Psuedo Celebrities and the People who Follow Them

"Who the hell are the Kardashians?"  That was the question I posed to my co-workers a few weeks ago.  I have been hearing of Kim and her sisters Kourtney and Kloe' (what's up with all the k's?) for years but had no idea what they are famous for.  Infamous would probably be a better word.  I knew that a seemingly confused Bruce Jenner is their stepfather, but to me that wasn't enough for them to have their own reality show.  So I asked the woman who works by me (and has a huge crush on Reggie Bush) what made them famous.

Their father was Robert Kardashian who probably is most famous for being friends with and an attorney to O.J. Simpson.  Um, I remember F. Lee Bailey and Johnnie Cochran, but not Mr. Kardashian.  And is that really enough to make someone's daughter a celebrity.  Ah, but no!  It turns out there is more to Kim Kardashian's story and her infamy.

Wikipedia describes Kim as "an American celebutante, socialite, model, actress, and television personality. She is known for her social life and her role on the E! reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians."  I think the word celebutante says a whole heck of a lot here.  Place her with the more well known celebutante Paris Hilton and I still wouldn't care if they were on television.  Or the planet for that matter.  Meh.  I'm supposed to be excited about someone who carries around a Chihuahua as a fashion accessory? Sorry, but no.




And it still begs the question, just what has made Kim so famous that she gets so much press?  Then the women at work told me about the "leaked" sex tape she made with R&B singer Ray J - who has his own reality show.  And it probably helped her when she posed nude for Playboy magazine.  Ah!  Now we're getting somewhere.  She's famous for being an internet sensation with a sex tape and for being curvy and naked in print.  Wow.  If that's all it takes to be famous, then there are a lot of people out there who can aspire to greatness.

The bigger question for me though is this: what is the matter with the public that they can take someone without any obvious talent and make them a "Star"?  I don't understand the obsession with reality shows and I am completely clueless as to the appeal of celebutantes and their ilk.  There are so many people deserving of that kind of attention who haven't stripped down to their birthday suits.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm sure the Kardashians are perfectly lovely people, I just don't care to see them on TV.  Or on the covers of countless magazines each month.  When they start contributing to society as a whole, then maybe I'll pay a little attention.  Maybe.

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Update 3/27/10: Yes, I realize there is a certain irony on commenting on pseudo celebrities in a negative way on this blog.  By doing so I help perpetuate the cycle of keeping their names in the public's eye.  I suppose my saving grace is that I'm not making any money off of this.

Password Overload

I've done it again.  I've joined another blog community.  I'm sure that I must be insane.  I now have access to three different blogs under my name: this one on Blogger, one on WordPress (because I couldn't decided between the two when I first started out) and now one on a different site.  Oh, I also have JimShue.com because my stinking ego didn't want some other guy with the same name to claim the domain just in case I become famous. :) 

Blogger is my primary one.  I've been using this one for over a year now and feel comfortable with the format and the functionality of it.  I'm please that I can customize the look of it to make it my own without having to pay a webmaster (why does that sound slightly S & M to me?) to create something unique for me.  I can change colors and the background image in the Masthead to make my blog somewhat unique to me.

WordPress I use to email thoughts from work - that is when I have free time.  It sat dormant for about a year before I posted for the first time to it.  I think it was a rant about idiot early a.m. drivers.  From the one post that there is, you can probably discern that the free time from work thing hasn't happened yet.  In fact, we've been on mandatory overtime off and on for three months now which doesn't give me any time to waste company time by sending emails to my blog.

The third one I started today just so that I could have access to a blog that is being kept private.  I can't go into details bout it.  If I did I'd have to kill you.  Ha!  Seriously, it's a friend who's new to this and just doesn't want to go public, but wants some encouragement from a few friends.  I can respect that.  It's a bit scary to put your thoughts down, hit enter and wait to see if anyone is reading and if they are, how their comments are going to go.  Will they be nice?  Or will they be like the ranters on newspaper forums who can't find a nice thing to say about anything?

But having three blogs (and a website) got me to doing some weird math problem.  Counting work, I have three email accounts.  The first email account I had was for work.  I quickly discovered that there were free email accounts to be had and procured one from Hotmail using my name.  I found that after a while of using it to make online purchases and registering for numerous websites or product warranties that the level of spam hitting it was daunting at times.  I then created a Yahoo! account for personal emails.  Having the two really works well as I don't have to check the Hotmail account as often for legitimate email that may have been caught in the spam filter.  Conversely, I rarely received spam on the Yahoo! account.

Now for the tricky part and what is contributing to the feelings of insanity... passwords.  Every account that is created requires a password.  Experts say that to protect your information that you should create a unique password for each separate account.  Um, right.  I'll admit that I've duplicated some passwords and that the accounts that I haven't are the ones that when I'm prompted for a password are the ones that for the life of me I can't remember.  National City has locked me out of their Points program because I can't remember the password.  In order to reset my password I have to enter the PIN that was assigned to me when I signed on for the Points program.  Hell, I can't even remember that a PIN was assigned! 

So what's the answer?  (What was the question?)  Is there an easy way of remembering passwords that are hard enough to thwart hackers?  Is this something I'm too paranoid about?  I'd really like suggestions from any of you that have the same problem.  Short of not doing anything online anymore, I'm stumped.

Time Capsule: Part III

Tomorrow is Ground Hog Day.  My point?  None, actually.  Other than it's a holiday and I had no other tie-in to the continuing archeology dig going on in our garage.  Today's find was a stash of candy inside a purple cardboard heart.  Valentine's Day could be your first assumption, but the actual holiday would be Easter.  Inside the heart was as stash of Cadbury Creme Eggs, circa 2001.  Yup, we're had almost nine year old creme filled chocolate eggs stashed away as if they were Faberge' Eggs handed to us by the Csar of Russia. 

Curiosity got the best of me and I just had to find out what they looked like after all these years.  Here is a picture of what I found inside.  Turns out they aren't so creamy after all this time.  But it wasn't as bad as finding a real Easter egg after a year or two hidden behind a forgotten piece of furniture.  The most surprising part was the smell of chocolate wasn't rancid after sitting in "climate controlled" storage.  Still, I wasn't tempted to try one out.

One final word on this.  Either fresh or nine years old...  Gross.