I stumbled across it quite by accident while signing up for a pledge to blog about an influential woman on March 24th (an entry about that is forthcoming), and while reading the short story that inspired "Secretary", one of my favourite movies. (That, too, probably merits its own entry. Or, possibly, a fundraiser to pay for the psychotherapy I clearly need.) It's a top 40 list of pop culture icons, all of whom we know but many of whom we've completely forgotten.
Click the photo to go to the complete list (I shan't be lifting ALL of it from Nerve.Com), but first have a taste of some highlights:
We've all been there. You're yukking it up at a party and someone cracks a one-liner about Kato Kaelin over their gin and tonic. A few people chuckle, a few more ask, "Who?" and you quietly wonder: what the hell happened to that guy? Nerve's got your answer with our exhaustively researched look at the forty greatest lost icons in pop-culture history. Come on in and catch up with the walking ephemera everyone's only mostly forgotten.
I don't know that I've ever been to a party where the guests are bourgeois enough to make Kato Kaelin jokes, but..sure. I've no doubt attended a few during which at least some of the remaining 39 "lost icons" have come up, and I imagine some of you have been at those shindigs right next to me. Hell, you might've been the one making the obscure cracks yourself!
Never in a million years would I have dreamed that some intrepid journalist would track down, for our information and to satiate our Need To Know, a whole whack of Barker's Beauties from The Price Is Right. Complete with video, no less! Maybe YOU could sleep at night without knowing, but not all of us are so fortunate.
One of my favourites is the update on Michael Fay, the American kid who...well, just read this:
Michael Fay was your average American teenager: hyperactive, bored, prone to defacing property. In the early 1990s, he touched off a geopolitical firestorm when Singapore officials sentenced him to six canings for vandalizing cars and stealing street signs. The punishment so shocked Western sensibilities, President Bill Clinton himself asked for clemency, succeeding only in reducing the sentence to four canings. So it was that on May 4, 1994, Fay was stripped naked, bent over on his arms, strapped to a trestle, and struck with a half-inch rattan rod. Fay has largely disappeared from the public eye since, surfacing here and there for assorted petty crimes: reckless driving, possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, and sniffing butane (which he blamed on the Singapore ordeal). Four strokes clearly wasn't enough.
Remember him?? I wonder how long it took before he could sit down again.
And has it ever occurred to you to wonder whatever became of the baby who famously appeared on the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album?? I bet it hasn't, but I know you're curious now. You've just gotta click to find out where Jessica Hahn and Joey Buttafuoco ended up. And the "Where's the beef?" lady. It's compelling stuff. Hard-hitting. Christiane Amanpour should watch her back.
Honestly, WHO THINKS UP THESE LISTS??
Whoever it is, I love them.
Enjoy your end-of-the-weekend dose of brain candy, my friends. Or save it for your dreary Monday morning. Either way, don't say I never gave you anything.
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