Friday, June 15, 2007

Unyielding Commissioning Knee Deep in Schadenfreude

What goes around comes around. Lou Pearlman has been expelled from Indonesia and arrested in Guam. Who is Lou Pearlman? Apparently, he is first and foremost a con artist who has run ponzi schemes and cheated people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that's all pretty bad. But more importantly, he's the man who provided us not only N-Sync and The Backstreet Boys, but also O-Town, LFO, and scads of other grating pop acts. See, the charter jet company he owned once flew New Kids on the Block somewhere and he decided that boy bands were the über shit. Not only would they make him a ton of money, they're really young, so he can rip them off, too. Now, I don't think Justin Timberlake is starving these days, but his claim that he was "monetarily raped by a Svengali" seems to be par for the course for Pearlman.


It's just a shame that they couldn't parlay this into a very special Dateline NBC To Catch a Predator with Chris Hansen. Pearlman looks the every bit the depraved lecher. I could see him coming over to a random house to meet a young, blonde boy who likes to dance. But instead of bringing a six pack, he'd have a recording contract which he had no intention of honoring. Hansen would pop out and say, "Hi! Have a seat. Siddown. Please. Take a seat."
"Oh, I was just checking on this kid. He was alone and I wanted to make sure he was OK."
"We have the e-mails, we know what you were here for. It says here you promised him, 'Lots of money and girls and appearances on MTV.' Then why do you have this contract with all kinds of loopholes?"
"Oh, no. This, uh. This is just - I just had this with me."
"You said in your e-mail, 'It doesn't matter if you can't sing - just dance. I'll dress you and get four other guys. We'll have your songs on every radio station in the country.' Is that true?"
"Er, well, you know. Girls want to hear that stuff."
"So it's OK to inflict it on the rest of us? It's not bad enough that you're going to rip off some kid, but you're going to make us watch while you do it? Pretty sick, dontcha think?"
Pearlman pulls his shirt up over his face. "Look, I'm sorry. I don't know what I was thinking. I was stupid. Please don't arrest me."
Here's hoping his ass lands in jail for a loooong time. I tried to come up with a boy-band pun, but I (thankfully) can't remember any of those songs right now. Someone want to jump in? Add a comment...

Triumphant Return! Triumph the insult comic dog is back. I was concerned that maybe he hung up his bow tie, but he went to the Tonys on Sunday (hat tip: Adamriff).



Here there be tygers.

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