"Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have reportedly agreed to film a fly-on-the-wall reality show..."

"The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were initially expected to only remain behind the camera for their multi-year deal with Netflix.... The pair will allow Netflix cameras to follow them for three months in a 'tasteful' docuseries as they go about their new life in ritzy Montecito, California.... Another source insisted that the docuseries will mostly focus on their 'philanthropy rather than what they get up to behind closed doors,' and it is not clear if cameras will be allowed in their new $14 million mansion.... 'We were told they had gone to California for greater privacy so it all appears rather hypocritical,' Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty Magazine, told The Sun. 'It is extraordinary. This is exactly what they said they wouldn’t do. The more they talk about themselves the more people will want them to do just that and won’t be interested in anything else they have to offer.'... [Piers Morgan said] 'At what point does the penny drop that she came over here, took our prince and now Mrs. Privacy is making a $150 million fly on the wall documentary where every part of their lives is going to be filmed?'"

From Page Six.

How dumb would they need to be to believe they could be paid $150 million to appear on camera doing philanthropy?! Of course, we must get inside their California mansion. But what will make them interesting in there? Him bumbling about and her running the show? Ha ha. I'm picturing something like Season 1 of "The Osbournes."

ADDED: Here's my post from the Harry-and-Meghan wedding day. I observed the body language:

Did anyone count the number of times Harry touched his face?... ... I don't want to be awful... but Harry kept touching and rubbing his face and I just couldn't help thinking about Harry's mother and what I know about the thoughts that rushed through her head on that day that the world watched her bogus "fairytale" wedding.... You can watch all sorts of couples get married — people congregate to witness weddings — but you can't know what the marrying minds are thinking. Is it wrong to look at the outward signs that there is a big disconnect between the spoken words and real person who is enduring the theatrical ritual?

I was trying to be discreet. In the comments, somebody said, "Can’t we just enjoy a wedding?," and I said:

I don't think it's right to enjoy watching the torment of a human being. So, no. But maybe your observation of human facial expression and body language is something you haven't developed or like to turn off when you're trying to have fun, but that's not me!

 Somebody else said, "Let us all aim to spread happiness," and I said:

So it's all about what goal you're hoping to achieve? But even if my main goal were to increase the happiness in the world, I would not believe that the way to do it is to encourage credulous sentimentality about marriage (especially the marriage of royalty).

"The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats."

"There’s no defense. Poor people have to expect to have their lives interfered with ad infinitum by these neurotic busybodies. It’s a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don’t exist to their satisfaction. Neal was so mad he wanted to come back to Virginia and shoot the cop as soon as he had a gun. 'Pennsylvania!' he scoffed. 'I wish I knew what that charge was! Vag, probably; take all my money and charge me vag. Those guys have it so damned easy. They’ll out and shoot you if you complain, too.' There was nothing to do but get happy with ourselves again and forget about it. When we got through Richmond we began forgetting about it and soon everything was OK. In the Virginia wilderness suddenly we saw a man walking on the road. Neal zoomed to a stop. I looked back and said he was only a bum and probably didn’t have a cent. 'We’ll just pick him up for kicks!' laughed Neal. The man was a ragged bespectacled mad type walking along reading a paperbacked muddy book he’d found in a culvert by the road. He got in the car and went right on reading; he was incredibly filthy and covered with scabs. He said his name was Herbert Diamond and that he walked all over the USA knocking and sometimes kicking at Jewish doors and demanding money. 'Give me money to eat. I am Jew.' He said it worked very well and that it was coming to him. We asked him what he was reading. He didn’t know. He didn’t bother to look at the title page. He was only looking at the words, as tho he had found the real Torah where it belonged, in the Wilderness. 'See? see? see?' cackled Neal poking my ribs. 'I told you it was kicks. Everybody’s kicks, man!'"

Kerouac, Jack. "On the Road: The Original Scroll" (p. 238). Kindle Edition.

