Tag Archives: Balloon Boy

Falcon Heene is going to be a star

Posted on by
4

Colorado balloon boyThe Heene family takes the high road, pleading guilty to false reporting, to the surprise I’m sure of the poor-parazzi planting their tent stakes for a courtroom circus feeding frenzy. For his parents stepping up to tell the truth, Balloon Boy is going to emerge a hero, even at school. Who can fault the Heenes for taking the predatory media for a ride? They entertained, they became the butt of jokes, but they harmed no one and exposed the television media’s thinning credibility. The media is showing its vindictiveness, by explaining that the guilty plea was made to avoid Mrs. Heene’s deportation, but parents know this decision was about the kids, and I predict the Heene family’s star will rise. The media may never forgive them, but it’s too competitive to pass on this enterprising bunch.

How culpable was the media? There was not a single possibility that a child was being carried aloft by that mylar balloon. The media willfully played along and knew the story’s unraveling would make for even better ratings.

The prevailing opinion has it that the Heene parents committed an obvious error in judgment to plan this fraud and make the children their accomplices. I’d even agree. But in today’s scheme of things, isn’t seeking fortune and fame a matter of calculating what you have to compromise? It’s too early for mere television viewers to know if the Heenes actually miscalculated. Lots of ordinary people have launched themselves into the celebrity firmament on gambits which would embarrass the rest of us.

Was the Heene gambit much worse than taking your family to sail around the world, or any other foolhardy adventure? They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind. In this godless age, that is no longer a warning. It’s become an adage to define the fast track for social climbers.

We can second guess to what risks parents should or shouldn’t expose their children, but I don’t know who can say that a grab at the brass ring is ultimately out of bounds.

The fraudulent child-abducted-by-balloon story could almost pass for tongue-in-cheek, really. Just how stupid are the reporters and law enforcement? If you called them to complain of an elephant stuck in your toilet, and they came, my first thought is not going to be to accuse you of fraud.

I don’t care how many search and rescue emergency vehicles were expended on the balloon chase. They’re salaried, and the fuel and equipment hours can be expensed as training exercise. Giving chase is what those personnel are for.

I’m much more concerned about the media teams, fully prepared to build media events from fabricated premises. But it’s what they do with the big stories, like war, and politics. Balloon Boy exposed it.

The Famous Oprah Video punks who?

Posted on by
1

Oprah famous video black eyed peas good day
You find it by searching for FAMOUS + OPRAH + VIDEO. Because hyperbole arcs the hyperlink. Allegedly, the viral clip is being removed as fast as websites are putting it up. I’ll bet the reason would have more to do with James Frey and Augusten Burroughs baldfaced disingenuity than copyright infringement or Oprah being embarrassed by pedestrian plagiarism. The performance by the Black Eyed Peas, taped live in downtown Chicago for the 24th season of Oprah’s talk show, purports to ignite a spontaneous dance, to Oprah’s joyful astonishment. While the video may be a crowd-pleaser, it certifies corporate music’s lack of originality, and the American TV tube’s despicable boobness.

The jubilant TODAY’S GONNA BE A GOOD DAY scenario borrows of course from the T-mobile commercial featuring a dance production taped at a Liverpool train station, set to a medley of powerhouse dance numbers. At first fellow commuters are surprised. By the end we realize the entirety has been choreographed. Youtube viewers would recognize the contrivance from the Belgian train station scene, where ordinary commuters begin dancing to a favorite song from The Sound of Music, until the whole crowd is participating.

Is dance so highly infectious? There’s something people really love about seeing that theme play out. It gives viewers warm fuzzy feelings having to do with belonging to community. There’s nothing wrong with the Black Eyed Peas wanting to reap that same enthusiasm for their pretend live video. Who holds it against pop to imitate from anything?

Their job of commercial entertainment is to popularize, and an Antwerp central station is hardly a setting familiar to Americans. Better a live concert audience, youthful, outside, wearing the usual panoply of Disney colors, living in the moment, attached to no context of exterior lives, a high school musical on a sunny day, reality TV on vivid.

Both predecessors feature onlookers who stare transfixed, some calling friends on their cellphones, others recording what they see. In both sequences, often those standing on the periphery turn out also to be participants, eventually joining in the dance.

In Oprah’s version, she is the lone spectator, watching incredulous from onstage. Like the train station commuters, she holds a cellphone aloft, eager to record the dance epidemic as it spreads throughout her “audience.” Apparently, it’s not enough today to drop your jaw to show surprise, you have to pull out your camera to show how you know when seeing defies believing. What, is Oprah going to Youtube it? Would her television audience worry that the impromptu dance was going to pass without someone recording it for posterity?

Oprah’s spontaneous wonder may have passed for genuine before a television audience who didn’t see the dance coming, but on the instant replay, how will Oprah’s act play? Are we to believe she didn’t know about the Christo scale choreographed event? If the stunt had been planned as a surprise, do you suppose Oprah wouldn’t have noticed her audience was suddenly uniformly younger and more fit, wearing uniformly bright colors evenly distributed across the monitor screens. Failing that, do you imagine someone as skilled as Oprah at communicating with peoples en masse, wouldn’t detect that this audience had something up its sleeve? It’s probably no false flattery to brag that Chicago is not big enough for Oprah and a surprise party of thousands, without invitations coming across her desk.

The Black Eyed Peas dance bomb may have made wonderful television, and it might have been even better if Oprah had winked instead of gasped. Because now the scene is simply contrived. To watch it in hindsight, as has become the norm for television in the Youtube age, there’s Oprah punking us all.

CNN did it with Balloon Boy, FOX does it for politics, and the rest do it for the war: false concern, contrived conclusions. American media nourishes with falsity. Musicians lip-sinc, Yo-Yo Ma faked his performance at the inauguration, as we learned all instrumentalists do in cold weather.

Balloon Boy parents know Must See TV

Posted on by
Reply

balloonboy falcon ft collins colorado
In defense of Balloon Boy’s parents not looking too hard for him in the garage, can you imagine their eyes weren’t riveted like everyone’s on the television images of the soaring balloon? The spectacle was not a mere stray weather balloon, but a 6-year-old aeronaut aloft. Theirs.
If viewers have cause to suspect a hoax, it’s the corporate news and whatever their owners/sponsors would rather us not be pointing at.

Of course little Falcon Heene’s prime-time onscreen debriefing revealed he’d concealed himself, or wasn’t answering his parent’s calls, or thought his parents might have been play-acting, “for the show.” No doubt taping two episodes of reality TV for “Swapping Wives” had taught the Heene household about stage-managed reality. I can imagine there were lots of scenes where the kids had to learn to stay out of the shot until the cameras were ready for their closeup.

America, this is reality TV, the play at home game.

Perhaps we’ll learn later if network producers were in the house today making sure their footage, the entirety of it, from action to personal interest, would make good television. Little Falcon grinning from under a box in the garage would render the aerial footage about nothing but a runaway Chipotle float. A child’s escaped balloon is something you see everyday at the state fair, hardly TV Worth Watching. Not to mention the anti-climax for the rescue posse chasing on the ground for the big payoff reveal, the Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault on a barren Eastern Colorado field.

I find it hard to believe, actually, that Falcon’s father, couldn’t tell at a glance whether his helium borne backyard project was carrying the significant extra weight of a child. That was no UFO to the balloon’s engineer, who’d have to have noticed if ballast had been dropped at the takeoff point to compensate for a supposed passenger.

Similarly, police helicopters are equipped with infrared sensors which would have revealed immediately if a human body was aboard. The entire media distraction was a fabrication.