First- Kevin Trudeau- guilty on all counts. In jail awaiting sentencing.
An observation: Yesterday I was downtown, riding in 3 or 4 elevators. Every person in every elevator I took was either talking or texting on their cell phone. EVERYONE!!
There is a great article in Sports Illustrated this week written by Steve Rushin. In it he describes the dumbing down of America. (The article is called Dumbstruck.)
The last paragraph describes a basketball game he attended:
Then you attend a basketball game a week after the Sandy Hook tragedy, and there is a pregame moment of silence for the victims, and that silence is shattered when a cellphone rings behind you, and the owner, unbelievably, answers it. As he conducts his loud and long conversation, you wonder if our collective IQ hasn’t already fallen below some intellectual Mendoza line, from which it can never return.
Earlier in the week, I built some new bookshelves in my office, and started moving some books around. In one pile I found a magazine that I have saved for about ten years. It is a special edition of Q Magazine, a great English rock magazine. It is titled The 100 Greatest Rock’n’Roll Photographs. Each photograph is accompanied by a short paragraph written by the photographer. Most are English, but there are a few Americans in the list, most notably Jim Marshall, Henry Diltz and David LaChappelle. Some of the quotes are pretty priceless. Next to photo # 27 (A naked Eminem with a lit stick of dynamite covering his junk) LaChappelle says:
Rule number 1 is don’t tell anyone your ideas for the shoot until the day of. There are a lot of people in the record industry whose whole purpose in life is to rain on the parade.
The best quote is in the forward (written by David Bowie):
A vaguely irrelevant sidebar to this discussion is that during my formative Ziggy period my then management, no doubt giddy on the trip and under the spell of Colonel Tom Parker, brought in a policy of no photographs at gigs. This brought a singularly ridiculous outcome, particularly in the States in that most newspaper reviews of my shows, not having a nice action shot, were relegated to an inside or back page of the entertainment section. Ha bloody ha.
While I was reading that I was remembering a festival I photographed starring Moby and David Bowie. I was there to photograph Moby, the final act, and his publicist asked me to stay in a tent backstage (with most of the other photographers) during Bowie’s set, as we were not cleared to photograph him. She put a guard at the entrance to make sure that none of us escaped. It was hot in the tent, so myself and the Sun Times photographer (who had just gotten out of the hospital, where he had actually died on the operating table, and was brought back to life) decided to walk about 10 feet from the entrance of the tent to find some shade and breeze. Just as we sat down on the ground in the shade, the publicist came back, so us and started screaming at us that we were breaking the rules!
Maybe Mr. Bowie forgot what he wrote in Q!