14:59

A confession: I don't really follow popular culture. Like most people who own a television and don't live in a cave I can't avoid the highest profile events that ensnare he mass mind, but I'm nowhere near the cutting edge nor the inside track. I fake it instead, by basing almost everything I write about on Google Zeitgeist, which aggregates information on search activity on the search engine and provides a handy top fifteen for the previous week, and thus a reasonable approximation of the public eyeball of a given moment.

The downside of this is being unable, from time to time, to avoid some particularly noisome bit of public offal that I have been studiously ignoring, sometimes for weeks.

Case in point, it was not immediately obvious to me what the connection was between several components of the November 7 Zeitgeist report, namely number 2, "cardinal panthers cheerleaders," number 10, "renee thomas," and number 12, "angela keathley." It didn't take too long to connect the dots. That first one is not a typo, at least not my typo. Carolina Panther Cheerleaders would seem more appropriate. There's no mistaking the intent: I have been sucked into the vortex of the Carolina Panther Cheerleaders bathroom sex story.

This is one of those stories, that what strikes me is how utterly dull and mundane the true meat of the story is, which is some drunk beating some other drunk over some perfectly idiotic conflict in a bar. If I had to report every time that happened my work would never be done. No, of course the twist that has its pincers lodged firmly in the collective psyche is that the fight in question apparently started over allegations that the dispute arose over two cheerleaders having sex in a bathroom. Now again, if I had to write every time someone had sex in a bathroom... well, it wouldn't keep me as busy as covering the bar fight scene, but it would make for a lot more disgusting reading, I'm sure. There is evidently some issue of the alleged assaulter (that would be, uhhh, Renee Thomas) also presented a different cheerleader's ID to the police after she was taken into custody. Thomas and Kethley deny the sex part.

That is absolutely as far as I'm willing to go into the story, except to note that its tenacious hold on the public imagination is just so tediously predictable. It does present the opportunity for headlines that appeal to my sense of the surreal, such as "Panthers Cheerleaders Deny Lesbian Sex, Loud Moans Only Crying" (National Ledger, November 12 2005), and demonstrates that level of prurient controversy at which the truth or falsity of a given story becomes utterly irrelevant, and also provides the valuable lesson that using a fake ID on the police is a good way to turn a misdemeanor charge into a felony.

And it does, finally, lead me to the announcement that the future is already here and thus the time has come to canonize Warhol's comment on the future of fame as a Law. As in:

Warhol's Law: Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

Scrivener's First Corollary: 99.9% of the time it will be for being a complete jackass.

I should have just gone with puggles.

It'’s Rome, Baby! Home
It's Rome, Baby! Archives & Disclaimer