Fausta’s Blog

Haven’t read the books, haven’t seen the movies, but this is funny,

Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From ‘Twilight’, with the stress on prepping up for abusive relationships:

1. If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence.
2. Secrets are good — especially life-threatening ones.
3. It’s OK for a potential romantic interest to be dimwitted, violent and vengeful — as long as he has great abs.
4. If a boy tells you to stay away from him because he is dangerous and may even kill you, he must be the love of your life. You should stay with him since he will keep you safe forever.

Go through enough of that and you’ll be ready for the Church of Oprah when you’re older and want to blame all that self-inflicted victimization on some guy.

Over at Big Hollywood Alicia Colon writes about Appreciating True Erotica in Cinema, as opposed to putting yourself through any sort of Twilight.

EM writes on the cult of Oprah hosting the Obama Christmas special:

Don’t get me wrong, I envy her a little. Who wouldn’t want to be the person millions of gullible people turn to for advice on all the wrong things?

Indeed, and Oprah ought to be credited for having made more marriages miserable than most anyone else in history.

Which reminds me of Peter Drucker’s phrase,

The only reason the word guru is so popular is because charlatan is so hard to spell.

… says Michelle Obama’s Mirror’s Blog about the gown:

Evening. Naeem Kahn – Indian born American based designer. Oh, how clever of Lady M! “The dress is entirely handmade, requiring three weeks of work by 40 people, completed in Naeem Kahn’s family workshop in India.” So that’s another 40 jobs created or saved right there.

As you know, I have severely criticized Michelle Obama’s poor (too rich?) fashion choices and her posture.

Last night, however, Michelle Obama finally wore a beautiful dress, that fit her perfectly, was exactly proportioned for her, and the color was exactly right for her. She did not over acessorize with jewelry, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. Best yet, she managed to carry herself with the right poise and posture as the photo shows.

The Anchoress says it’s Beautiful and Well Played Mrs. O.

Let’s hope Mrs. O gives up the silly cardigans and the ridiculous ammo belts.

In other Obama news, guess who’s interviewing the Obamas for Christmas. I’m sorely tempted to take up golf instead.

But then, there’s always tango.

I wonder if she’ll run for Senate?

Oprah Winfrey to End Her Talk Show

Not to worry, though. The show will go on until September 2011. After that, the Church of Oprah will roll on and on and on, and her magazine will have her on every cover of every issue.

Last week, Roman Polanski; today, the perversion du jour, at the Church of Oprah:

Somehow I had managed to not know about Mackenzie Phillips’s heroin addiction and her 10-yr long incestuous sexual relation with her own father.

Ten years. The word wrong doesn’t begin to describe it.

Evil, no matter how you look at it.

How more revolting can it get? Well, she can write a book now that he’s dead, and go on Oprah to sell it. This means big bucks for Mac, large viewership of enablers for Oprah, and yet another instance of the Church of Oprah granting non-judgmental indulgences to the unrepentant perverse – after a full hour’s worth of wallowing in the sordid details (granted, the phrase sordid details doesn’t come close).

Kurt Schlichter makes the case for ending the Celebrity Dysfunction Complex:

Ladies and gentlemen, Mackenzie Phillips, who as an adult, shot smack and banged her dad – thanks for sharing your amazing journey!

But shame is so old-fashioned. It makes people feel bad. And who wants to make people feel bad? Probably those mean old conservatives who have nothing better to do. No, it’s easier to simply normalize dysfunction, to rationalize wrong, to mainstream evil.

You get to be the good guy, the nice guy. You get to be Oprah.

That’s how the Celebrity Dysfunction Complex works. The Complex encompasses talk shows, tabloids, web sites – anything that embraces the dysfunctional, caresses them, pats them on the head, assuring them they are blameless while displaying their dysfunction for our amusement. And by doing so, the Complex whittles away at the differences between the dysfunctional and the functional until they can’t be told apart.

