now had to marry Kody, so her kids could be - oh, who gives a fuck).
So Meri, left alone in a giant house without her one grown-up child (a daughter who seems to hate her - we'll get to see the catfight next episode!)has been shunted aside as useless while Robyn just keeps poppin' 'em out. They obviously need some more kids, and soon the tally will be somewhere around 20. Squicks me out that they all look alike, but they're all half-Kody, aren't they? Squick. Anyway, Meri started itchin' for action of some sort. SOMEhow she ended up "chatting" with someone on the internet, and ended up with This Guy who turns out to be a woman. The woman is an especially poisonous sort who is now out to ruin Meri by posting all her intimate voicemails on YouTube, not to mention embarrassing photos showing her suggestively eating a banana.
But that's not what I'm writing about today! One of the many sons - well, who knows who the mother is, but we can assume Kody is the Dad - is named Garrison, and guess what. He wants to join the army! Here is where the show's credibility is stretched so far it's close to the snapping point. Why not call him Beetle Bailey or Sad Sack? But anyway, Garrison wants to join a garrison somewhere, and there is the inevitable feverish discussion amongst family members, when the decision was probably made months ago. One of the other brothers - "a brother from another mother", Kody calls him (and the rest of them, when he forgets their names) is training to be an Officer, whereas it looks as if Garrison won't rise any higher than digging latrines.
Wait for it: here comes my point! "I want to join the army," Garrison (Beetle Bailey) says, his muffled words spelled out in captions. "I think it will test my mettle." I am sure, nearly certain, that most of the viewers said, "My God, LOOK at that spelling mistake."
Now, Garrison didn't make the "mistake". I'm amazed he knew the word "mettle" at all. And using it did not mean he knew how to spell it. How many people DO know how to spell "mettle"? The producers of the show must have looked it up. It's one of those words where if you spell it correctly, someone will look at you with irritated contempt and say, "It's M-E-T-A-L," then wait for you to thank them for setting you straight. Imagine: thinking "mettle" is a word!
This led me to remember a few others, similar misspellings or word-switcheroos (some of them bordering on the malaprop-ish). I wish I could think of more, but I am sure they will come to me because they are jammed in my face daily. Someone on Facebook, a teenage girl probably, posts, "I looked out the window, and LOW AND BEHOLD, there was my kitten eating the neighbor's pet grasshopper." Well - ?? Low and behold has to be right, because low is spelled . . . low. That's just how you do it. You can't take off the w, for God's sake - it makes no sense!
Low, how the mighty have fallen. OK, here's another: "I was in the THROWS of the flu at the time." (This is a misuse within a misuse, because flu is often spelled flue - and that, too is a real word, but - ). That IS how you spell throws, if you are talking about multiple tosses. I even looked it up, and if one has the flue, one often throes up. (Sorry, that was a mistake. Or two.)
One of the most irritating for me - and it's becoming almost universal - is loose instead of lose. Thus, "even after following the 600-lb.-a-week Chris Powell torture plan, I just couldn't loose weight." I have this image of someone loosing great chunks of weight on civilization, and once that weight is loosed, it wreaks havoc (never mind) on all and sundry (no, wait a minute! That's Sunday.)
Something else happened, and it peaked my interest. People have completely forgotten how to spell piqued. It just doesn't look right! It couldn't have a Q in it, could it? To confuse matters still more, peaked can mean something quite apart from pointy: it can mean pale or sickly, though it's pronounced PEAK-id. I don't think anyone under 40 has heard of this word, or believes that it even exists. Like quinsy and lumbago, it has just fallen into disuse and (thus) obsolescence.
Now getting into pronunciations - a hair product ad for Tousle Me Softly kept insisting the word was towssel (almost like tassel) rather than tousle. I always thought the s had a z sound, not a sibilant sssss. The ad gave me the awful squeamish feeling that most young women aren't familiar with the word tousle, have never seen it or used it, or can't spell it, and surely can't pronounce it to save their lives.
Since it was pointed out to me, I've started to notice "vocal fry", a tendency for mostly-young women to drop the pitch of their voices on the last syllable of a word or phrase with a sort of darkly grating, almost grinding sound that's hard to describe (but you'd know it to hear it). If you're a Kardashian, forget about it, your voice is just one big CROAK. I also hear final words opened out with an elongated short-a sound: "That's not really trewwwaaAAHH" (or, with the requisite "uptalk", "trewwwaaAAHH?")
Then there's what I call the Say Yass to the Drass syndrome: "It's badder to go there for lunch when it's not so crowded?" "She saadd she had her nails done in raadd but it wasn't trewwwwwaaAAHH?" And so on. I would ask what language they were speaking - I can't even think of appropriate phrases for it because it isn't really English. I guess it's a form of Valley Speak, but updated in the most bizarre way possible.
One thing it does is convey privilege, even entitlement. This isn't just uptalk (and even older people are upspeaking more and more now, no longer outgrowing it at age 14), it's la-di-da-speak, the drawly cigarette-holding speech of a post-millennial Tallulah Bankhead. Poor folk don't vocal fry because they have other fish to fry. Adding an extraneous "aah" to the end of words like the little fillip on the top of a Dairy Queen soft-serve cone (and PLEASE do not tell me it's spelled Phillip!) strikes them as silly, or maybe they just don't have time for it.
Want a great example? or a horrible one? I've just discovered a real estate-flipping show called Flip or Flop on the home-whatever channel, and the woman on it is a living Barbie, I swear. She has every vocal mannerism ever invented. I don't know where it all comes from. I marvel at this, and at her appearance, her unblinking Barbie eyes and pound of makeup. Nearly every sentence is either upticked, fried, "oh-ahhh"-ed, "badder"-ed, or all of the above. I don't know how she keeps track of it all.
