Paparazzi Buried With Anna Nicole Smith

merica’s trailer park inhabitants mourned between talk shows and soap operas Saturday as the world’s public-access Marilyn Monroe was buried in the Bahamas. The modest celebrity and super-tabloid magnet was finally laid to rest after a month of court battles and life-draining media coverage following her February 8 death from over-exposure. Laid next to her son following his September 2006 death from a drug overdose, Smith’s burial was most notable for a judge’s order that allowed several members of the tabloid media and freelance photographers to be interred with the body.

"I’ve got a feeling this story is only going to get bigger after this," said photographer Ray Snable, still clicking away on his camera with fresh photos of the body as pallbearers nailed a large lid on the 125-man coffin containing the deceased starlet and her new entourage.

"The unusual burial situation came about from an order handed down by vaudeville’s own Judge Larry Seidlin when he released the Smith body and its bosom baggage for a burial in the sunny Bahamas. Judge Seidlin decreed that "America has a vested interest in following the continuing drama of the Anna Nicole Smith story."

"Now more than ever," said Broadway Seidlin, "as the country faces one tumor of dull-ass presidential election coverage and weak competition on American Idol, the people want and need the security of a sassy, beautiful corpse of no particular claim to fame and her everyday trials. Reruns are simply not enough."

The court ruling allowed 124 members of the medias, including freelance photographers, to join the Smith remains in their underground adventure with a specified promise of keeping the public up to date on how the story continued to unfold. Will Smith learn to cope with the loss of her son? Will she tell the real identity of her baby’s father? Will she continue to live the sedentary lifestyle all of America witnessed on her too-short-lived The Anna Nicole Show? Judge Seidlin promised just because the body ceased to breathe it doesn’t mean Americans will stop caring about the drama.

After burial of the notably large coffin, the muffled screams of the more timid members of the burial coverage crew were drowned out by the sobbing of people who felt a bizarre kinship with the former Playboy playmate and grave-robbing skeleton widow, as well as the appropriately vacant song stylings of country music superstar Joe Nichols. Slash, of the band Guns ’N’ Roses, was also in attendance, because what else could he have been expected to be doing.

Despite objections from some human rights advocates, Entertainment Tonight segment producer Lynn Hoddbody argued those reporters and photographers buried alive with the corpse of the peroxide blonde model were the lucky ones.

"This is probably the single most important media event of the century, and I can say without fear of contradiction Anna Nicole Smith will be the most tragic figure in history," Hoddbody said. "Who wouldn’t gladly sacrifice themselves to be there when O.J. Simpson slashed the shit out of his wife and that guy, to witness that world-shaking event in progress and have a slim chance of telling us just what happened? In this case, we can all truly say we should envy the dead."

Which begs the question—first O.J., now Anna Nicole: Is there a curse on all the stars of The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult? Will George Kennedy survive?

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Fads have existed from the beginning of time. From the original fad of the dinosaurs, through the first Christian who nervously fingered his WWJD lapel pin right before he was fed to the lions, fads have been a simple fact of life for eons. So it should come as no surprise that there were even fads during America's own ancient times, the 1930's. Just because people talked funny and everything was in black and white doesn't mean those somber times were free of people getting overly excited about stupid trends.

Perhaps the most bizarre fad of the 1930's was the practice of goldfish swallowing. The origins of this fad are unclear, though a hilarious story about a goldfish owner eating an insanely hot tamale the same day his home's water was turned off, leading him to accidentally swallow his own pet goldfish while gulping down the contents of its bowl, has persevered over the years. True, or just funny? We may never know, but the exact same thing happened to my cousin and I wouldn't rush to credit him with being the first person to do anything.

In 1939 Dickie Lunds set the modern-day record by swallowing three hundred goldfish, after which a tapeworm the size of Doris Day was coaxed out of his large intestine with promises of a film career. Though like most aspiring starlets arriving in Hollywood, the tapeworm was then unceremoniously hit upside the head with an oar and sold to the rich as an exotic house pet. Lunds' short-lived fame then quickly deflated, since without the tapeworm puffing him up he had so much excess skin he looked like a giant scrotal flap. And no matter how many cut-rate children's pets you can cram down your disgusting throat, that's just not something the chicks dig. Unless you're Hugh Hefner, it wouldn't surprise me if that nasty old guy experiences full-body erections that cause him to grow to eight feet tall.

Lunds would later set the record for eating the most antacids after attempting to set the record for iguanas eaten in 1944, and would die alone in 1953 while trying to eat more hermit crabs than Lyle Downey of Hershberg, Kansas, who had spent three weeks accidentally locked inside of a pet store that had gone out of business. Even though he would end up as only a footnote in the history of lousy children's pet eating, Lunds has to be admired for his resolve and "never get a clue" attitude.

