Well, that was a long day of posting.We'll do the open thread thing again tonight/this morning. Please post in the comments if anything newsworthy happens while your lazy west-coast editor actually spends some time with his family, then tries to sleep.
Will Blackstone buy Busch's theme parks on Thursday? Will a certain Orlando restaurant critic discover that Disney has replaced the cheese in its Cheddar Cheese Soup with Cheez Whiz? What other crazy rumor do you think you can get a Central Florida TV station to believe?
And, if nothing newsworthy happens before I return and you have nothing else to discuss, you can always talk about this.
Kings Island fans, perhaps you have some 'splain' to do.
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On the Universal/Barbie deal, here's the link. It is a movie studio deal, for a film. No mention of any theme park implications.
Though we can certainly begin the speculation on who will play Barbie in the flick. And Ken. :-)
http://www.wlwt.com/entertainment/21043973/detail.html
http://www.wlwt.com/news/21102054/detail.html
I guess that my opinion is this. The McNair skeleton is campy, and questionable at worst, but it's Halloween...the time of year where human beings celebrate a day with buckets of blood, chainsaws, zombies and dead bodies. They put heads on a platter, coffins on their porch, and run around with toy knives, axes, and the like. This wasn't a graphic recreation, and other celebrities had their own skeletons. I'm sure that the McNair family wouldn't like the scene, but I'm also sure that the family of a non-celebrity woman who was stabbed to death, or family of an anonymous person that hanged himself wouldn't like a different scene that was on display. It shouldn't make it any different or more special because the guy was famous. If the male skeleton was wearing a black t shirt instead of a McNair jersey with the dead female draped over him, nobody would have said a word. So to me, it doesn't seem that the uproar is about someone dying. It seems to be that the person was famous, which to me isn't a valid reason to be offended. There are far more disturbing images to me used in horror movies and halloween displays than that one.
Now...Disney using cheez whiz...that's offensive, and quite frankly disgusting. How many more of these little stories are going to come out?
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The answer to my question calls more for a societal observation than it does for personal opinion. Before you answer, consider this thought. Yes, McNair's murder was a real event, but I'm sure that somebody has really hanged themselves since then. There have been plenty of real murders and real car crashes leaving mutilated bodies, and many people were killed in the electric chair.
And now the question. Why would it be that a dummy being lit up in an electric chair or a body hanging from a noose, or a bloody, mutilated dummy is passed off as "Halloween fun", but a campy, non graphic depiction of Steve McNair and his "lover" using no more than skeletons and a helmet used for popcorn would strike a nerve?
Is it our insensitivity to violence? celebrity worship? Is this story just the media (you know...the ones with the old mantra "If it bleeds, it leads) trying to stir a little controversy? Is it hypocrisy? Is it anything at all?
Thoughts?