Entries from March 2008 ↓

b.o. ghost[bee oh gohst] n:The stench that remains in the air long after a particularly odoriferous individual has left a room or area, i.e.: “After Paul left the store warehouse, his b.o. ghost remained for hours.” –Coined by The Wife.

Work (in the Air Force) makes you free, apparently…

Is anyone else having flashbacks to Starship Troopers right about now?

Ah, Starship Troopers, the first movie to make you root for the Nazis and hate the good guys (the bugs). Too bad I understand the book kind of sucks ass. Not that I have read it or have time to read it, what with pouring over What Color is Your Parachute right now and all.

Shit, that just got personal. Forget that last sentence and just remember: US Air Force Uber Alles.

*whistles “Springtime for Hitler”*

“Oh the HUMANITY!”
“Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!”

These were some of the reactions of (fictional) people to the news that Margaret B. Jones (real name: Margaret Seltzer) not only published fiction as fact, but that she made up 99% of her life for recent interviews.

Ms. Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Ms. Seltzer and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Ms. Seltzer’s older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw the article and called Riverhead to tell editors that Ms. Seltzer’s story was untrue.

That’s a Thanksgiving dinner I’d love to sit in on!

If you didn’t read it, the article the New York Times is referring to above is “A Refugee from Gang Land which was in last Thursday’s Style section. It was basically a “lifestyles of the not rich and soon to be famous for not being rich” piece about this half-white, half-native American girl (with a little girl of her own) who overcame life in “Big Mom’s” foster home, being a Blood (which she stated she was still a member of, by the way), and watching all of her foster siblings die or drift away, to become a successful graduate from the University of Oregon with a degree in ethnic studies and writer of a soon-to-be runaway best selling memoir.

Except that she’s an upper class all-white girl (no half Native American blood here!) who went to a posh private school in Hollywood with her biological sister and future whistleblower. There was never a foster mother or family, no gangs, no slogging through a job in Starbucks while going to school, no drug deals, no shotgun deaths, and no University of Oregon.

Instead, after high school, this privileged white girl worked with gang members and, essentially, stole their stories to pass off as her own memoir. That’s classy!

Naturally, her publisher is pulling the book. No word on whether or not her “less than $100,000″ advance is going to be returned.

I read the original story on Friday morning (I’m always behind on the news!) and thought something about her just didn’t seem right. There was too much *trying* to be ghetto without really getting there. Her speech was too good; her sentences weren’t peppered with dropped gs or urban words like “conversate”. But whatever, maybe being out of ‘the hood’ for eight years had a middle glass effect on people.

Today, after reading the NYTimes’ news story today, I reread the prior articles and was kind of caught off guard. The story about the “uncle” drug dealer her daughter wrote to in prison, the alleged (and did the writer see said tattoo?) bulldog tattoo that spans her small back, the photos of her foster family, the dirty shoe box of Big Mom’s recipies: all lies. Why did she buy the ghetto clothes, invite gang members into her home, adopt pit bulls — all things observed by the author of the article — if she never lived that way? How entrenched into this bizarre fantasy did she become to cover her tracks, and did she really never suspect when the New York Times showed up on her doorstep with a writer and photographer to do a photo essay and article on her life that no one from her real, privileged life woud go “Hey, wait a minute….”?

Naive, they called this girl? How about straight-up stupid.

(In case you’re wondering about how this is “round three” of fake memoirs, in addition to James Frey, a Belgian author was exposed today was faking her memoir about the Holocaust in which she lived in a Warsaw ghetto and was saved by the Nazis from wolves. Really? Kept safe from Nazis by wolves? And people believed this? That’s it, I’m being kept safe from George W. Bush’s wiretapping scheme by technology given to me by my alien father from Alpha Centauri.)

Ms. “Jones” also gave a recent interview with NPR; listen to her pull the best snow job since Tony Snow!