The Rescue League Pulls Into ‘Crazy’ Town, Act Two

THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT MENTAL ILLNESS IS that most families don’t recognize its symptoms, don’t want to face its existence, or outright deny it altogether.

It’s much easier to blame someone’s erratic behavior on addictive drugs or neglectful parents or just ‘bad’ kids. And God help the family member who calls it by its name, who by doing so risks embarrassment and shame to the family unschooled or unable to grapple with the implications of "crazy.&quot

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Coming Soon Underneath Harpo Studio Chairs: The Miniature Oprah Deity

CELEBRITY GOSSIPS ARE BETTING THAT AMERICA’S FIRST LADY OF TV, OPRAH, won’t cotton to the "Oprah Sarcophagus" created by artist Daniel Edwards, a native of LaPorte, Indiana, where the Big "O" once owned property. But I think they underestimate the world’s favorite faux goddess’s smug delight at being compared to a deity.

On the contrary, I think it won’t be long before Edwards is invited on The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss the social significance of his sculptures depicting celebrities or their poop in bronze.

Among his creations: A sculpture of Britney Spears in labor, a "bust" of Hillary Clinton, and a dead Paris Hilton as public service announcement. There’s also the highly-anticipated form of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro dead on his back, hooves pointing skyward to the heavens, which is scheduled for its public unveiling in New York in April.

Some observers think Edwards’ "Sarcophagus" bears little likeness to the flesh and blood O, but in my opinion the mold eerily captures her godlike countenance, and I’m predicting that the barely human side of O will agree. In fact, I’ll bet you that Harpo’s next big distribution deal provides for 18 inch replicas of the statue, made with tiny alarms inside set to ring moments before TOWS appears on local televisions, but with just enough time for viewers to genuflect toward the screen in a moment of silence. I can picture it now: Surprise! Everybody in the studio audience gets to take home a miniature version of their false idol. Just look under your seat for the prize.

Florida and the Disenfranchised Voter

HAVE THE DEMOCRATS SHOT THEMSELVES IN THE BIG TOE? It wouldn’t be the first time. But when national leaders stripped the state of its delegates for moving up its primary to January 29, in essence it also stripped the 2.5 million Democrats who turned out to vote in yesterday’s contest of their right to cast a ballot. That means that Hillary will get to crow about her roust of Obama, winning 50 percent of votes cast to Barak’s 33 percent, but won’t get to add any delegates to her column. As Obama’s Barack Obama spokesman Bill Burton wrote gleefully to reporters Tuesday night, "Obama and Clinton tie for delegates in Florida. 0 for Obama, 0 for Clinton."

Yet in this hotly contested historic race between the "woman" and the "black," it’s easy to imagine that the final delegate count could be within the 185 that Donkey Party leaders have stripped from Florida’s voters. And that would be an awkward postscript for the Party that has rightly claimed that Florida’s votes were stolen by the Republicans in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. "This whole thing here is a joke," John Taylor, a Jacksonville schoolteacher told The Nation last November. "How stupid the Democrats are-we’re shooting ourselves in the foot!…They stole two elections, and now we’ve been working six years to make sure that don’t happen again. And the Democrats screw us!"

Perhaps all 2.5 million votes will be moot after Super Tuesday’s 24-state lottery and the 185 Florida delegates won’t make a difference in the end. But my guess is that’s just wishful thinking.

BuzzFeed: The Internet’s Populist

PARDON MY SWOON, BUT I’VE FALLEN HEAD-OVER-HEELS IN LIKE. The object of my affection? BuzzFeed, a website that keeps constant score in the "24/7" contest known as the Internet. Even before discovering BuzzFeed, I knew I wasn’t fishing in the web’s deep waters. But you can’t say that about the editors at BuzzFeed. A quick sampling of today’s offering includes links on "Smurf Sex," "Silence of the Lambs" toys, spermatazoa typeface, butt glue, marijuana vending machines (legal ones for "sick people"), Japan’s "rice babies," Oprahama and bacon cocktails. (I am jealous of the mind that came up with "gateway meat" to describe this pork cut’s addictive quality.) Obviously the editors over at BuzzFeed.com find that the editorial life is more rewarding beyond the news pages of Google, MSN or TMZ. And their reading list definitely extends deeper than the New York Times, Time magazine and Perez Hilton. Thank you, BuzzFeed, for bringing true populism to the web. Need I say more to promote a visit?

