Katyboo1’s Weblog

I fear that I am becoming obsessed by Celine Dion.  My Celine Dion’s Nude Ski Death blog is still riding high in my blog stat charts, in fact it gets the most hits of all the posts I’ve written, and I’ve written a lot.  On an average day I get between fifteen and forty hits on that post alone.  It’s a phenomenon.  It’s sweeping the nation.  It’s deeply troubling is what it is. I can’t afford to start an obsession now.  I’ve got things to do, and that doesn’t include wallpapering the attic with pictures of Celine with her eyes scratched out with a biro and the words ‘Devil’s Spawn’ written across them in dripping red paint.

Every day the stats page posts what people search for, and every day more hits than ever come in about her impending death.  We did get a variation yesterday which asked if Celine Dion was ill?  No doubt this was some tender hearted reader, who really really wanted to know if she was dead, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to be that mean about typing it in, in case it started a horrible catalyst of wish fulfilment type fantasies.  Perhaps they were shaken by the sad news of Jezza Beadle’s death and were trying to remain respectful.  Perhaps they were getting Jezza and Celine mixed up.  It is possible.  After all, you never saw them in the same photograph… 

Before Celine had that surgery she did look like a bit of old mutton.  With cataracts it would have been possible to mistake her for a small man called Jeremy with a tiny hand.  It might even have been a relief.  There’s a lot to be said for being born in the twentieth century.  In the olden days it didn’t matter how beautiful her voice was,  a monobrow, an overbite and an extraordinary amount of body hair would have had her burned as a witch, and that’s a solid gold fact (Mind you, it didn’t seem to harm George Michael or the Bee Gees.  Typical patriarchal society. Bah!).  The voice would have added ammunition.  She could have been charming poor simple country folk, just before she stole their pig and gave their baby away to the fairies.  I’d be more upset about the pig than the babies.  Such is the cruel nature of life.

I will point out that Gillian McKeith is not half as fascinating to you out there in cyberspace (who knew?).  Yesterday someone did want to know why Gillian McKeith has ‘a strange back’ however.  Now I am really curious.  I have never thought that she has a ’strange back’.  I am now going to trawl through all the Sky channels, looking for an episode of ‘You Are What You Eat’, just so that I can spend half an hour scrutinising her vertebrae for signs of ’strangeness’.  I’m not sure what they mean by the word strange exactly.  I mean it’s clear that she doesn’t have spines or some weird Richard III type hunch (which was folks entirely fictitious, by the way, and we only have dear old Shakespeare to blame for that fiction), unless they’re using quite remarkable feats of camera trickery.  Maybe they never film her side on; ‘Always full frontals with Gillian lovey, she’s a bit sensitive about the growth, poor dear!’

This will be like when someone pointed out to me that John Thaw had a limp.  I watched back to back episodes of Inspector Morse for a week to check it out and make sure it wasn’t the fact that he was walking on some quaint Oxford cobblestones.  I can’t help it.  I just need to know these things.  I am a child of the celebrity obsessed culture.  My great friend Edmund said that I should have made an effort to meet the author Michael Moorcock.  He was writing a book about Michael’s early works and said that Michael always had as his hero some person with a distinct physical deformity, which made them more tragic and appealing in a heroic style way.  He thought that me and Michael would have gotten on like a house on fire. 

When I found out that he wrote books about an albino dwarf slayer I felt that this was probably true.  I have however, due to a rather busy schedule, never actually read one of Michael’s tomes yet.  I feel that I cannot actually meet the man until such time as I have read at least one of his books, so it is something on the back burner for when I retire.  Let’s hope he lives that long.  I shall invite him round for tea and cake, and we can happily compare deformities for a few hours.  Maybe I’ll have a few of my own by then, and we can show each other our scars.  That’s what old people do after all, when they’re not at gala bingo or clogging up the byways of Majorca lapping up the winter sun.

To get back to the burning issue of Celine.  Maybe it’s not that I’m obsessed by her.  It’s more that I’m now obsessed by those who are obsessed by her.  Why do people want to know these things?  Why? Why? Why?  If you are one of the people who keeps logging in to find out about her imminent demise, I would appreciate an e-mail to explain this fatal fascination.  Maybe when you listen to her records they have coded messages in, just like those old seventies metal bands! ’Sclrhughhshsh! You Love Celine, mffhghghslsh! You want to know if she’s dead yet, wfhsodofhsls! Why not log into the internet and find out? fsjfdofdsfhdfdjf! You love Celine.’ etc, etc, etc.

Perhaps the record company have invented some kind of weird chemical which is injected into the CD packaging.  It comes off all over your hands and then filters slowly into your blood stream.  Twenty four hours later you develop a crazy desire to find out just what the hell has happened to the cheeky, French Canadian popstrel, and no matter how hard you search, you just can’t get enough.  It’s like what they put in Whiskers cat food to make eight out of ten cats prefer it.  Our cat was one of the two dissenters.  He used to try and bury it in the carpet.  It’s probably why he’s not at this very moment trying to log on to the web with his tiny, furry paws, lamenting his lack of opposable thumbs and worrying himself sick about la chanteuse Dion.  He’s immune.  Now that would be brilliant.  If I could isolate his immunity gene I could offer a cure to those who are distressed by their macabre turn of mind and want to get their lives back on track.  First build your laboratory…It may take a while.

