We can thank global warming for at least one piece of good news: the retreating ice pack has revealed the remains of an alien space ship hidden for millennia beneath Antarctic snow.
And that’s about as factual as this week’s tabloids get in yet another truth-challenged week’s reporting.
JonBenet Ramsey’s killer has been found (allegedly a “jailed sex pervert” being protected by police), Priscilla Presley has called off her wedding to “sex perv” singer Tom Jones (as if that was ever going to happen), and Prince Charles’ wife Camilla “runs for her life” terrified that he will “shut her mouth ‘permanently’ like his murdered first wife Princess Diana,” according to the facts-be-damned ‘Globe.’
Tiger Woods is in a “tragic death spiral” after his DUI arrest, and “friends fear the fallen idol may be suicidal,” claims an unnamed source.
A word of advice to ‘Globe’ reporters: People don’t usually talk in rabid tabloid headlines, so it’s hard to believe that anyone actually said: “His shocking mug shot is the face of a man who’s lost everything and doesn’t know where to turn. There are fears he may kill himself!” His mug shot is far from “shocking” – it’s the face of a bleary-eyed guy who’d rather be back in bed letting his attorneys clean up his mess. And he knows exactly where to turn: to the right, for his profile mug shot photo.
It’s enough to drive any editor to drink, which is perhaps why boozing celebrities remain an obsession at the ‘Globe,’ which claims that Hillary Clinton is “chugging two bottles of wine every day,” and that Prince Charles’ wife Camilla “has been guzzling anything she can get her hands on” as “constant fear fuels her nonstop drinking.”
Former ‘Friends’ star Matthew Perry is “fat & sloppy” reports the ‘National Enquirer,’ world-renown as the ultimate arbiter of high fashion and healthy weight maintenance, where any celebrity who gains an extra pound must “diet or die,” or if they lose a single pound are condemned for “starving themselves to death.”
Angelina Jolie took four of her children to visit the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, bringing along two other kids, prompting the ‘Enquirer’ to speculate that “she plans to grow her family without Brad.” Because there’s no way the additional children could simply be friends of her kids, is there?. And those three adults walking with Angie and the kids – they couldn’t possibly be those other children’s parents or caregivers, could they? Of course not. Angie probably plans to adopt the lot, plus any other kids she comes across at the Tar Pits.
“A-Rod cheats on J Lo,” screams the ‘Enquirer’ cover, devoting four pages inside to the baseball star’s alleged affair with a “glamorous fitness model” who claims: “He made me dress as a schoolgirl!” The ‘Enquirer’ does appear to have rather a lot of highly incriminating sexually explicit texts and videos allegedly sent between A-Rod and “mistress” Lauren Hunter, but they only go to prove the banality of the affair and the duo’s depressing dearth of imagination and dreary inarticulacy. The language of love has been reduced to such stultifying prose as: “Are you home alone? . . . I miss you . . . Maybe face time tonight . . . Video video please. Want to see and hear you xxxx :)” Pure Shakespeare.
Olivia Newton-John, having announced that her cancer has returned, inevitably joins the tabloids’ death watch. The ‘Enquirer’ says the singer “won’t last another year,” while the team of medically-trained experts at the ‘Globe’ categorically state that she has “7 months left.” ‘People’ magazine, which devotes its cover and six inside pages to Olivia’s “brave journey” says that her particular diagnosis "tends to be less life-threatening, so you can really live for a fairly long time . . . “ Maybe she should get a fourth medical opinion? ‘People’ magazine’s story is notable for its pretty pictures accompanied by a starkly generic brief two-sentence statement from Newton-John. The rest is all supportive praise from family and friends, and I can’t help wondering if this set of pictures was taken weeks or even months before her diagnosis.
Thankfully we have the crack investigative team at ‘Us’ magazine to tell us that Jenna Dewan Tatum wore it best, that Olympics skater Apolo Ohno prefers tea over coffee, that actress Adrienne C. Moore carries lipstick, hand sanitizer and a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s 'The Prophet' in her Henri Bendel backpack, and that the stars are just like us: they swim, shop, drink and read books. Riveting.
‘Us’ promises to have the week’s biggest scoop with its cover story on Ivanka Trump, under the headline: “Why I Disagree With my Dad.” Yet not only does Ivanka not explain why she disagrees with the president, but she hasn’t even spoken with ‘Us’ magazine, which relies on foraging for quotes from her past interviews and pulling them together to show that she takes a different stand than her father on such issues of LGBT rights, climate change, and aiding Syrian refugees, among others. But ‘Us’ never explains the promise of why she disagrees with The Donald. “I think he’s an unprincipled troglodyte who doesn’t give a damn about the suffering of others” is the quote on her lips that she never utters.
Once again, the ’National Examiner’ remains in the vanguard of contemporary journalism, telling us that a "thieving dog” has been “collared at last,” that Lucille Ball’s TV sidekick Vivian Vance really did “love Lucy,” that “smarty-pants don’t wear any” (a survey purports to show that people with higher intellects are more likely to lounge around the house naked) and that an “immense UFO lay hidden in ice for eons!”
The images of the alleged spaceship, found in Antarctica by a Russian UFO hunter, definitely looks like a space ship – because we all know what those look like, right? Or it could just be a rock . . but what are the odds of that? Astronomical.
Onwards and downwards . . .
