Joel Murphy

When Britney Spears has an extended public meltdown involving umbrella attacks and child-endangerment or when Mel Gibson gets drunk and rants to Officer Sugartits about how the Jews are responsible for all of the wars in the world, we as a society tend to condemn them at the time, but ultimately are willing to give these performers a second (or third, or tenth) chance.

After enough time passes, we simply forgive and forget. Something else captures our collective attention – like a missing white girl or a crazy family who pretends their boy is inside a runaway balloon – and we simply move on. Then, somewhere down the line, Britney releases a new single or Mel Gibson releases a new movie and we all decide it’s okay to support them once again. Even Michael Jackson, who had his career marred by allegations of child molestation, was ultimately given a grand send-off when he died and now is once again fondly remembered as the King of Pop.

But it’s not always so easy to forgive and forget. Sometimes a celebrity’s actions are so egregious that it’s difficult to simply let it go. At those times, we are left with a difficult decision – do we separate the artist from the art and condemn the man while supporting his work or do we throw out the baby with the bathwater?

I’m talking about someone like Roman Polanski. The man is responsible for two classic Hollywood films (Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown) and a modern classic (The Pianist). There is no question that he is an incredibly talented filmmaker. But he is also someone who plead guilty to “engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl in the 1970s. He was accused of drugging and raping the girl at a party. Polanski served 42 days in prison and then fled the country when a judge ordered him to serve the remainder of his 90-day sentence.

As you all probably already know, Polanski was arrested last month when he traveled to the Zurich Film Festival to accept a lifetime achievement award. Since then, prominent figures in Hollywood – such as directors Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen and Neil Jordan – have petitioned for Polanski’s release. Whoopi Goldberg even went on The View and said what he did wasn’t really rape.

So clearly Hollywood has no problem standing behind the man despite his horrendous actions. But for the rest of us, it’s not always so easy to separate the work from the man. Personally, I have no sympathy for Polanski. I think he deserves whatever sentence he gets.

But at the same time, I think his films are absolutely brilliant. The Pianist is one of the most gripping and heart-wrenching films I’ve ever seen. Chinatown is one of the greatest examples of film noir. And Rosemary’s Baby is undeniably a classic. Yet, it’s hard to truly appreciate these films without feeling a tinge of guilt for supporting the man. It’s hard to admire the beauty of the work knowing it came from someone capable of such a horrible crime.

I had a similar dilemma with Chris Brown. This may surprise you considering what an uncoordinated, dorky white guy I am, but I am actually a big fan of Brown’s music. Of course, once it came out that Brown beat up his girlfriend Rhianna, suddenly he stopped ending up in heavy rotation on my iPod. But then, just last week, I found myself jamming to “With You,” but it wasn’t the same. It just seems tainted now.

The same thing happens whenever I watch The Naked Gun. That movie still holds up as one of the funniest films of my lifetime, but it’s a bit strange to watch a lighthearted comedy with O.J. Simpson in it. The fact that Simpson gets beat up throughout the entire film softens the blow a bit, but it’s still quite bizarre to see him on my TV screen rattling off one-liners with Leslie Nielsen.

Or there is Chris Benoit. Most of you probably only know Benoit as the guy who murdered his wife and child and then committed suicide. But I followed Benoit’s career for years, starting with his Four Horseman days in WCW. One of my fondest wrestling memories was watching Chris Benoit win the 2004 Royal Rumble live in Philly. I had always wanted to see a Royal Rumble live and I had always pulled for Benoit, who was a quintessential underdog. Seeing him win was a great moment. However, now it’s impossible to look back at that day without being reminded of the horrible crimes Benoit committed.

I could go on and on. R Kelly, Michael Vick, Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant – there have been so many actors, musicians and athletes who have done horrible things that forever tarnish their legacy. So many great moments have forever been tainted.

The question is – what do we do about it? Do we take Hollywood’s approach to Polanski and overlook the actions in favor of the work? Or do we throw out all of the movies, songs and sports footage featuring these celebrities, effectively pretending like none of it ever happened? Where is the middle ground?

I’ve thought long and hard about this and I think there is only one real solution …

Adorable, cuddly baby kittens.

That’s right, kittens. After all, kittens make everything better. Whether they are attacking the laces on your favorite pair of running shoes or hanging from a tree on the motivation poster you hang in your cubicle to keep you from going postal on your coworkers, kittens just make the world a happier place.

