Kim Kardashian leaving the Maxim Style Awards from the Avalon nightclub in Hollywood, CA

Scurrilous Ephemera Nov 2010 – Kim Kardashian, Lindsay Lohan, and more!

– by Stephanie MacDonald

We can safely begin this week’s overdue SE with a very deep question.

As you know, Scurrilous Ephemera is all an excuse to read trashy, poorly written, frequently fallacious pop culture detritus in a self-consciously intellectual, post-snark, quasi-political, transparently lazy and inept search for the grains of enlightenment to be found perusing Perez et al. Out of this miasma of media-generated, ego-driven, accomplishment-indifferent non-news, we can theoretically grasp at some fleeting metaphor that may help explain our society’s response to the inherent absurdity of life, and find where we as mortal individuals exist in terms of our relationship to this planet floating in a timeless universe. Anyway, this deep question occurred to me at work today: Why is Kim Kardashian not referred to as K-Kar?

K-Cars were awesome ’70s faux cop cars, in case you don’t know. This quandary distracted me from my in-progress press release and consumed my mental energy for about two minutes until I was re-distracted by the press release, when the concluding sentence I was looking for popped into my head. Find your own meaning in this.

So it’s been a while, and it appears that in SE’s absence all manner of unfortunate things have happened to those who we used to enthusiastically pretend care about in an ironic way. Some of them are broke and forgotten and maybe we can do them an actual service by paying attention to them again, briefly, and thus can feel good about ourselves for at least one thing today.

We can start with the only person famous before she started making questionable decisions, Lindsay Lohan, whose SCRAM bracelet’s energetic cries for help from the second-to-last bathroom stall on the left got her a court-imposed trip to the expensive Betty Ford Clinic. Sitting through her fourth week of family therapy with Michael and Dina is probably making her pine for solitary confinement in prison, but onward.

Lindsay Lohan, pre-prison and Betty Ford.

Out-of-work Jon Gosselin has no cash to buy ridiculous outfits, go to strip clubs or buy drugs. Or pay child support, something that Octomom could also use to keep the bank from foreclosing on her, except she was single, unemployed, and living at her parents’ house with her six existing children when she had the interesting idea to implant herself with eight more embryos from her ex.

Moving on up (or down) the pathos scale, Heidi and Spencer are happily back together, but they are sad they have blown the ten million they earned from The Hills on plastic surgery and crystals, and are residing in Spencer’s parents’ pool house. Smugly, we can make the assumption that our society has left these formerly ubiquitous people behind because of their karma, their lack of abilities or whatever, but it must be pointed out that out of the carcass of this hydra emerges The Situation, teen moms, and housewives ad infinitum. We are not getting smarter – clearly, our attention spans are simply getting shorter.

And… Charlie Sheen keeps on being the highest paid TV star, and K-Kar is exceedingly busy opening fancy stores, having sex with Kanye West, wearing lots of makeup, and getting her face put on credit cards.

Mad man Charlie Sheen, the highest-paid actor on television.

In moments of frustration with the senselessness of fame, fortune, and U.S. election results, it’s comforting to find objective answers to at least some of life’s most pressing concerns. Last night, the National Geographic Channel explained the following existential mystery: Great White Shark VS. Killer Whale! Answer: If you pit a killer whale against a great white shark, the killer whale will win. Evidently, if you stun a shark and flip it onto its back it goes into a trance, and killer whales have figured this out, so they can drown them and then tear out the tasty liver and devour it. This makes them officially smarter than the human beings who enjoy keeping them in swimming pools for their amusement. Free the K-Wha!!! More SE next week, promise.

Killer whale - smarter than the average shark.