Latest posts

So, I get this lovely piece of junkmail disguised as a letter (pdf file) in the mail today. It’s an ad for Jersey Air, an HVAC contractor that apparently wants to drum up business by scaring people into thinking that everyone but them hires “Thieves, con-artists, crooks, rapists and below aptitude technician!”

As it stands, I don’t how reputable a contractor claims to be, I’m going to watch them like a hawk anyway!

Remember Tana Goertz? Yeah, well, I didn’t either. So why am I even writing about her? Well, as it turns out, this lovely I-am-woman,-watch-me-sell-you-a-used-car mug was on the third season of The Apprentice. Naturally, she was fired. And under normal circumstances, such a dismissal would would generally bring her 15 minutes of fame to a merciful end. And for those of us who don’t watch The Apprentice (myself included), we would never have even heard of her, and would have been much better off for it.
But, it appears Tana refuses to gracefully let go of the limelight. She of course has her own tacky website (warning: it is annoyingly tacky, down to the embedded audio clip that plays upon loading the page).

And, she’s still haunting television. How low will the Queen of tack stoop? Apparently, quite low, as she’s now hocking the tackiest of all infomercial wares: The Bedazzler.

Oh, yes! She took the indignity of being fired by the world’s worst entrepenuer, and submitted to even worse indiginities by pushing the “art” of embedding cheap plastic shiny bits into clothing, thereby making it possible to really argue that getting fired by The Donald isn’t all that bad, by comparison.

So now, she invades the late night TV I watch on nights when I can’t immediately get to sleep, whoring her li’l heart out as she’s telling me about how wonderful it is to make my jeans replusively tacky by encrusting fake colored plastic jewels and tin. And the sad thing is that people will actually buy this crap!

Oh well… at least she didn’t turn into a professional spammer.

Every once in a while, I find myself seeing some remnant of a faddish act from decades gone by on TV and think, “gee, what ever happened to those people?” And alas, long after many b-list celebrities fade into oblivion, their lives often end up taking terrible turns for the worse.

And so it is with Victor Willis, the former “cop” in the ’70s act The Village People. Willis left the group in 1980, and the remaining Village People lived out their slide from b-list to c-list to… z-list? by replacing Willis with a new Cop, Ray Simpson. Why Willis left is a mystery. Maybe he thought he could make it on his own… who knows? Whatever the reason, it turned out to be the wrong choice:

Victor Willis, who co-wrote some of the band’s hits such as “In the Navy” and “YMCA” has had a number of run-ins with the law since he left the group in 1980 and now faces as much as five years in prison, said Morley Pitt, assistant district attorney in San Mateo County south of San Francisco.

“It’s just sad that his life has spiraled down to the point where in all likelihood he’s going to go to prison,” Pitt, who said he enjoys the song “YMCA”, told Reuters. “You never like to see anybody go to prison, let alone somebody who is 54 years old.”

Willis was arrested last year on charges of possessing a gun and cocaine, but he disappeared after agreeing to a plea deal that set a maximum sentence of 16 months behind bars, Pitt said.

They say that cops are dead meat in prison. But does that also hold true for ’70s cop-impersonator gay icons?  It looks like soon enough, we’ll find out.