Where is Tanya Harding When We Need Her?

The News Just Isn’t What It Used to Be!

(LAKE TAHOE REAL ESTATE BLOG) Donno about you, but we’re tired of all of this Spears attention. Probably as much as we’re tired of the joke that our news media has become. All of them news rooms and Spears buffoons should be harpooned.

Does the first amendment cover stupid? Don’t answer that. We know. Unfortunately.  The world is terror stricken, we’re fighting two wars, the price of gas has gone through the roof, and the value of the house under it is heading for the floor. We’ve got a fiasco of a presidential free-for-all where if any of them win, we lose. And the news is about an unthoroughbred filly that’s foaling.

We’d like to call them “javelins”; it sounds seedier, but what the Spears have done mostly is take their clothes off. That’s Britney taking them off to get out of a car, presumed because she can’t create, and here’s little sister Jamie Lynn taking them off to get in a car to create.

It doesn’t take a lot of talent to take your clothes off. Hell, I can even do that (but only with the lights off). Affairs made public of disorderly disrobing are audio visual assaults to our senses. One would think the media would be content to just report news about the housing market, and declare it bad, even though all of it is good news for buyers.

We’ve had it with the news spin cocaphony of crass classless celebrity calamity. Dizzy dense and dumb from it, our hurting heads have had enough.

These news spinners need to be spun, of course, but let’s get the whole lot of’em in the wash cycle, to spin there where they belong, and clean’em off. But watching dirty laundry is dull, boring. It makes our head bone hurt. And reality TV near palpable.

We need a return to greater glory. Where the news was, well... news, and today’s drivel is no more than an imposing imposter.

Where is Tanya Harding when we need her? This was news of sterner stuff. Our news media, Britney and Jamie Lynn could learn a thing or two about news making from this tearfully tragic trailer trash tornado.

We like the idea of a top-notch, misfigured figure skater, who smokes and pops gum doing impossible triple axels, who gets arrested for hiring a hit man to hit a woman, and collared again for hitting someone over the head with the lid of a trash can. You can’t make this stuff up.

Now this is theater. Good old fashioned fun. Tanya, please come home. Your public misses you. Here’s a review of preposterous pearls from the Tanya school of real news... just in case you forgot:

Jeff Gillooly -
This was Tanya’s husband, but the marriage was a step down for both of them. Jeff was likely the master mind of the whole charade, but he had help. The sound thinking went like this, if we take Nancy Kerrigan out, Tanya will win, and we will all be rich. (Presumedly then, they could buy their own trailer park, and hush puppies and used Ford Pintos of every color.)

Shawn Eckardt: (I’ll have a beer, shaken not stirred.)
This was Gillooly’s life-long friend since grade school, and our favorite character in this torrid tale by far. Here’s the classic Walter Mitty, a tragicomic hero with imagination. His main persona was that of a lesser James Bond, but with a 1976 Mercury... that was an Aston Martin incognito.

Shawn, being sluthier and more sherlockian than most sluths, lived in his old room at his parents house in a Portland suburb. Claiming expertise on his business card in counterterrorism (Rumsfeld should’ve used him), espionage and protection of famous celebrities (the redundancy passed his grasp), Eckhardt’s “office” was upstairs in a spare bedroom (he had a short commute to work). There in the hall, a sign on the door gave notice to all passersby: “Worldwide Bodyguard Service.”

It was a secret worth keeping. The Worldwide Bodyguard Service had only one client, ever. Actually it was two, Mr. and Mrs. Gillooly. We read somewhere that after master Gillooly and Shawn hatched the plot, deep in the secured operations area (it had to be) of The Worldwide Bodyguard Service, both went downstairs where Shawn told his mother Agnes about the plan.

Shawn took countermeasures to make sure his thinking was encrypted, we're sure, but uncoded it went like this, if we take Nancy Kerrigan out, other skaters and “famous celebrities” will need The Worldwide Bodyguard Service and I’ll be rich. Agnes was proud of her son. It was a brilliant plan.

After Shawn was told that the plan happened, that Nancy had been thumped, he called Agnes and asked her to videotape all of the news. “I’ve changed world history,” he told her. Apparently she overtaped some of the episodes from Shawn’s prized Star Trek collection, but never mind that, she had bigger business to deal with. Family pride is an amazing thing.

Poor Shawn eventually had to do a year in jail out of an18-month sentence because of all of this foolishness. They caught the klutz cabal because, who would have guessed, Shawn had to brag about it to anyone who would listen. It was marketing wizardry from the top, the CEO, don’t you know, of The Worldwide Bodyguard Service.

There is a footnote we like, and it’s a delicious one. One would imagine that Shawn, who tipped the scales at about 300 pounds, spent some, ok most, of his time in jail thinking about food. Jail fare will do that to you. Unless you are on death row, there are none of those last-meal goodies to be had. A year is a long time for any Walter Mitty to hone a well-thought out and top-of-the-culinary-world appetite.

Shawn’s get-out-of-jail meal was at a Denny’s. And it was a celebration. Agnes was there. And things were looking up again. (We poke fun, but we truly hope so for the both of them.)

(PS. Four days after we posted this, we read that Shawn passed away, at 40 years of age of natural causes.)

Tanya Harding: (Since Then)
Since her greater glory, she’s been a singer, a wrestler, a boxer, and we’ve even heard rumors of her tring to become a Seal. She got a trophy in front of a jeep at a car show in 2006, and got a beauty make over on Entertainment Tonight (no comment on whether it worked or not). And a Portland theatre company is going to produce a new World Premiere Rock Opera entitled: Tonya / Nancy: The Rock Opera, and we wonder if The Worldwide Bodyguard Service will be there. The hits just keep on coming.

Back to Present:
The Spears sisters are going to have to do a lot more than cut off some hair, and get pregnant, to top all of this. Although it would be tongue in cheek if Tanya were to use "Oops, I Did It Again" as her enter-the-boxing-ring theme song.

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