I'm reading that as a consequence of searching for the word "poor" in the only Jack Kerouac book I have in searchable form. I was looking for "poor" because I'd read — in a non-Kerouac book — "Just a moment before, I was feeling a little like Jack Kerouac in that line that Gregory hated, when Kerouac says how, because he was poor, everything in the world belonged to him."

That line, it turns out, isn't in "On the Road." It's in "Visions of Cody." I found it here: "Everything belongs to me because I am poor." Why would you hate that line? "Gregory" was Gregory Corso, and the book I was reading was "When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School." I have been reading that book for practically the entire history of this blog! Here's my post from March 15, 2004, which says I've been reading the book for the past month.

Line from the post that really places it in the past: "Ah! Too bad there weren't video cameras everywhere, because that could be the perfect reality show, combining The Apprentice and The Osbournes!" (the book is about going to study at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, where the teachers are famous beat poets who turn out to be — as I put it in '04 — "all old men, somewhat addled and shambling" and the author finds that he is "not quite so much a student as an apprentice").

Yes, why can't I just get through the book, which is quite likable? Obviously, I got very distracted by the blog and fell out of the habit of reading things in paper form. But I picked it up again today because the light was so good for reading outside. It was bright but overcast. I'd read paper books outside all the time if the light could be like that. It was 72°.

"This weather is perfect," I said. "This is the weather in Limbo."

I was talking to Meade, who said: "Limbo, Kansas."

"If you have always suspected that 'sex addict' is celebrity shorthand for 'what do I have to do to make this go away?'..."

"... behold your unlikely whistleblower: Ozzy Osbourne."

On Saturday, Ozzy, driven either through naive honesty or a charming disregard for the party line has broke ranks and explained his rationale for cheating to the Times of London as: “I’m in a fucking rock band, aren’t I?”

“There have always been groupies. I just got caught, didn’t I? It was a bump in the road. I bet your marriage has bumps in the road too an’ all. In any marriage you grow apart if you don’t spend enough time together, and that was part of the problem. I don’t think I’m a fucking sex addict.”

Back in August, the headline was: "Ozzy Osbourne Undergoing 'Intense Therapy' for Sex Addiction After Multiple Affairs."

"Who is this woman, this fruit bat in fleece and Gore-Tex, clenching the side of the rock face above a glacier..."

"... screaming 'Tahhd! Tahhd!' at her husband, piercing the tranquillity of the Alaskan paradise?"

The Washington Post staff writer — Hank Stuever — doesn't know what to make of Sarah Palin's reality show.

You're flipping channels and you randomly land on "Sarah Palin's Alaska"... It's a show about . . . hmmm.

About a busy mom with a sporty husband. Their many offspring run from a soldier son in his 20s down to a mentally disabled adorable toddler and an unexpected grandson with curly blond hair. But quick enough it seems to be a show about a woman who fancies herself as something of a nature enthusiast who wants to take advantage of the short-but-sweet Alaskan summer. So is it about the li'l town where she lives? Is it about flowers and birdies and double rainbows? Is it like "Northern Exposure" meets "An American Family?"

You still don't know....

Stuever is imagining "you" flipping channels and arriving at this show, but for "you" to have this reaction, "you" would need not to recognize the celebrity or the celebrity-at-home genre of reality show. Maybe 10 years ago, this hapless "you" would have puzzled over a show like that, back before "The Osbournes" was the next big thing. But now? Come on, "you" is dumb!



(Mumbled "fuck" warning.)

4 teenaged girls are arrested after they figured out what clothes and jewelry they wanted and which celebrities houses to break into to get them.

The L.A. Times reports:

... Rachel Lee, 19; Diana Tamayo, 19; Courtney Ames, 18; and Alexis Neiers, 18 ... were arrested last week on suspicion of burglary in several of the cases....

