Oh, the outrage! and other stuff...

- DHC pinged me with this story thinking it would be a good blog post (she's right of course), and I was immediately reminded that uber music blogger Beth and two other "friends" couldn't make it to my birthday gathering at the Mike Doughty show back in March because they had tickets to see the gawdy asshat that is Barry Manilow. In Dana's words...

"Apparently, a group of kids with cancer were scheduled to appear on the "Today" show on the same day as Barry Manilow was to appear. When the kids got to the studio, they were ushered to the "green room". Allegedly BM threw a hissy fit and told the Today show people to keep THOSE kids OUT. The kids were quickly ushered to a closed down food court with filthy bathrooms and no food where they waited for a long time to appear on the show. A mother of a cancer victim called the Today Show and Barry's rep to complain, and even joined the "Barry Manilow fan club" on line so she could post a comment about this to his "fanilows". She referenced her deceased daughter's website in the process. WELL...she got HATE COMMENTS from MANY "fanilows", both on the BM fan club site AND on the caring bridgesite.

It would be really sad, but here's the one that got EVERYONE going: a woman named Kaaren Radecki from Pittsburgh wrote a comment on caring bridge about how Barry "would never do something like this" and how he is such a "caring person" (and she knows this because...?). It gets better: she followed up with a threat (I paraphrase): "Because of your actions, I will never again watch Marlo Thomas's St. Jude Children's Hospital "phonymercials" and never ever give another dime to St. Jude's". SERIOUSLY??? All over Barry Manilow's HONOR??? OK, I don't know what's worse...that someone is wacky enough to actually post something like this on someone's cancer website, OR that there are still (and ever WERE) rabid Barry Manilow fans who worship him enough to actually POST hate mail on a cancer website when they think that their dear Barry was slighted???? If ANYONE seriously needs to get a life, it's THESE pathetic souls...!!!"

The internets seem to support the story. Puts him in contention for Douche of the Year for sure.

- This post pretty much satirizes my feelings on civil disobedience and activism. It's good to laugh at yourself once in a while, right?

- This past weekend, I was digging through some old stuff and found a list of students I studied art with in England during the summer of 1985. I immediately sat down and Googled my three roommates (one fellow American, one Brit, and one Russian) who were all top shelf individuals and enormous talents. My British roommate Peter Woodward was by far the most talented guy I ever had the chance to know personally and it was great to actually track him down. It is obvious that his considerable talent has carried him far. I hope to pick up one of his works in the new year. You should too.

- Lastly, because it's badass...