To my mind, it’s a slow news day. Britney is left on a curb following an emotional meltdown? Ho hum. Heath’s getting buried in a $25,000 mahogany casket? I think this story is, um, over. At least until the toxicology report is back. And who really cares what an unpopular, lame-duck president says in his last State of the Union address? Frankly I find just looking at him painful these days.

On a lazy day, the only news blurb that’s caught my attention is the case of Ohio twentysomethings who stole more $8 million from an armored car last November. "I knew taking the money from AT Systems was wrong, but I wanted a better life," said Nicole Boyd, 25, of Youngstown, in the statement to the FBI. Poor thing: she obviously hasn’t learned that the only crime that pays is white-collared.

The Moment Of Truth: I’m Waiting For The Celebrity Edition

IN THE CARNIVAL THAT IS REALITY TV, THIS ONE ACTUALLY INTRIQUES. That purveyor of popular American tastes, FOX TV, has introduced its latest freak show to wild success, thanks to the hawking of its main attraction, American Idol. Heretic that I am, I must confess that I may have watched one, maybe two, American Idols in its entire run on the air. So I doubt that I’ll be running to catch ‘The Moment of Truth.’ I have them every day in my own living room.

BUT…I can say that I’m already wringing my hands over the possibility of the first "Celebrity Editon." Can you imagine? The public could finally find out all sorts of truths about their heroes. The first one I’d put on the stand is the First Lady of TV, Oprah, and I’d tell her to bring that diary she always mentions that presages her next, great "dream come true," the most recent being a May 1992 entry about owning her own network. Can we see that, ‘O’ great one? Then we talk to her protege, Dr. Phil, and find out what he really intended when he visited Britney during her brief incarceration in the nut house. And was Oprah really mad at you for the visit?

But, oh, there’s plenty more to explore. I’d ask Tom Cruise, ‘Is Suri the human hybrid baby born with the alien sperm donors from the Church of Scientology?’

Let’s get Baaabra Walters up there and find out what she really told The Donald about Rosie before she quit.

We’d ask Britney Spearsto reveal if she is really in cahoots with the paps. And we’ll ask beau, Adnan Ghalib,’ Is Brit your meal ticket?’

And of course inquiring minds will demand to know of Tracey Edmonds, Eddie Murphy’s faux bride, "Didn’t you already know he was a jerk before your make-pretend wedding?

Finally, we could force Sylvester Stallone out of denial when we’d ask him: Did you really think what the world needed was another Rambo picture?

Let me know when that show comes on, and I’ll be front and center at the Tube.

Suddenly, I’ve Lost My Appetite For Google

CONTRARIAN THAT I AM, perhaps I am among the minority of Americans who don’t want their cell phones pointing out the nearest drive-through burger joint. But beware, world, for that is what the technology "experts" are planning to serve you soon. At the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Friday, experts promoted the mobile Internet saying it would let advertisers tailor messages based on a user’s location.

"After all, they know where you are,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying in an AP article. "You’re driving along and it says, ‘Eric, you had pizza yesterday and there’s a hamburger stand on the right.’ In theory, location-based advertising will be very good for business and useful to the end user."

To this I say, "harrumph." And then let me direct unwitting consumers to the book "Feed," M.T. Anderson’s terrifying ideation of a near future when people have chips implanted in their brains to deliver a constant "feed" of advertising. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you run to your nearest bookstore, grab a copy and immediately devour it. (Or, for those of you who are able defer gratification for the 40 percent discount, any online bookstore will do.) Once you make it past the disorienting first chapter, you’ll quickly find yourself wide-eyed in terror at the implications of all this "technology" we so eagerly lap up.

Feeding ads inside the brain is not as farfetched as you might think. Last December, National Public Radio’s show, "On the Media" reported about a billboard in New York which was "emitting highly focused sound that resonates within the skulls of passersby." OTM summarized it as "a novel way of advertising, a potentially terrifying intrusion and, according to technology writer Clive Thompson, the leading edge of a new civil rights battleground - the right to privacy in your own mind." Thompson introduces us to the Center for Cognitive Liberties, which is at the forefront of this looming sci-fi privacy battle. Check out the interview here, but to skip advertisement, fast forward 40 seconds.

