I'm such a late adopter when it comes to technology. For someone who touts podcasts of her show The Book Squad, I don't even own an iPod. EGAD!!!! I can just feel my cool points decreasing right now.
I think I learned my lesson with a super-buggy version of Windows 95, spending my hard-earned money to beta-test Bill Gates' crappy product. So now, I just lay back in the cut and let all those other early adopters beta test stuff for me and separate the chaff from the wheat.
Take MySpace. Like a lemming, I joined last year and hadn't been the most diligent person on the planet with it. But now I've seen how so many of my writer friends have these tricked out pages and are working it. So, I decided to give it another chance.
If you're on MySpace, hit me up here and be my friend:
http://www.myspace.com/wendycoakleythompson
No pressure, though. Don't want to be that friend...
Monday, March 26, 2007
Sunday, March 25, 2007
March 25, 2007: Why I'm Thankful They've Buried Anna Nicole Smith
I mean, don't get me wrong. It's tragic when anyone dies, especially someone as young as Anna Nicole Smith. I was less than a year old when she was born, so when, on February 8, I'd heard she'd died at 39, I was like, 'There but for the grace of God..."
Then the invariable media circus began. Now you know I'm notoriously of Bahamian descent. I spent a good chunk of my life there. The bulk of my family lives there. So, I was quite distressed by saw unfold on TV over the weeks that followed after Anna Nicole's death. I'd heard that someone in Nassau had expresed this sentiment: Thank God she died in Florida, because if she'd died in the Bahamas, we never would've heard the end. I can't help thinking that that person was right. People still haven't gotten over what happen in Abaco with Aaliyah in 2001 -- despite the fact that it was a coked-up pilot and an overweighted plane that killed her, and not her geographic location. Anyhu, I digress...
When I heard Entertainment Tonight correspondent and media whore Mark Steines say during Anna Nicole's funeral that she'd put the Bahamas on the map, I wanted to do an Elvis and shoot the TV! Had Steines not been giving himself his own colonoscopy for a good number of years, he'd have realized that the Bahamas, extra of a suicide blonde looking for love in all the wrong places, has been known for quite sometime to explorers, tourists, bankers, and sportsfishermen -- and to us! -- for centuries. It was even the place to which famously Nazi-loving Edward and his divorcee wife Wallis Simpson retreated after he'd abdicated the throne. The Royals, embarrased by his behavior and by that nasty Nazi-sympathizing business, threw him a bone and made him the Governor General of the Bahamas.
This is not to say that some of my people didn't play a role in the world thinking them idioits. There was the cheering and booing of people entering the funeral and the courthouse as she was buried and as folks tried to decide what conga line into Anna Nicole's vagina could've produced her unfortunate, now motherless daughter. Then seeing the very dark Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shane Gibson, in bed with this aggressively white woman (i.e., Anna Nicole) made me cringe! I think in a previous blog entry, I'd mentioned that my agent, when pitching a story of mine, had been told that people don't know anything about "Jamaica." I wanted people to know more about a country that's only a forty-five-minute plane ride from Miami. But I sure didn't want them to come to know the Bahamas like this.
But the damage has already been done. I can only hope now that the rest of this drama -- the eviction of Howard K. Stern from a house that wasn't Anna's to begin with, the discovery of the Baby Daddy, etc. -- can be played out in a more dignified manner, in a manner that gets folks remembering that the Bahamas was the place of Christopher Columbus's first New World landfall on the island of San Salvador, not the place that Anna Nicole Smith used to wipe her ass with in the last days of her tragic life.
So, yes, I'm happy that Anna Nicole Smith has been laid to rest from a life that was rife with trouble and was way too short. But I'm also hoping that the ancestral home can get back to normal and recover from the klieg light of infamy that burned white hot on it for a moment in time.
Here's hoping...
Then the invariable media circus began. Now you know I'm notoriously of Bahamian descent. I spent a good chunk of my life there. The bulk of my family lives there. So, I was quite distressed by saw unfold on TV over the weeks that followed after Anna Nicole's death. I'd heard that someone in Nassau had expresed this sentiment: Thank God she died in Florida, because if she'd died in the Bahamas, we never would've heard the end. I can't help thinking that that person was right. People still haven't gotten over what happen in Abaco with Aaliyah in 2001 -- despite the fact that it was a coked-up pilot and an overweighted plane that killed her, and not her geographic location. Anyhu, I digress...
When I heard Entertainment Tonight correspondent and media whore Mark Steines say during Anna Nicole's funeral that she'd put the Bahamas on the map, I wanted to do an Elvis and shoot the TV! Had Steines not been giving himself his own colonoscopy for a good number of years, he'd have realized that the Bahamas, extra of a suicide blonde looking for love in all the wrong places, has been known for quite sometime to explorers, tourists, bankers, and sportsfishermen -- and to us! -- for centuries. It was even the place to which famously Nazi-loving Edward and his divorcee wife Wallis Simpson retreated after he'd abdicated the throne. The Royals, embarrased by his behavior and by that nasty Nazi-sympathizing business, threw him a bone and made him the Governor General of the Bahamas.
This is not to say that some of my people didn't play a role in the world thinking them idioits. There was the cheering and booing of people entering the funeral and the courthouse as she was buried and as folks tried to decide what conga line into Anna Nicole's vagina could've produced her unfortunate, now motherless daughter. Then seeing the very dark Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Shane Gibson, in bed with this aggressively white woman (i.e., Anna Nicole) made me cringe! I think in a previous blog entry, I'd mentioned that my agent, when pitching a story of mine, had been told that people don't know anything about "Jamaica." I wanted people to know more about a country that's only a forty-five-minute plane ride from Miami. But I sure didn't want them to come to know the Bahamas like this.
But the damage has already been done. I can only hope now that the rest of this drama -- the eviction of Howard K. Stern from a house that wasn't Anna's to begin with, the discovery of the Baby Daddy, etc. -- can be played out in a more dignified manner, in a manner that gets folks remembering that the Bahamas was the place of Christopher Columbus's first New World landfall on the island of San Salvador, not the place that Anna Nicole Smith used to wipe her ass with in the last days of her tragic life.
So, yes, I'm happy that Anna Nicole Smith has been laid to rest from a life that was rife with trouble and was way too short. But I'm also hoping that the ancestral home can get back to normal and recover from the klieg light of infamy that burned white hot on it for a moment in time.
Here's hoping...
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