Most of the group were classmates at Indian Hills High School, a continuation campus in Agoura Hills, set atop a leafy incline in an upscale neighborhood next to a traditional high school. BMWs and Audis were parked in the student lot Monday, and some of the nearby roads mark off horse trails for equestrians.

So... apparently children of privilege. How could this happen?

Blair Berk, an attorney who represents some of the victims, blamed "paparazzi shots and magazine coverage" for "increasingly prying into the private homes, schools and personal possessions of stars."

"There are only so many shot of a star's back gate before someone, be it a stalker or burglar, goes through it," Berk said.

Damned paparazzi, enabling us to see things we might want. Once you see what you want and where it is, it's just a short leap to stealing it.

At least one of the accused had her own aspirations for television stardom. Neiers was set to appear with her family in a reality-TV pilot about aspiring actresses on the cable network E!, and she was arrested on the set of the show, police said....

Reality is really biting us in the ass this month, isn't it? Balloon Boy, and now this. Is everybody in L.A. working on a reality show? Too bad criminal activity — so far, at least — hasn't become acceptable subject matter for reality TV shows. But the line between crime and reality shows is getting blurred. There seems to be some serious overlap in the kinds of people that are draw to the 2 things.

A young woman who identified herself as Neiers' sister said at the family's Thousand Oaks home Monday that the accusations are untrue. "My family is in so much debt," she said. "If this TV show falls through, you don't know how bad this is going to be."

How many families out there are hanging by the thread of a possible TV show? All it takes is one kid in the family to screw up... or can they edit out that kid — kind of like the way Aimee Osbourne was kept out of "The Osbournes" — except that Aimee was the sensible person who simply preferred not to be a reality show kid.

"When I Was Cool." I had to drive from Chicago back home to Madison today, and I was glad to turn on the car radio to find the very beginning of a Fresh Air interview with Sam Kashner about his book "When I Was Cool," which I've been reading--along with a bunch of other things--for the past month. The interview got me half the way home and was just great, with Kashner telling the story of being enamoured of the beatniks, going to study at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, and then finding them all old men, somewhat addled and shambling, and himself not quite so much a student as an apprentice.



Ah! Too bad there weren't video cameras everywhere, because that could be the perfect reality show, combining The Apprentice and The Osbournes!

You can listen to the show here today, and click on the archive after today. Memorable revelations from the interview:

1. William Burroughs said he would never have been a heroin addict if he had realized how badly constipated it would make him when he got to be an old man.

2. Allen Ginsberg made a pass at Kashner and, after Kashner declined, started to find Kashner's poetry terrible. Kashner is still angry ... about the poetry critiques.

3. Ginsberg's guru ordered him to shave off his beard because he was too attached to it--and he did!

4. Kashner's first assignment was to finish one of Ginsberg's poems and when it turned out to be a poem about having sex with Neal Cassady, Kashner went to the Boulder Public Library to ask for information!

5. It was Kashner's job to do Ginsberg's laundry, and the method he used was to ship the dirty laundry in a box home to his mother. She did the laundry and shipped it back!

Oh, listen to the interview. And read the book.

Eisner is to Trump as Simpson is to Osbourne? Prof. Bainbridge is thinking of joining me and Prof. Yin in the lawprofs who blog about reality TV shows business. That would be if Disney devised an Apprentice-like reality show to find a replacement for Michael Eisner, as was jokingly suggested.

There will be attempts to replicate The Apprentice, because it's so successful (and it's great too!), but I wonder what they will look like. The Osbournes was (past tense used intentionally, unfortunately) a great show, but could you just follow another celebrity around? It didn't work with Roseanne. But following Jessica Simpson around on the Newlyweds is actually pretty good. That's because Simpson is a great character. Not as supremely great as Ozzy Osbourne, but decently great. Now Trump is a great character, strangely compelling in his loathsomeness. He's the Ozzy of business competition shows. Is there also a Jessica? We'll find out. I'll bet we'll see a Roseanne, though.