Google, which christened its foray into big bigness with the motto, "Don’t be Evil," might be losing its way. For all the amazing services offered by Google, including Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Books, and of course its invaluable search engine, the truth is Google closed Friday at $566.40 because of its muscle in internet advertising. And greed might be a part of that bottom line: in my own "bite the hand that feeds" way, I’ll reveal here that I have paid as much as $10 for one Google click but have received about two cents back for each ad placed on this page. Won’t be long now before Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be dethroning Bill Gates from the top of the world’s richest list.

In a strange coincidence, another story that popped on the web Friday was of study in which behavioral scientists concluded that lonely people are more likely to anthropomorphize their pets and possessions. Now the same scientists plan to study further whether promoting human feelings toward objects should be used as a treatment to cure loneliness. Sorry, guys, I think the techies have beaten you to the punch. The overall message being delivered? Our possessions are our best friends. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go talk to my cats.

Finally, The Rescue League Pulls into ‘Crazy’ Town

BLOW THE TRUMPET: THE CAVALRY’S COMING TO HELP SAVE BRITNEY SPEARS from her media tormentors. According to MSNBC, the national zeitgeist on Brit just might be changing, and sniff sniff, Crabby is taking a teardrop of credit.

Let’s recount the latest: The Britney Celebrity Defense League© keeps growing longer, with Demi Moore and Backstreet Boy A.J. McLean being the latest celebs to speak in defense of the Popped Tart. The Los Angeles Police is finally running interference between Brit and the paps, stopping four while they chased Britney’s car on the highway last week. And, now, God bless ’em, we have real credentialed experts outside of La La Land spanking the media for practicing its own form of quackery for affixing mental diagnoses on Brit.

In line with their new edict that all things Britney are newsworthy, the Associated Press is running a story quoting mental health experts scolding the media for slapping labels such as "bi-polar" and "multiple personality" on Spears.

”I’ve been very upset about this,” Mark Smaller, a psychoanalyst from Chicago, told the AP. "This idea of making a diagnosis of someone they’ve never met is completely inappropriate, and it gives mental health professionals a bad name." He made a point to note that any diagnosis takes at least several appointments with a patient to make. "Trying to make such a diagnosis based purely on someone’s behavior," and especially as it’s portrayed by selective news coverage,"is scientifically impossible," says Smaller, director of the Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation.

The 26-year-old mom/singer/starlet spends her life under seiged by the paparazzi, so much so that some people and news agencies are wondering if she hasn’t developed "Stockholm Syndrome" now that she’s even sleeping with the enemy, a.k.a. cameraman Adnan Ghalib. "When you see her seeming like she’s friends with the paparazzi, she’s got, like, Stockholm syndrome," actress Patricia Arquette told Contactmusic.com. "I mean she’s becoming friends with her captors. She’s being torn apart by this business." (We can add Patricia to the BCDL now.) That saying Brit has SS is also a diagnosis but one that leavens less blame on Britney for making friends with the paps; after all, she’s basically their prisoner. But her captor Adnan at least has nice things to say about the so-called "train wreck", in an exclusive interview with Entertainment Tonight. If he screws her over as the gossips are betting, then there will at least big a bigger villain in this story than Brit.

Heath Ledger’s Death Begs The Question: Surrender or Refusal to Compromise?

PERHAPS HE WASN’T ACTING AT ALL WHEN HE APPEARED IN "BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN" AS A WOUNDED MAN FULL OF SECRETS AND LONGING. Heath Ledger, the Australian actor who gained acclaim for his role in the Oscar Nominated movie, turned life into art Tuesday when he was found dead in a New York apartment with a bottle of pills next to his bed. The 28-year-old actor was separated from actress Michelle Williams, whom he met on the set of "Brokeback" and with whom he has a two-year-old daughter, Matilda. Although New York police say his death may or may not be accidental, his family has vehemently denied to TMZ.com that the death was a suicide.

Ledger was an "actor," not a star, and he seemed to relish the difference. He stayed far away from La La Land and settled in Brooklyn, where he was apparently one of the borough’s best known residents. He took risky roles, most recently playing one of the incarnations of Bob Dylan in the movie, "I’m Not There." And his image will soon be resurrected at the box office in the role of a more sinister Joker in "Dark Knight" than even Jack Nicholson played in 1989’s "Batman." Christopher Nolan, the director of "Dark Knight," recently said of Ledger’s performance,"He’s extremely original, extremely frightening, tremendously edgy." The actor himself complained in a New York Times’ interview in November that his mind wouldn’t let him rest, that he was having trouble sleeping. Apparently, the tiredness caught up with him.

