There was a time, when I was a kid, I thought the year 2000 was completely out of reach.
Some of the best things on the boob tube back then were Godzilla films on lazy, school-free Saturday afternoons. (They were all the rage with me and my friends.) The commonplace television technology of today – with its digital this and surround sound that and DVR the other – is the stuff sci-fi (and that’s the way it’s spelled, not freakin’ SyFy) dreams are made of. The closest thing to TV reality programming were the fantastic Gene Rayburn and the wonderful and glorious game show The Match Game.
The full force of influence able to take shape as a result of the doings of television celebrities hadn’t fully been realized back then. Not like it has today.
And wow … have those influences manifested themselves in interesting ways.
Some of those influences have been nothing less than ground-shaking and extraordinary. People we love watching on television can (figuratively) move mountains, affect political agendas, perform humanitarian feats of awe which otherwise wouldn’t be possible without their celebrity.
Others? Not so much.
Some of those “others” are the ones who have celebrity thrust upon them for any host of reasons. You know the ones I’m speaking about – “personalities” who make our jaws drop from either being a hot mess (I swear, that’s the last time I use that term ever again) or a train wreck.
One of those personalities (I’m loathe to call her a “celebrity”) is Nicole Polizzi, better know as Snooki from Jersey Shore. Not only is Snooki a piece of work on the show, not only does she have a best-selling book out (below), she somehow wrangled a nice little $32,000 speaker’s fee from an appearance at Rutgers University. The rub? Well, from the “Just Kill Me Now” files, we find out not only did her fee shadow this year’s Rutgers commencement speaker Toni Morrison, but that of Nobel Prize Winner Maya Angelou as well.
Celebrity. It’s a (sometimes) head-scratching, mortifying but interesting thing.
I just want to know one thing: How have things come to the point where a renown university forks over student tuition for someone whose biggest inspiration is her skin tone?
It just might be proof of the (further) decline of western civilization …
(Acknowledgments to Sprezzatura)
Clacked by Michael Noble 
on Apr 04, 2011 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
%20decline%20of%20western%20civilization){kind=link}
Oh the many annoying things about Rutgers.
– Even though the money is coming from separate funds, paying someone a teacher’s salary to talk about their tan is just bad taste.
– Everyone complains about the lack of good musical acts at the end of the year festival, well I guess its cause the money went to whatever that was supposed to be Thursday. From what I heard it wasn’t funny.
– The Daily Targum is incapable of reporting without ass kissing. It drives me nuts.
– 500 to 800 people saw her “show.” Yet news organizations act like the whole college was there the way they report it. That is two lecture halls worth of people in a school that has 27 thousand undergrads. It shouldn’t affect how people think of the intelligence of the community as a whole. It just means the students who organize student activities are idiots.
As far as I’m concerned, student activity fees that are mandated as an addition to tuition might as well be considered tuition. And anything paid for by tuition should be part of the curriculum leading to diploma.
I remember paying an optional activity fee that gave me discounts or free tickets to campus functions I chose to attend. This was later changed to a mandated student activity fee “for better budget planning”. In other words, for more money in the hands of the planners and less individual choices by the individuals paying the fees.