This requires a rejection of judgment. Oprah would never be judgmental. That’s too emblematic of a narrow-minded worldview where all you see are black and white instead of moral relativism’s gauzy, comforting gray.

But Schlichtler points out that recognizing right from wrong is difficult. It carries a price (in cash, for Mac & Oprah):

Right and wrong are troublesome concepts because they impose limits on what one can and can’t do. This is against everything that the Celebrity Dysfunction Complex stands for, because if people start judging those they see wasting their lives and their talents on drugs, alcohol, perversions and all manner of other debauchery, then the circus is over. When Lindsey Lohan sobers up, the party ends. When the mutants from the Springer-type talk shows stop living like the crew from Deliverance, the gravy train derails. And the Celebrity Dysfunction Complex depends on a never-ending supply of new human train wrecks.

The task of bringing down the Celebrity Dysfunction Complex falls to us. You have a remote that goes with that big screen. Up near the top is a red button. When some degenerate comes on your screen, supported and approved of by media demigods, spouting off about how being a stripper is empowering, push that button.

No, I don’t watch Oprah. I suggest you don’t, either.

Stop buying what Oprah’s selling.

Time to say, Enough.

I don’t watch Oprah but Maria sent an interesting article, so I turned on the TV just now and briefly watched the Oprah Show.

A teenager was crying hysterically, tears streaming down his face, screaming. It was embarrassing to watch, actually painful to see such public and humiliating display. I can not imagine why a parent would agree to have their child’s emotional pain out for all the world to see. I don’t care what the reason is; such trauma should be dealt with in private, showing enough respect and compassion to one’s own child to spare him/her the humiliation of been displayed like that.

Apparently the show is about obese families. The scene looked like penitents publicly confessing their sins seeking absolution. The Church of Oprah lives.

Which brings me to the article Maria sent, by Maureen Callahan, THE OPRAH SYNDROME
BLOATED, DEPRESSED — AS O GOES, SO GOES THE NATION

In one of her top-rated shows this season, Oprah Winfrey used her Jan. 5 episode to publicly confess, in a gauzy, soft-palette setting, her mortification and shame at hitting 200 (maybe more?) pounds.

“I am embarrassed,” she said. “All the money and all the fame and all the attention and the glamorous life and the success doesn’t mean one thing if you can’t control your own being.” Twenty-two years on, Oprah Winfrey – America’s most prominent secular spiritual leader, who has stated that her life’s work is to help all Americans “live your best life” and has deployed an army of self-help gurus to that effect – continues to publicly grapple with her weight and, it seems, her despair.

Why can’t America’s self-help queen help herself?

“That’s a great question,” says Micki McGee, sociology professor and author of “Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life.” “Ultimately, the key threads of self-help culture are hard work and control of the self. If she can’t control herself, she must engage in the narrative of shame and humiliation.

Shame and humiliation, not just for herself but for her guests. It’s bad enough that she’s into this narrative but inexcusable that minors are put through it.

I sincerely don’t understand what people see in Oprah that they follow her every word. I also don’t see the appeal of a magazine who has the same person on every cover month after month, year after year. Maybe the void left by people who don’t believe in faith has to be filled by faith in Oprahthink. Who knows. Certainly there’s a self-help industry out there.

I have read a number of self-help books, most of them because friends had just read them and suggested them to me. I read The Secret and found it interesting enough to do some of the things it suggests. Not because, as The Secret claims, “the Universe will find a way to manifest your wishes” but because prioritizing and visualizing your goals will clarify the direction you want your life to take.

However, the best self-help book I ever read was Toughness Training for Life by James Loehr, PhD. Loehr’s thesis is that you should develop health habits every day, in order to overcome difficult times. It’s basically what the Classic philosophers, such as the Stoics, used to teach. He explains what he calls “recovery training” convincingly, and it served me very well when I was recovering from my very severe hypoglycemia years ago.

I really don’t care if Oprah’s fat, thin, in between. Obviously the hours of TV broadcast time she dedicates to the subject must have brought her profits and fame. Which is probably why I don’t have Oprah’s money and influence: I don’t spend the day focusing on food, and if I gain a couple of extra pounds and my clothes feel tight I cut down on butter and spend an extra 30 minutes at the gym until the clothes again fit well.