In another, older interview, this one with the Associated Press seven years ago, Ledger confided that soon after he starred in the movie "10 Things I Hate About You,” he was offered — and rejected — a handful of other teen flicks. But despite raised eyebrows from his parents and agents, Ledger refused to compromise and held out for roles he relished. He said the decision wasn’t hard for him, but "it was hard for everyone else around me to understand. Agents were like, ”You’re crazy." My parents were like, "Come on, you have to eat."

Many of us have peripheral or personal experience with the solace that comes from a puff, a snort, a pill, a bottle. The dream-like haze can keep life’s uninvited compromises at bay for a little while. And sometimes, even if by accident, for ever.

Don’t Call Him Demagogue: Bill Cosby Speaks Unpopular Truths To Help His People.

IT WOULD BE SO EASY FOR BILL COSBY to forget poor blacks and live in quiet luxury. That’s what a selfish, shallow, or perhaps just a simple person would do. Like Jesse Jackson, it would be easy for him to blame the economic failures of Black America on the intrinsic racism of a system that delivers most to those with "social equity." Like Oprah, he could easily tell people whom to vote for, as though the future of an entire people rests on the shoulders of one man. But Cosby has proven he is no demagogue by eschewing personal popularity and speaking candidly to "father" poor urban communities. He tackles his concerns about some blacks wearing "victimhood" as their identity in his new book, "Come On People," co-authored with Harvard University’s Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint

During an appearance in Chicago last weekend to honor the Rev. Martin Luther King, Cosby reminded the well-heeled African Americans who paid $100 a plate to attend the breakfast that they have a responsibility to overtly steer teenagers toward books and away from early parenthood. "You’ve got to talk to these 20-year-old women with children who are teenagers,” he said. "They didn’t have the child with the intent of sending somebody higher."

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive health research, there’s good news for the nation: Teenage pregnancy is at its lowest level in 30 years, down 36% since its peak in 1990. The decrease is even greater among black teens: Among black teens aged 15 to 19, the pregnancy rate fell by 40% between 1990 and 2002. That is progress, but black girls continue to have the highest teen pregnancy: 134 pregnancies per 1,000 women, as opposed to 131 for Hispanics and 48 per non-Hispanic whites. And babies having babies keeps these women trapped in a cycle of poverty and struggle.

At the breakfast Sunday, Cosby told the crowd that education is what will break African Americans’ chains of economic deprivation."You need parents to say…”You don’t have to be at Northwestern, but what you have to be is in those books." In the struggle for economic success for Black America, Bill Cosby doesn’t dismiss the reality of discrimination. He just doesn’t want the towel thrown in before the fight gets started. Some call this airing dirty laundry; I prefer to call it shedding light where the sun doesn’t normally shine.

Spinning Rumors Into Gold: The Make-Believe World Of Britney Spears

IN THE MEDIA’S EVER-EXPANDING MAKE-BELIEVE WORLD OF BRITNEY SPEARS, the Popped Tart is: 1. Buying a brand new Mercedes for her bag boy Adnan Ghalib. 2. Wearing her white lace wedding dress is proof she’s about to tie the knot to paparazzo-leech Ghalib. 3. Was "popping pills" all day long on the day she refused to turn over her two boys to Kevin Federline, forcing a three-hour standoff that ended with her in the nut house. And 4, is so perilously close to disaster that the Associated Press finds the need to release a story that its preparing her obituary.

Such is the curse of being the world’s most popular reigning princess. The stories must be larger-than life; tedium is an unimaginable part of her world. Thus, when Britney accompanies her current closest hanger-on to the Keyes Mercedes Dealership, she isn’t merely passing the time while Ghalib perhaps replaces a lost key. When she wears her wedding dress, she is planning to elope she is so besotted by her new Muslim beau. It couldn’t be as sad a scenario as Britney crying her heart out over spilt milk, Kevin Federline. It couldn’t be that those "pills" she was popping was medication prescribed to regulate personality rather than cause illicit highs. And finally, is it possible that the AP wrote the bio because Britney is the number one news story, such as the definition of news is today, rather than because they expect her to die? Remember, it was mere days before that an AP internal memo was leaked to the press saying that from now on, Britney should be treated as big news by AP reporters. Does it not follow then that if Brit’s big news, then by golly they should have an obit in the file on her?

Meanwhile, the Britney Celebrity Defense League grows longer, with fading star Demi Moore and Backstreet Boy A.J. McLean speaking up for the popster. The question is: Who will she let into her life?