That’s why I think we need to add CGI kittens to all of these forever-tainted celebrities’ works. That way, I can pop in the 2004 Royal Rumble DVD and whenever those dark feelings about Benoit’s horrible actions surface, I can look at the corner of the screen and see an adorable kitten innocently batting a ball of yarn around. When I feel that tinge of guilt for playing “With You” on my iPod, I can look at the album artwork that pops up and see an adorable little calico with a toy mouse in its teeth looking back at me. When Lakers fans feel conflicted about cheering for Kobe during a great game, a cute little tabby licking its paws can appear on the Jumbotron to help ease their guilt.

It is the perfect solution …

Unless, of course, one of those adorable kittens rapes or kills someone. Then we are totally screwed.

Joel Murphy is the creator of HoboTrashcan, which is probably why he has his own column. He loves pugs, hates Jimmy Fallon and has an irrational fear of robots. You can contact him at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

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Aaron R. Davis

What a difference a day without the Internet makes.

I was blissfully offline the other day when most of America came to a grinding halt in order to scratch their collective heads and watch an empty balloon float away while the Heene family pretended their precious snowflake was trapped inside and in mortal danger. Getting online that evening, I saw that the Internet had already reduced the incident to a series of memes, with Kanye West interrupting and Adolf Hitler getting angry about it and all of the other dismissive bullshit that keeps everyone distracted from doing any real work.

It was a quintessentially American moment: an outpouring of caring (for an endangered white child) punctuated by a stop of productivity and an emotional immaturity so powerful it’s almost dangerous, and it made everyone involved – the Heenes, the police, the media and everyone paying attention to it – look like total idiots. And then it all turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by the Heenes for media attention so they could sell a reality show.

Yes, we love to exploit our children. We also love to watch people exploit their children; it’s entertaining. And when it stops being fun and it becomes more obvious that Kate Gosselin is insane or Dina Lohan is a dumbass of dangerous levels and the whole thing gets creepy, we have the pleasure of feeling superior to someone who would exploit their own babies, because we would never do something so vile. And if there’s one thing we love more than watching freaks, it’s having the moral high ground. (Hell, I’m enjoying my smug superiority right now by dismissing the Heene Hoax as an act of idiocy perpetrated by idiots for the pleasure of idiots, aren’t I?)

But there are times when having the moral high ground doesn’t take any effort at all. There are some people who just so terrible, who do something so unforgivable, that they seem to have been put in this world for the sole purpose of providing object lessons to the rest of us on how not to act.

This is a case with an unnamed woman in the UK whose exploitation of her young son make the Heenes, the Gosselins and even the Lohans of the world look like they just made a couple of honest mistakes.

This 35 year-old woman thought the easiest way to make money would be to claim that her baby was seriously ill. For six years.

Six. Years.

For six years, she claimed around $200,000 in benefits because she lied to the authorities and claimed her child was very ill.

Now, it’s one thing (one very bad thing) to lie and say your baby is sick. But this gets even worse.

She provided fake glucose and urine samples to prove her son was diabetic.

She claimed the boy had cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis, so she got a wheelchair and made sure her son’s school spent thousands making itself wheelchair-friendly.

She claimed he had dysphagia (a throat disorder) and all manner of food allergies, and the perfectly healthy boy had to be hooked up to a drip to take in liquid food. Which is nothing compared to the fact that, even though the doctors found nothing wrong with the kid in actual medical tests, doctors installed a tube in his stomach to avoid reflux at her behest. Unnecessary surgery on a four-year-old kid? That almost makes Ali Lohan’s underage boob job seem like mother-daughter bonding.

The kid, now eight, was on a special diet for diabetics and prescribed medication he didn’t need. He received care at three hospitals, where apparently they just take the mother’s word for it and don’t do any actual medical testing. Who runs that hospital? Jenny McCarthy? According to her, being a mom makes you medically qualified, right? And this woman, just like Jenny McCarthy and her dangerous anti-vaccine bullshit, claimed that she had some sort of medical background. She even wore a nurse’s uniform when taking care of her kid’s made-up illnesses.

The kid was perfectly healthy, and that’s the truly sick part of all of this. This kid was apparently a bit of a celebrity – he appeared in magazines and on television, got to meet members of the Royal Family and even conned X Factor tickets out of Simon Cowell – but away from the public eye, he would get out of his wheelchair and run and play with his friends and eat hamburgers and chips and generally act like, you know, a perfectly healthy child. Which is what he was. Except that he had a mother who was sick and ridiculous and, I’ll just say it, lazy.

We’re talking about a woman who thought it was a great idea to have her son undergo completely unnecessary surgical procedures and medical treatments and spending six weeks a year in the hospital and being fitted with a permanent feeding tube so that she could go on vacations and make improvements to her house. She makes the Octomom look like an underachiever. She conned charities and the government and the British public, and all she had to do was exploit her child for sympathy.

