My love for American Idol has been chronicled here many times, so I don't have to go to great lengths describing how enthusiastically I read the interview with Fantasia Barrino on CNN.com today. Let if suffice to say that I was not so enthusiastic that my pants were around my ankles, but I read it more enthusiastically than I read the story about South Korean response to the beheading of one of its citizens. Things about both articles puzzle me, however. Find them below, you lucky you, you.

I'll begin with Fantasia. I wasn't upset by the descriptions of her irresponsible, especially for a young mother, fiscal behavior prior to being on Idol. Nor was I upset that she's chosen to drop the Barrino and go only by Fantasia. Why should that upset me? I've given a great number of dollar bills to lovely young women named Fantasia who've made the same decision to drop their surnames. What upset me, and greatly, was this picture:



While I agree that Camile Velasco is quite lovely and perhaps even worthy of a portrait, I find that Fantasia has a crudely painted pictured of her former competitor in her home offputting at the very least.

And now for South Korea. Obviously, I was upset by the beheading. I'll go on record right now as saying that I think beheading is a really awful thing, both to do to someone and to have done to you or someone you love. I was also kind of upset by the notion of an Asian person in the same place as an Arab person. I don't think I've ever seen that before and, for some reason or another, those two races exist in almost different dimensions in my mind. Before this, picturing an Asian and an Arab in the same room was like picturing a flounder in a kangaroo's pouch. But what really grabbed me about this story is, again, the picture:



Why do Asian people wear those white gloves all the time? Not only is the guy holding the picture wearing them, but if you look closely, it appears as though the younger woman center has a pair in her hand. Maybe she's carrying the distressed old woman's gloves. Looking at this image, you might think the white gloves are ceremonial. I've been to China, though, and people wear them all over the place. Especially the cab drivers. Now, unless they're mourning the passing of their steering wheels, I think there's another explanation. If I knew any Asians, I'd ask them.

Analogcabin @ 10:42 AM
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