While I can understand why her guests are so troubled, I don’t understand her angst and feeling of helplessness over her weight. I wouldn’t doubt that it’s sincere, but let’s face it, she’s one of the most influential and rich women in the world. How important can it be whether she’s fat?

Callahan looks for an answer:

“She actually said that it doesn’t matter how much she can accomplish unless she gets control of her body,” says McGee. “You cannot control yourself by controlling your body. She’s diminishing all her other accomplishments by while trying to create a diminutive physical self. It’s tragic.” Maybe. But, consciously or not, it’s shrewd. Her public shame over her gluttony and her renewed commitment to regaining control mirror the sentiments expressed in President Obama’s inauguration speech. His exhortation for Americans to “put away childish things” and to take personal responsibility for their future by acting with restraint and regard speaks to the national desire for a kind of proud austerity. And what could be more austere than denying yourself food?

It all reminds me of the slim and wise Rosalind Russell, who titled her biography Life is a Banquet, from one of her lines in Auntie Mame: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

Don’t be a sucker.

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McGreevey seeking to become Episcopal priest

Former Gov. James E. McGreevey has started the process to become a priest in his newly adopted Episcopal faith and has been accepted into a three-year seminary program starting this fall.

McGreevey, who often described himself as a devout Catholic while in public office, was officially received into the Episcopal religion on Sunday, at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan.

He also has been accepted into the Master of Divinity program at Manhattan’s renowned General Theological Seminary, seminary spokesman Bruce Parker said in a statement this afternoon.

I expect there’ll be a return visit to the confessional self-help and possitive affirmationtm venue^tm.

Here’s the reaction from another Jim:

Well, now here we are. At the same time that this crud is back on the state payroll and is tying up valuable court time slugging it out in what promises to be an ugly custody dispute, and at the same time that his soon-to-be former wife has published her own account of life with the governor and is making an appearance on Oprah [the confessional self-help and possitive affirmation venue^tm], we learn that he really is doing all things one does to become an Episcopalian priest.

I gotta tell ya. Living in Jersey is farookin’ adventure.

Jersey: it’s a heck of a place!

Update: Instapundit quotes Mark Stein

On any Sunday morning, there are more Anglicans in the pews in Nigeria than in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada combined.

Indeed.

Instapundit has an item from Virginia Postrel, who posts on those Dove commercials suggesting that every woman is beautiful.

The Dove advertising campaign got launched at the Church of Oprah, where self-esteem is built on ignoring the obvious.

“Every woman is beautiful”: Political correctness is now oozing out of a tube of hand lotion.

Can anyone possibly believe that “every woman is beautiful”, any more than “every man is handsome”?

What are they, blind?

While the airwaves are currently filled with pictures of Anna Nicole Smith in her bad days, she was gorgeous in her Guess days.

The elderly mother of one of my friends is a most attractive woman. She has great legs even at the age of eighty, beautiful hands and great complexion. She’s been married and widowed three times. She’s well dressed and has a great personality. But she has Mary Wickes’s face, not Ava Gardner’s.

(Ava Gardner used to stay at the hotel where my father worked. Of all the famous and beautiful that visited that hotel over the decades, she was the only one that the hotel staff considered as naturally beautiful even as she aged.)

Patrick Stewart has tremendous stage presence. He is well dressed, and when I’ve seen him on stage he’s been in great shape. He has a most sexy voice. But he’s not the young Errol Flynn.

Heck, even the old Errol Flynn wasn’t the young Errol Flynn.

And Errol Flynn was never Humphrey Bogart, either.

As Virginial Postrel points out,

Like the rest of the genetic lottery, beauty is unfair. Everyone falls short of perfection, but some are luckier than others.

Luck is hard.

Self-confidence is even harder.

Not every woman is beautiful. Not every man is handsome. Deal with it.