In the meantime, what I would suggest is that one of you sets up a website called: ‘The Tragic Demise of Celine Dion. com’ and then collate all the webular information to that one site.  You can sell access to it for a fiver a time and make your fortune.  I’m sure you could write a note to Celine explaining that you wish her well (from a well wisher is always a good phrase to use, particularly if you cut all the words in the letter out of magazines and newspapers), and that you are merely worried about her.  If you offer her a cut of the profits I expect she will snap your hand off.  As long as you liberally sprinkle the word ‘allegedly’ round and about, like spraying Oust on a particularly noxious smell, you shouldn’t get sued, and you would find a haven for all those who are permanently curious about death and Celine, Celine and death.

You could even have forums where you could discuss ways of bumping the poor woman off (not forgetting the entire rest of her family, as some of you are interested in that as well).  You could have an award, rather like the Darwin awards (real award, awarded posthumously to the person who died in the most ridiculous fashion in that year), where the most inventively staged death wins a prize of some kind.  Probably a year’s supply of ‘Undertakers’ Weekly: First for Undertakers.’ or some other cheery tome.  For those of a more creative leaning, you could have fan fic forums where people send in short stories.  The only proviso being that rather like Kenny in Southpark, Celine is bumped off in spectacular fashion at the end of every story.  I think there’s a lot of meat on the bones there.  That site could run and run.

I have to confess that I am tempted to take out another blog subscription and write one entitled: ‘The Fictional World of Celine Dion (allegedly)’.  My hit rate would be astronomical and I’m sure it would net me a book deal.  Apparently Bloomsbury are looking for another great cash cow now that J.K. Rowling has finished the Harry Potter series. It could be me.  They’re the kind of serious literary publishers I aspire to joining.  I  can just see it now,  the authorial family tree: Virginia Woolf, J.K. Rowling, Katy who writes about the death of celebrities she doesn’t know.

That is the rub you see.  I know very few pertinent facts about Celine.  I shall endeavour to sum up my actual knowledge:

1. She is French Canadian
2. She has a warbly voice
3. She is very thin
4. She has execrable dress sense
5. She sang, ‘My Heart Will Go On’
6. She waves her hands around a lot when she sings
7. She is married to a man who looks like a bear.
8. She has a kid.
9. She did a show in Las Vegas for about thirty years.
10. She is still alive

That’s it.  That is the sum total of my knowledge.  I don’t feel however, after thinking about this deeply for at least a couple of minutes, that I should let this stand in the way.  I once wrote an entire interview about the self-development guru Anthony Robbins, and I’d never met him either.  It was very good.  It was universally agreed that it was very good.  It was for an NLP magazine.  It was also universally agreed that as he is American, looks like Jaws from Moonraker, and is reputed to have a massive sense of humour failure when it comes to issues of self-mockery, that I would be down the salt mines for about thirty five years if it were ever published and it would undoubtedly signal the end of said NLP magazine for all eternity.  Shame.  I might publish it here one day if I ever have the bottle.  Mind you.  I expect Anthony has spies everywhere, looking for just this sort of thing, and I would mysteriously disappear from my home, hours after publication.

So that’s where we’re at with the whole Celine thing. I’m glad I’ve got it out of my system for a while, although I’m still mulling over the blog thing.  I could do a mini blog here, just to see if I could get into it I suppose:

Thursday January 31st

I woke up this morning feeling vairy French and only a leetle bit Canadian.  I found it hard to move when I tried to get out of bed, and thought for a moment that I might be paralysed.  I worry about my health a lot.  I get lots of cards from concerned well wishers and it has started to make me feel a bit paranoid.

Luckily for me it turned out that Renee, my loving, yet bear like husband, had sellotaped my hands to the white velvet headboard in the night, because apparently I had woken him several times, waving my arms around in a Gallic fashion.  It probably explains why I was feeling more French today.  I had hoped that it might be a signal for impending passion, but Renee made his excuses and left.  Apparently he had things to do in the woods.

After breakfast of a boiled quail’s egg, washed down with nightingale spit (good for the vocal chords),  I went to the soundproof bunker to practice my singing.  We have recently installed the bunker as it turned out to be cheaper than buying the entire household staff and neighbours for three miles around ear defenders.  I have a fantastic vocal range, which is sadly not appreciated by all.  Although the FBI have approached me for talks about some kind of weapon of mass destruction I think they called it.  I told them I would have to think about it.  One of them got quite irritated when my arm movements got a bit out of control and smacked him across the face.  C’est La Vie.  It is the lot of the artist to be continually misunderstood.  We suffer for our art.

I spent the afternoon visiting my wardrobe mistress.  She has had a fantastic idea for my new concert outfits.  She has taken inspiration from Julie Andrews (how tragic her life is now that she can no longer sing.  Surely she must want to kill herself.  It is the honourable way out for those of us who can no longer make sweet music), and wanted to show me a fantastic clip from The Sound of Music where Julie (poor, poor woman.  Damn those nodules) makes delightful dresses from curtain material.  I have instructed my seamstress to remove the drapes from my three acre living room and whip something up.  I think it will really work.

I spent the evening eating crepes and sewing tiny maple leaves on my son’s underpants.  Even though I am so rich I now live in my own country; Celination, I don’t want him to forget his Canadian roots.  I have of course embroidered Eiffel Towers on his socks, because we must never forget what we owe to the genius of the French.  I am truly blessed.

I finish by noting that I must attend my weekly checkup at the doctors tomorrow.  I rang to request an emergency appointment.  It was very sweet, when they put me on hold they were playing ‘my heart will go on’.  What a moment!  I will remember it forever.  Several more enquiries about my health were delivered again today.  I really must put out a restraining order on that well wisher.