How well-adjusted was this woman? Whenever doctors would finally become suspicious, she would cancel appointments by claiming she had been raped.

Apparently it was the kid himself who blew the whole deal. And not purposely, either; just by being a kid and telling his friends that he didn’t have to use his wheelchair or his feeding tubes at home. It got enough people suspicious that the police finally searched her home. They actually found a home video of the boy running on a beach and looking like a perfectly healthy child. Which, again, is what he was.

Unfortunately for him, his mother was a very sick woman who probably has Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. She needs help. And the British medical system needs to figure out why it took them six damn years to figure out that she was lying.

But none of that changes the fact that she nearly sacrificed him for some money and some attention.

Frankly, I’m surprised she doesn’t already have her own reality show.

Aaron R. Davis lives in a cave at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes shut tight and his fingers in his ears. You can contact him at samuraifrog@yahoo.com.

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• Outside of the In-Crowd – Reality people don’t count
• Guest Blog Post – Breeding: the new celebrity

Courtney Enlow

I hate the Heene family. I hope a tornado comes and spits the parents into a large mass of water, and drops the kids safely into the arms of DCFS.

As we all know from the countless “hilarious” Kanye West-tinged Facebook statuses, the Heene family of Colorado attempted to fool the police and media into believing that they thought their son had floated off in a balloon like Alvin and the goddamn Chipmunks. Then, insert WAH WAH WAH WAHHH music here, turns out he was in the attic the whole time. Super adorable to the max! Right? No.

After the son totally botched his lines, we found out that it was a hoax. These sickening people, who appeared on the ultra-sickening Wife Swap, were just using their adorable children to score themselves a reality show. And honestly, why wouldn’t they? We’ve made it so easy for them.

Look any supermarket checkout line magazine right now. Those worthless piece of shit Gosselins, those even more worthless Kardashians and those festering blisters from The Hills. Ad this whole thing started so innocently, with a young blonde with a dream and a not-so-fresh feeling with problem feminine itching.

Her name was Paris Hilton. She had a famous last name, a brain fit for fingerpainting and little else and a lot of daddy issues that led her to get drunk and dance on tables. That was how she first found her way into our lives. She had a friend, Nicole Richie, who had a famous last name, a brain that was kind of awesome and funny and a drug history that would make Nikki Sixx blush. And she was a little fat. Naturally, the powers that be handed them a TV show.

Of course then followed a sex tape and Nicole Richie becoming roughly the size of a candle wick, but lest we forget, they had a TV program in the can before all that. All they had to do was be born, basically.

From there, things got easier. The rich and famous were getting reality shows all the time, certainly, but in the wake of Paris and Nicole, so were the famous-by-association. Ashlee Simpson was handed a show for being the sister of a celebrity. Some people called Gastineau got a show because the dad played football or something. Tommy Hilfiger’s daughter had a show for a quick minute there, and a bunch of dumb rich teenagers whose parents invented Yahoo or Yoohoo or the Yo-Yo got sent to a cattle farm.

After that, a famous last name was no longer necessary.

Three blonde Playboy models were given a show because they claimed to have sex with a really, really old guy. The Kardashians were given a show because the one with the big ass got pissed on by Moesha’s brother. Jon and Kate were given a show because Kate used her vagina as a clown car. Ditto on the Duggars. Real housewives of all manner of locale were given shows for overpaying for poorly done implants and restylane. And we’re not even to the general fuckery of the competition shows yet. The Wife Swaps and the Nexts and the Date My Moms and what have you.

By the way, did you know Joe Millionaire was only six years ago? Doesn’t it seem like it was from such a simple time?

Of course it does. Save for a few NutraSystem commercials from three or four years back, we haven’t had to lay eyes on any of those people. When was the last time you saw or thought of the Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire chick, Darva Conger? I mean, if you asked me about Darva Conger before I’d hit Wiki a minute ago, I would have thought she was one of Clinton’s bevy, post-Gennifer Flowers, pre-Paula Jones. But now, we’re supposed to actually care about the people who appear in this cheap filler.

The only pre-Hills batch you actually ever see in magazines? Trista and Ryan from The Bachelorette. They just keep trying. They have kids for the sole purpose of losing weight and posing in bathing suits, then they disappear for a few years.

Nowadays, they all have the gumption of a Trista and a Ryan. They desperately want the fame. They call paparazzi when they’re out, they walk around The Ivy like it’s a food bank, they fake weddings and relationships and cheating and drama, and they will show up to the opening of a Circle K in Poughkeepsie. And it’s working.

