RantGate: I Don't Get It

Is everyone out for their fifteen minutes of fame? Is it us seeking the attention. or is it the media focusing the attention on us. For every news story out there, we suffer through countless more tales of those people on the fringe, who knew somebody, worked with somebody, had once been in the same situation, saw it, heard it, smelled it, felt it. It's a need for attention that I don't understand.

I don't get it.

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Beau Breedlove had an affair with out Portland Mayor Sam Adams back in 2005. It was a big scandal, with everyone, or almost everyone, calling for Adams to resign. He didn't; and he's still the mayor.

But Breedlove took his, ahem, media exposure to a new level. It wasn't enough that his personal live, personal love, personal affair, personal fling, whatever it was, was splashed all over the papers and the web. No, Breedlove took himself to Unzipped magazine and posed for the cover, using the story to further his career, or whatever.

Inside the May issue of Unzipped, Breedlove will tell all about his relationship with Adams and how the story broke, he'll reveal all about his own sex life and the kind of men he finds most attractive, and, of course, he'll do it buck naked.

I don't get it.

Is that what Breedlove wanted? To be a cover model for a male magazine? To be a nude model? No big deal there. But why exploit yourself and the relationship you had in the past. Is it only to be famous?

Because there's fame, and then there's infamy.

And they are not the same.

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I don't like to talk about the OctoMom because it makes me cringe thinking about those poor children who will be trotted out at every birthday and Christmas, Halloween and whatever day their Mama needs mo' money.

They are being used. She's the user.

It isn't a miracle she had eight babies. it was science.

So please, Entertainment Tonight and Today, quit using that word.

And the part I don't get is that when this miserable excuse for a parent was bringing home two of her eight babies, the car was surrounded by the media; the shoved at the car, they tried to keep Octo from closing the garage door; they tried to crawl under the garage door.

It was so terrifying that, inside the car, Octo was dialing 911.....AGAIN!....to ask for police help.

And how do we know all this?

Because she had Entertainment Tonight inside the car with her! She called the police to say that the media was dangerously close to her and her babies while she had the media in the car with her!

This is the worst case of media whore-ness I've ever seen.

I think we could all do ourselves a favor by not watching this tragedy unfold any further. Don't read about it online, or watch on TV. Don't talk about it.

Seriously.

I'm done as of right no.....

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That plane crash in Montana in which fourteen people lost their lives.

The media keeps mentioning that seven of them were children.

As if that's worse that the children were killed and not the adults.

But then they take it a step further and talk about the children, and the ones that were under ten years of age.

I guess if you're a child over ten, or an adult, dying in a fiery plane crash doesn't warrant any sympathy.

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I saw some video of the church service and funeral for Natasha Richardson.

Liam Neeson, his sons, Vanessa Redgrave, her sister Lynne, and the rest of Natasha's family stood outside the church posing for photographers, apparently in the hopes that the press might leave them alone.

They were burying a wife, mother, niece, daughter, sister, friend, and they have to pose for pictures to guarantee some sense of privacy.

it's outrageous.

But what makes it worse, is that just after seeing the images of the family posing, the next story was Did Natasha Have To Die? The media has grabbed onto this story and dug it's heels in deep. The woman is barely dead, the family is still mourning, and yet all the conversation turns to any mistakes that may, or may not, have been made, and who made them.

Can't we just let her rest in peace and let her family grieve?

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Fifteen minutes.

I don't want mine, so they're up for grabs.

Peaceful Angel

Natasha Richardson was born in London, a member of the Redgrave family, an acting dynasty, the daughter of the late director and producer Tony Richardson and actress Vanessa Redgrave.

Richardson made her film debut in 1968 at the age of four in a film directed by her father, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Her official career began in regional theatre, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, England, while her screen debut was in Every Picture Tells a Story in 1984. A year later, Richardson appeared in a revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull--her first professional work in London's West End. She also starred in a London stage production of High Society, adapted from the Cole Porter film, and portrayed Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's Gothic.

In 1998, she won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. In 2005, she was onstage again, as Blanche DuBois in their revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.

Her first marriage was to filmmaker Robert Fox, from 1990 to 1992.

She married actor Liam Neeson in 1994, and had two sons with him: Micheál and Daniel.

Natasha Richardson helped raise millions of dollars in the fight against AIDS after her father, Tony Richardson, died of AIDS-related causes in 1991.

Richardson was actively involved in amfAR, becoming a board of trustees member in 2006, and participating in many other AIDS charities including Bailey House, God's Love We Deliver, Mothers' Voices, AIDS Crisis Trust and National AIDS Trust, for which she was an ambassador. Richardson received amfAR's Award of Courage in November 2000.

She didn't make a lot of noise, but the silence upon her passing is deafening.