Reid About It

I saw a photo spread of Sara Rue in a magazine recently. Rue is the brunette from "Popular," and "Less Than Perfect." She's very funny, a good actress of average size, which of course in Hollywood means she's going to get all the parts labeled "Fat Girl."

Her TV show was called "Less Than Perfect," a play on words about the fact that her main character was not your typical Hollywood girl. That is to say, she was not composed of sinew, bone, and a skin stretched so tight that it can be played like a snare drum.

It the entertainment field, where caffeine and nicotine are classified as food groups, a woman isn't allowed to have more than five extra pounds on her at any given time. That figure goes up to seven in the post-meal, pre-vomiting stage.

The picture indicated that Rue had lost most of the weight that kept her separate from everyone else in Hollywood. She also had gotten a shorter haircut, which she had dyed blonde. If not for the caption, I wouldn't have recognized her, nor would I have looked.

Why does the alternate universe that is Hollywood insist on having everyone look the same? Is it so that all of these actresses can play each other in the movies, and we don't have to worry about getting the names correct? If I saw a movie starring Maggie Gyllenhall, Keira Knightley, Taryn Manning, and Jaime King, they'd have to wear nametags so I could pretend to care about each one of them.

It's the Christina Ricci syndrome. When Ricci reached legal age, she was attractive because she appeared to have a figure behind her. Even though, or perhaps because she was a walking smoky, Gothy, bad attitude, she stood out in Hollywood. Now that same girl is exactly the same girl as everyone else, with the forgotten indy cred long left behind her.

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I like things that are different. Every movie does not have to have the exact same cast, plot, special effects, and voice-over guy.

Look at "The Island." Was it enough that you had Scarlett Johannson, a very good, attractive actress in the lead? Nope. You have to Photoshop the ads, and inflate her to superhuman proportions.

Scarlett Johansson Terrified By Her Own Giant Rack

No wonder we're a society possessed of unrealistic expectations.

The big thing now in car sales is "Employee Pricing." I think GMC was the first, then Ford and everybody else jumped on. Now, you can get employee pricing, plus you get to keep your rebate. It sounds great. However, what it really means is that the oil companies are making so much money off of us, they don't even need to sell us automobiles anymore. They can afford to give us the car, and still make a big profit off of the price of gas.

Now, if the AMA would step in and subsidize those new Burger King Ultimate omelet sandwiches, that would be something. Maybe the trial lawyers could offer free booze to people after midnight in bars. Anything to keep the machine running.

My local Wal-Mart now has those automated check-out lines, where you go through, you run your groceries across the scanner, you sack them, you pay for them, and then you take them out to the parking lot. What a great idea this is! I was so thrilled to get that "working at Wal-Mart experience," when I was finished, I stocked the shelves in housewares and then mopped the cosmetics aisles before rounding up the buggies in the parking lot on the way to my car.

The people these stores hire to check out your items are paid by the company, and most of the time, they still don't have any idea how to do it correctly. Why should I have to do their work for them?

I figure Wal-Mart thinks if they can just get us to ring our own groceries up, they can fire the rest of the night shift, replace them with underage illegal aliens smuggled in from Cambodia as indentured servants to the Sam Walton Foundation For Global Economic Control, and then generate nothing but profit.

Something else I've noticed about Wal-Mart. Leaving aside the stylistic irony of a poor white trash bottom dollar seller mentality store like Wal-Mart actually selling jewelry, have you ever noticed the security at the store? If you wanted to steal jewelry from Wal-Mart, you're much better off waiting until someone buys it, then clocking them while they're trying to find their keys in the parking lot. They've got ten times as many cameras focused on their cheap jewelry counter as they do on your car in the dark of the lot.

I just bought Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" on a book-on-CD, as read by Christopher Walken. It comes on a boxed set of 232 CDs.