Happy Birthday....Macauley Culkin!!??? Is that you??

In an attempt to figure out what to write about for this blog I figured I would look at the top headlines on Yahoos home page. Upon searching, I found a name that I hadn’t heard in a while; Macaulay Culkin. It seems that this Sunday is Culkin’s 32^nd birthday. It seems so crazy to me that the cute little blonde that warmed our hearts in so many times is almost twice as old as me.

  Other than watching the Home Alone movies and My Girl countless times over the years, I haven’t seen or heard much about him at all. This is the face we all remembered and adored while he made us laugh and he made us cry. Every household in the 90s knew his face and his name. In 1991 Culkin became the youngest person(11 years old) to ever host Saturday Night Live. He was one of the most famous Hollywood kids of all time. But what happens when children receive this much attention before they even hit puberty?

                                                      Thisà

“Look guys, Macauley Culkin just turned 32! Isn’t that crazy?” I said to the group of girls in my dorm room. As they all crowed around my laptop in awe, this image popped up. We all gasped in disbelief. Not only did this not look like him, it looked like a man that was 55 rather than a man that had just turned 32. I think this a direct result of a child ruined by fame and the media. He was given too much attention throughout his childhood and early teens, so when he got to the age that he wanted to start making his own decisions, the media wouldn’t back off long enough to let him think first. When he was 17 he got married to a girl he hadn’t been dating very long and who was also 17. After their very successful two year marriage, the couple divorced. That was only the best of what was yet to come for Culkin.

Not to say that celebrities should not take responsibility for their own actions but I strongly feel that having the media involved with so much of his life at such a young age affected this man enormously.  He was an extremely talented actor that is now hanging on to life by a thread. Over the years he has been hounded by the media for being caught under the possession of marijuana, and now eight years later is addicted to heroin. Twenty years ago, viewers never would have guessed that such a charming little boy could be transformed into such a troubled man consumed by his own personal demons. All we can hope for is that this man lives to celebrate another birthday next year.

Newport Pleasure??

One day while flipping through my Entertainment Weekly, I came across this ad. I have to admit that initially my eyes were taken to the tan guy with nicely toned biceps. I stopped continuously flipping through the pages of the magazine to look more closely at the ad. “What the hell are they even advertising?” I thought to myself as my eyes scanned across the page. Then toward the bottom I spotted 3 pictured cartons of Newport Pleasure cigarettes. I was so confused. These two people in the picture have absolutely nothing to do with smoking cigarettes. I glanced back at the picture to see if maybe one of them had a cigarette in their hand and I had missed it. Nope, there was nothing. So why were they using this picture to advertise cigarettes? Because it’s pure genius.

If you take a guy that is tan, well built, with a nice smile and put him with a girl of equal attributes in a sporty setting, you can sell anything; even a product that is proven to cause lung cancer and is a result of over 100,000 deaths each year.  They have used bright colors around the border with a large picture of pretty people to try to mask the surgeon general warning to the left with side-effects such as lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and pregnancy complications. This ad makes smoking seem “pleasurable” by the attractiveness and activeness of the couple. It falsely shows that smoking cigarettes will make a person look like the models shown and be with someone as equally attractive and healthy.

 

Unfortunately this how things have to be sold nowadays to get people attention. We are a society that is only concerned with appearances and how we can make ourselves look more attractive to the opposite sex. No disrespect to any of those people because obviously it worked on me too. The only reason I didn't skim over the ad was because I saw an attractive guy in a picture. My dad however smoked most of my childhood and I saw how sick it made him until he finally quit when he was 48. About four years later my best friends dad was taken due to lung cancer. He was only 41 but had been smoking since he was in high school. He had two kids, ages 13 and 10, and a wife that were left behind. Because I have a history with smokers and what it can do to them, ads like this have not influenced me, but what about those that don't have a story to tell? So Newport Pleasure, how truly pleasurable is your product?