198) Speidi

The only people in America who can make you go, "Yeah...never going grocery shopping again. That's just off the table"

Confession: I don't really know what "The Hills" is. I've never seen an episode of "The Hills". But I still am pretty confident about the following things:

-It's on MTV.

-It's been on MTV for some time now. I would estimate between 3 to more than 3 years.

-It's MTV's answer to MTV's "Real World", except instead of casting unknown poor kids who never knew each other before filming began, it cast unknown rich kids who did know each other before filming began, and instead of the editing the show to make the cast look like terrible, terrible people, as "The Real World" does, "The Hills" simply casts terrible, terrible people who require no editing, but are still treated to a script and editing nonetheless (<--- I'm actually surprising myself with this knowledge. Sort of like how I surprised myself the other day with my strength and agility when I saved an attractive young family from a burning car and some terrorists on my way to volunteer at the orphanage in between shifts at the clinic for adorable puppies with cancer. Ladies?)

-An IMDB search reveals it stars one person I've heard of and vaguely know what she looks like (Lauren Conrad), one person I've heard of and have no idea what she looks like (Audrina Partridge, but for the time being, I'm going to assume she looks like a young Susan Dey), one person I've never heard of and whose inclusion in the cast list I can only assume was a typographical mistake on the part of the IMDB (Whitney Port?? WTF?), one person whose last name I hear all too often, but whose first name is pretty much alien to me (Stephanie Pratt), and, finally, two people who, through no fault of my own, I can't escape: Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt. Or "Speidi", as they are brilliantly, brilliantly known.

You know how in "Fight Club" (which you've seen, and if you haven't, then you've at least told people you've seen it, and if you haven't, it turns out Bruce Willis was dead all along) Tyler Durden keeps popping up for like a quarter second all throughout the movie, and you keep thinking "Wait, WTF? Did I just see Brad Pitt for like a quarter second, or am I just going crazy?"

Heidi and Spencer are sort of like the real life Tyler Durden Pop-ups, inexcorably woven into the fabric of the pop cosmos, such that even if you've never watched "The Hills" (as I promise I never have) and only vaguely even know who these people are, they still manage to find their way into your day as you struggle to know as little about these people as possible. And still, their Tylerdurdenitationality* will leave with the following impressions/feelings/facts/homicidal inclinations:

-Spencer Pratt is awful/douchebaggish in a way that, to date, still lacks an appropriate adjective to really do the whole human trainwreck on display here any kind of coherent justice, which can be frustrating.

-Spencer Pratt looks like a (again, there's no approriate metaphor here, but let's imagine for a second that "The Island of Doctor Moreau" was real, and we'd be getting somewhere).

-Heidi Montag is exactly the sort of person people are referring to when they refer to people the world would be better off without. I've never actually heard her say anything, though I have read comments allegedly attributed to her, and I'm thus imagining the first-hand experience is something close to what happens when you put a microphone too close to a speaker while being stabbed in the genitals.

-Something about virginity, purity, and Christianity, all of it bullshit.





*real word