So why wouldn’t some random family in the Rockies give it a go? Sure, they’re facing criminal charges now (hopefully involving jail sentences, otherwise that six year old would probably receive such daily spankings that his ass would fall off). But criminal charges just mean more press! Yay press! Yay fame! Yay for not having to do actual work and better myself as a human being in any way shape or form!

When did the whole world become Roxie Hart in Chicago? I hate people. Please make it stop.

Courtney Enlow is a writer living in Chicago and working as a corporate shill to pay the bills. You can contact her at courtney@hobotrashcan.com.

Similar Posts:

• Outside of the In-Crowd – Reality people don’t count
• Outside of the In-Crowd – Now that people are dead, can we finally reject reality TV?
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Hobo Stu

Hello everyone,

Here’s what’s new on HoboTrashcan.com this week:

Murphy’s Law – Marge Simpson, Playboy playmate
In a desperate effort to combat dwindling magazine sales, this month Playboy put Marge Simpson on the cover. This week, Joel Murphy takes a look at this bizarre move and explains why it will fail to boost sales.

Outside of the In-Crowd – Jump up my shark, jackass
The term “jump the shark” was meant to describe the moment when a popular show officially stopped being enjoyable and started spiraling downward creatively, but these days Internet commenters use it describe any moment on TV that annoys them. Courtney Enlow is not happy about this.

Positive Cynicism – Ralph Lauren, the Streisand Effect and the DMCA
Last month, Ralph Lauren released an ad featuring a photo that was so distorted that the model in it no longer looked human. Making matters worse, when people criticized the company for the offensive ad, they attempted to silence the critics. This week, Aaron R. Davis looks at these two huge mistakes.

Hobo Radio 102 – Pulling back the curtain
If you ever wanted a behind-the-scenes look at how a professional podcast is recorded … well, clearly you are listening to the wrong show. But, if you ever wanted a behind-the-scenes look at Hobo Radio, you are in luck.

Joel Murphy and Lars Periwinkle have decided to pull back the curtain and discuss a few things they would normally only talk about off the air. A grammatical mistake from two weeks ago, a secret lost podcast and Lars’ current living situation are all revealed this week. And somehow, the dynamic duo still find the time to discuss Captain Lou Albano, the Large Hadron Collider and Neal Patrick Harris.

Where is Lars living these days? What happened to the original Hobo Radio 100? What are the odds Lars called Joel 20 minutes after they finished this week’s show? The answers to these questions and more are in this week’s podcast.

Finish That Fortune 7
We provide you with the first half of a real fortune from a fortune cookie and it’s up to you to fill in the blank (and you can’t just write “in bed”). Every week, we will pick the funniest response. You won’t actually win a prize, but you will get the satisfaction of knowing that you are better than everyone else. And your name will be printed here on the site, so that others may bask in your glory.

From the Vault – One on One with Buzz Burbank
Last year, we had the opportunity to interview Buzz Burbank, a veteran broadcaster who became well-known as the newsman on the nationally syndicated Don and Mike Show. When Don Geronimo stepped away from the show in April 2008, Burbank saw his on-air role increase to co-host of the Mike O’Meara Show.

In July of this year, WJFK changed formats to sports talk, which brought an unceremonious end to the Mike O’Meara Show. Fans of Burbank are still waiting to see what the next chapter of his career will bring. In the meantime, if you missed our interview with him last year, here’s your chance to reminisce about the good ol’ days of talk radio.

- Hobo Stu

Hobo Stu’s Weekly Recap is also available as an email newsletter. To sign up for the newsletter to ensure you never miss an update, send an email to newsletter-subscribe@hobotrashcan.com.

• Introduction
• Remembering Captain Lou
• Pulling back curtain, Pt. 1
• Large Hadron Collider
• Pulling back curtain, Pt. 2
• Contractually-obligated Batman discussion

Hobo Radio 102 - Pulling back the curtain [ 39:11 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Week 102 Spotlight: Pulling back the curtain

If you ever wanted a behind-the-scenes look at how a professional podcast is recorded … well, clearly you are listening to the wrong show. But, if you ever wanted a behind-the-scenes look at Hobo Radio, you are in luck.

Joel Murphy and Lars Periwinkle have decided to pull back the curtain and discuss a few things they would normally only talk about off the air. A grammatical mistake from two weeks ago, a secret lost podcast and Lars’ current living situation are all revealed this week. And somehow, the dynamic duo still find the time to discuss Captain Lou Albano, the Large Hadron Collider and Neal Patrick Harris.

Where is Lars living these days? What happened to the original Hobo Radio 100? What are the odds Lars called Joel 20 minutes after they finished this week’s show? The answers to these questions and more are in this week’s podcast.

Hobo Radio is the official podcast of HoboTrashcan, brought to you by The Podcast Network.

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