Things I'm boycotting - part 4

You getting tired of these yet? Me too, but I have about a dozen more. Lots of shitty people and things in this world. I'll consider holding off on them just because it is the Holiday Season. Ho ho ho and all that crap.

So I'm boycotting American Idol. Who's with me?

I haven't really watched the show in a while anyway. I think the only season that I made it entirely through was the season that that grey-haired dude won. He's a big star nowadays, huh? The music is okay. I mean, it's not my kind of music, but it's perfectly acceptable. That's not why I stopped watching.

It's the first few weeks of the show that I find reprehensible. Now I know that they feature a bunch of people who are just idiots who want their 15 seconds of fame. Some people will do anything to be on television. Even if the world is making fun of them. But I couldn't help feeling that there were some people who were on the show that genuinely thought they were talented, even though they clearly weren't. And, even worse, some of these sad souls seemed mentally unstable at best.

The producers of the show seemed to be crossing the "making fun of retards" line that is about as funny as a train wreck. Sure, some people are gonna tune in for the train wreck, but at what cost to their soul (or whatever the equivalent is for the non-religious). The show was just getting mean, in my opinion. And one of these sad sacks was gonna kill themselves over their treatment on the show some day. You just knew it.

Nobody knows for certain why Paula Goodspeed killed herself in front of the home of Paula Abdul. What we do know is that she either stalked Abdul or was dangerously obsessed with her for upwards of 17 years. Abdul claims that she had restraining orders out for Goodspeed at various times during that period. Abdul blames the producers of American Idol for allowing a potentially dangerous person who clearly was deranged so close to the object of her obsession.

She should be mad at American Idol. We all should be. But not just for letting a dangerous stalker get close to Abdul. That is actually kinda fun. We all should be upset because they chose to look at the entertainment value of making fun of a mentally unstable individual rather than pointing that individual towards someone that could help them. They did it for ratings.

And now she is dead. And while we may never know exactly why, I have a pretty good idea that the "good-natured ribbing" that she took on American Idol may have had something to do with that. Sure, she was a whack job. But making fun of a whack-job in private (something we all do) is entirely different from publicly humiliating her in front of millions. At a time when she thought she was living her dream in front of her favorite person in the whole world. That is just sick.

Fuck American Idol!

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Note: Remember to play the Bug-Eyed Trivia Challenge every day. All the mentally unstable kids are doing it.