The most impressive fad of the 1930's had to be the dance marathon. Every Saturday night, couples would pit themselves against each other in this iron-willed test of resolve and lack of healthy perspective. In this bizarre ritual, dozens of men and women would dance to the death for weeks on end inside high school gymnasiums, the last couple standing crowned the king and queen of the killing floor. All the while, a dance "moderator," perched inside a lifeguard's tower with a rifle, eliminated contestants who clearly had lost the will to dance. Eventually this fad died off when people realized there were easier ways to get a door prize.

Though by this time they've probably eclipsed the statute of limitations on what can be considered a fad, drive-in theaters deserve a mention for their sublime tackiness. The first drive-in theater was opened by Delmar Hughes in his back yard in 1935, when he charged his neighbors admission to park on his lawn and watch footage of Delmar's wife having sex with a polo team projected onto his garage door. Never was the popular saying truer, that revenge is the mother of invention.

Drive-in theaters grew in popularity amongst people who were afraid to leave their cars for nearly fifty years, providing generations of Americans with warm memories of half-seen movies watched in pantomime form because dad didn't pay good money to not be able to listen to his smooth jazz station when he was in the car. If lip-reading were a real science and not just a bluff used by conmen to bilk the FBI and make deaf people feel inadequate, it would have got its start at the drive-in.

As you may have noticed, the big fads of the 1930's were decidedly low-budget affairs thanks to the Great Depression. But they were memorable in their creativity, and certianly worthy of a chapter in You Look Like an Asshole, my upcoming book. Speaking of which, it's starting to look like eight chapters isn't going to be nearly enough, so I need each and every one of you out there to put your heart into creating fads that will define the current decade, and fast. I don't care what; wear an oil filter for a hat or something, paint your dog. Just make sure it catches on in the next few weeks. Thanks.

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Tonight the city is packed like a cheap suitcase, my friends. It is brimming over with miserable, sweaty recluses, who sit naked in their stench-ridden plaster of Paris hovels like the penthouses of the damned. They spend their unfortunate lives brewing up Byzantine conspiracy theories like pots of runny black coffee, in an ass-clenching attempt to pass those painful small hours of the night's midsection, hours that cling and drag like a moss-covered gallstone. And not just tonight, no. Last night, as well. Most likely last Tuesday. Maybe other nights, it's hard to say.

True enough, there are still some intrepid dreamers who sniff glue or make Popsicle stick models of Eartha Kitt's gigantic ass when the boredom horn comes calling, cutting a crimson swath through their sleepwalking nightmare lives. But countless others have no hobbies at all, and instead attempt to break boredom's dark stranglehold by dreaming up improbable conspiracies galore, spiraling out into infinity with their paranoid cake-baking.

But the twisting corridors of this sickly web don't end there, good friend. This lonely waltz demands several more dancers to move their hips in and out when the suggestion is made, like freak-dancing mulatto robots. This latter-day ecosystem of conspiracy is made complete only by the existence of the noble dubunker, the conspiracy theorist's natural predator! Without debunkers, the conspiracy theorist population would grow wildly out of control, regenerating exponentially and savaging the natural cultural landscape. It would choke out all other indigenous lifetypes, like bad drivers and hypochondriacs. The beautiful diversity of nature would quickly and unceremoniously be destroyed, like a bedwetting puppy that was a gift from your ex-wife.

You might argue that this could be a good thing, especially the next time some sex-crazed zealot of questionable lineage backs his 4-Runner over the top of your humble sparkbox of a car, pausing only to spew a smoking stream of white-hot vitriol out his driver-side window before he peels out, and his bumper sticker tells you to go hump a penguin. But diversity is sustainability my friend, and without every variety of unfortunate asshole out there in the world, the whole circus tent would come down like a giant scale model of the Notre Dame cathedral, one made of lubricated dominoes.

Pluck one sphincter-searing malcontent from the beautiful mosaic of life and when your back is turned, six other varieties of life would disappear in the bat of a bat's eye. The nursemaid, the wax statue enthusiast, or the twice-baked grandmother, perhaps? Or could it be the surgeon, the Harley mechanic or the last unmolested boyscout? That's just the thing, my friends, the choice is not ours to make, and when we start yanking fibrous polybendanium stalks willy-nilly from the high-tech camping tent of nature, no one can say just what will come falling down around our ears next.

And what is life without the ammonia-scented wonders of nature? The dizzying variety of crawling, backward-twitching creation, a rancid, festering cornucopia of tropical ooze clogging our eye sockets like a pudding-thick discharge? Not a whole flaming lot. It's a couple of stale Styrofoam coffee cups rolling around on the floorboards of a cobalt blue 1985 Chevy Nova, friend, and personally I'm one who has been down that road before. You can have it. It only goes to Wisconsin.

So before you go to bed tonight, say a humble prayer of thanks to the noble debunker, for all too often they go unrecognized and unthanked. Yet regardless, they bravely trod forward, never once complaining. And when life leaves a steaming batch of road apples on their path, they make delicious apple pie.

And I think we can all learn a valuable lesson from that.

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