Oh. Oh. Oh! When I actually listened to this snippet of the Flip or Flop couple on a talk show (you'll see what I mean after only a couple of sentences: the woman is a blonde Kardashian), I heard another affectation: at the end, she said, "thank yeeaaaoooowwwwwwwhhhhhh" instead of "thank you". There's a sort of diphthong-y thing going on, a whole series of vowel sounds strung together. A simple sequence of ee and oo becomes a sort of cascading waterslide of vowel sounds that seems to encompass all of them. Instead of spreading out slushily in a crescendoed short-a sound, it sort of goes "YAOWWWH!" and is hauled back in again. Doesn't anyone realize how bizarre they sound? Why are they doing this? Was it a decision on their part? Who started it? More to the point: when will it stop?
Blogger's amen. Yes! Finally we hear the Truth about the whole sickening, sordid Ghomeshi disaster, and one would think there would be relief all around. But some of the commentary on this superb act of truth-telling is distinctly "off". Some journalists are writing about Kathryn Borel's statement as if it's a sadistic, deliberately ball-crushing act of malice, bitter vengeance for Ghomeshi's near-total escape from legal consequences after his shit-eating, lawyer-ghosted "apology".
I say "ghosted" because even after his 61 (count 'em! 61) therapy sessions, I have no illusions that this guy is doing anything but cover his own ass. This is a man who is just now, duhh, figuring out that, um, uh, er, groping and grabbing and choking women MIGHT just be a little bit disrespectful, particularly if it is done on the job. Might. Just. And this from a man nearing 50! He is 48 years old, and while waiting for trial, he was sent to live with his Mommy. There was nowhere else for him to go. No doubt she believes the sun rises and sets on him.
Ghomeshi has no friends, never has had any friends (this came out when the scandal first erupted and it was revealed that not one single person at the CBC liked him), and does not even have relationships with women in the usual, adult sense. And yet, and yet, look how much damage one slimy, narcissistic/opportunistic asshole can do. So desperate was the CBC for some sexing up that they took on this unshaven goat with the mind of a 14-year-old, then told women who worked under him (pun intended) that they had to put up with his humiliating grabs and gropes because "that's just the way he is". The whole place tiptoed around him, and it went on for years.
No, nay, never-no-more! I don't know HOW he is now, nor do I care. His life is over, as far as I am concerned - that is, if it ever began.
There's a piece about all this that I find particularly obnoxious because it uses boxing metaphors. I find it insulting because Kathryn Borel was not boxing. She was setting the record straight. She is not Muhammed Ali doing that, whatever, rope-a-dope thing (who cares what it is anyway?). She's a person, a woman grievously wronged who, while not having her day in court, found another way to win. This, in my opinion, was heroism, so far beyond a mere boxing match that there is no comparison. She got up there, she told the truth, she was passionate and self-possessed. We all saw. We all heard. So perhaps truth does come out, perhaps shallow narcissists do eventually fall. Stick a fork in him, people are saying. He's done.
But. We'll see.
P. S. When I first saw this photo, my scalp prickled. The stance of the hero is clear. Head up, back straight, her body posture dignified and confident. But there is also an indomitable spirit. She looks like a racehorse about to leap out of the gate. The archway over her head gives the whole scene the look of a classic battle. Victory sometimes comes in unexpected ways.
Tell me, folks. Are your gifs running a little slow and jerky? Mine are too, sort of, which is some sort of indication I'm not supposed to be posting 15 or 20 of them a day. Some are huge files, too, and I can't predict when that's going to happen. I'm at the mercy of Giphy, Makeagif and a new one called Facegarage (don't ask, but it made all those evangelical weight loss ones, so it's OK) and their individual peccadilloes. It's been my experience that gif programs are designed to break down sooner or later, especially the better ones. (Can you say Gifsforum?)
Speaking of peccadilloes. The image of a well-coiffed woman blowing out a langorous lungful of ignited tobacco leaves was once considered not only classy and elegant, but sexy. Coughing your lungs out in a pulmonary ward isn't. But who knew? So long as there was a smile in your smoking.
All these ads talk about "flavour". No one talks about the flavour/taste of a cigarette any more. In fact, no one talks about them period, because the whole subject has become taboo. But in these ads, people savoured their smokes with something like erotic pleasure. I do remember that stale, ghastly smell lingering on for hours, getting into your clothes and hair. And I never smoked.
At a certain point in the 1950s, health statistics began to come out that alarmed the big tobacco guys, so they rushed out ads that made their product seem safer. Figures were bandied about. "Recessed" filters made your smoke "cooler", "less irritating to the throat". Percentages, quarter-inches, mentions of tar and nicotene were reassuring to customers because, obviously, this little filter thingie here, this RECESSED filter, would take all the danger out of smoking. One ad even went so far as to say, "I want a treat, not a treatment". The guy would probably go on to get many treatments before the end.
Eventually, the real statistics leaked out: filters, low-tar-and-nicotene tobacco blends, and all that horseshit made not one bit of difference. Smoking cigarettes could be lethal, and there seemed to be no safe level. No one talks about smoking one or two cigarettes a day any more, because the assumption is that everyone is heavily addicted and blows through a pack or two a day.
And we won't get into the cost. I don't know how anyone can afford to smoke these days, but people buy tobacco before they buy food, so I guess it must be, uh, er, kind of addictive after all. The packages all have horrific warnings all over them, and photos of rotten lungs and people smoking through holes in their throats. I guess it happens.
