Sunday Books & Cultures - It's Drew Time!
Drew's fuming after clicking on a link about a murder-for-hire scheme, then made the mistake of fact-checking the story, which took him to Dotham, Alabama, and, well ... just read it.
COLUMNIST SAYS, CHRISTMAS TREE FARM IN TAYLOR SWIFT’S HOMETOWN SLAUGHTERED BAMBI!!!!!!
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
Fundamentally, the headline is true. When I was growing up in Swift’s hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, my parents (to be read: my mother) thought that the best way to get a Christmas tree was to drive to a Christmas tree farm somewhere in Berks County and cut down the Christmas tree. (Of course, I am slightly older than Tay Tay, so it was not in fact her hometown yet, since she was not born.)
Swift’s parents owned a Christmas tree farm near Reading and I’m 99 percent certain it is not the one we went to every Christmas, but the one we did go to was certainly in Taylor’s “soon to be” hometown.
My memory of the Christmas tree venture is limited beyond us driving to a farm during halftime of a Philadelphia Eagles’ game, taking a tractor ride into the rows of trees, and my mother picking a tree while my father watched one of the farm’s employees cut it down.
On one of these trips, there was a dead deer hanging from a rope in preparation for butchering. Just to recap, my father never attempted to use a saw, and there was a dead Bambi hanging from a rope. As far as the holiday ideal my mother had conjured in these family ventures, I’m certain she would be very disappointed in what images I’ve retained.
The rather roundabout point of this column and shoehorning Taylor Swift into it is all connected to clickbait.
For advertisers to think that a website is the perfect spot for their annoying pop-up ads, the website has to convince the advertiser that they have so many clicks, which equate to eyeballs. This became apparent with a recent article that showed up in my iPhone news feed (any potential advertisers to the FXBG Advance, let me assure you that people will not mind if pop-up ads obscure much of this column).
The headline was something along the lines of, “Beauty Queen Hires Hitman in the Bahamas to Kill Husband Who Was a Former NFL Player”. And … click.
I have to tread carefully on this issue because the once-loving couple does have three children together, and I don’t want to minimize murder because it is wrong and all are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. (Plus, I’ve already pissed off any Taylor Swift fans who read the headline and not the actual column, so I can’t afford any gray area with regard to murder.)
However, a very shallow dive into the particulars of the story shows that the wife was a Beauty Queen in that she once was named Ms. Houston County Georgia in 2005 and finished second in the National Peanut Festival pageant that same year.
The National Peanut Festival hosted in Dothan, Alabama, is an actual thing and apparently lasts for 10 days in November (tickets on sale now, and EpiPens are buy one get one half off while supplies last). The itinerary for this year’s Festival is not available on their website yet, but they do show a lot of guns for sale and an indoor lap pool with a jacuzzi at one end (the aquatic equivalent of mullet—business in the front, party in the back). The guns and lap pool/jacuzzi may be for events other than the National Peanut Festival, but it’s hard to tell on the website. Rest assured that the Peanut Festival is where the greased pig and calf scramble do take place.
Second place at the National Peanut Festival Beauty Pageant is nothing to sneeze at (unless you have a peanut allergy) but not sure that is something you want on the professional vita unless, of course, the other option is a conviction for conspiracy to commit murder.
And depending upon which news article you read on this scandalous affair, you might read that the husband was drafted by his hometown Atlanta Falcons (the scandal comes complete with adultery and paparazzi photos of the potential Bahamian assassin in expensive ripped jeans holding a green bottle—many captions stress the importance of the bottle being green because some readers may suffer from color blindness, and, most importantly, it means he was not drinking Yoo-hoo).
This is not true. He was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Falcons but was cut soon thereafter. His biography and news feed on ESPN’s NFL page are blank, and his position is listed as “unknown”.
A quick Google search reveals that he played football at Auburn University as a long snapper, which means ESPN does not care about undrafted free agents who get cut right away, or they don’t consider long snapper a real football position because they generally bring a pitching wedge to practice so they can work on their short game while waiting for the 15 minutes of practice devoted to special teams.
So, yes, I clicked on the story but was expecting a little more than second place in the National Peanut Festival Beauty Pageant and an undrafted free agent long snapper who was locked out of the Falcons’ practice facility after the first team breakfast. The story does have a happy ending of sorts in that the murder for hire never developed beyond text messages, and the long snapper is now on social media dating Savannah Chrisley who I gather I’m supposed to know as a TV personality and model. Whether or not she ever finished second in the National Peanut Beauty Pageant will have to wait for the next salacious headline.
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