Modern Times

On occasion, I get a chance to view a teevee with a cable connection. It seems to have disappeared from the offerings here, but I used to be able to get NHK TV - Japanese national television; broadcast in Japanese (sometimes with English subtitles) and in English (sometimes with Japanese subtitles). Altogether, a very satisfying experience. Especially since it appears to be counter to Japanese culture to be shrill and to feign outrage as for instance Fox News, where rational dialog is strictly forbidden. Aside: I wonder how much coaching it takes to get the talking heads on Fox to say "Fair And Balanced" without cracking up?
There is one offering on NKH that's of particular interest - a show that profiles people of some attainment; typically, but not necessarily, something technological in nature. On one occasion they profiled this man:

Daisuke Inoue, inventor of the Karaoke Machine.

In the English dubbing, Daisuke-san was quoted at one point as saying "I never got anything for my invention." Needless to say, I was disappointed to hear that. I personally would have given the inventor of Karaoke something like 20-to-life. I think that's a reasonable reward for enabling pop-singer-wannabes to pump up the volume of their unwelcome noise to new and unprecedented levels. I say, send 'em to the showers! Where the sound is muffled and echoic, the way God meant it to be!
Last year, I went to a friend's birthday celebration. It turned out to be at a club where the patrons were openly committing serial karaoke! It was a terrible sight to behold - or to behear. A few minutes of this caused my innate dislike of noise to coalese around a bitter hatred of karaoke. (Not, however, to this extreme: Man Shot Dead...).
Given all this, as you can easily imagine, I have long been puzzled at the intense fan(atic) respone to the teevee show

a karaoke show set in front of television cameras, and cabled into millions of homes. Somehow, this entertainment-on-the-cheap has captured a huge audience! One can only speculate how truly awful the competing offerings on teevee must be to make a karaoke show such a hit. That, or perhaps the sheer mindlessness of watching people doing nothing-very-interesting, as opposed to doing nothing-very-interesting yourself, is today the very height of entertainment.
Here is a recent also-ran, one whose name I saw almost continuously in major news venues for day after day after day. Now he's a celebrity on the order of Rula Lenska.

Sanjaya, performing on American Idol.

What! You don't know who Rula Lenska was? I must confess, I don't either, really. I only remember that some (well, many) years ago, she, or perhaps some Rula Lenska Lookalike, had her moment of fame (on teevee, of course) which consisted of looking sultrily (if that can possibly be a word) into the camera, and saying, "Hi; I'm Rula Lenska."
Well, it was a commercial, of course, advertising something, I'm certain. I never could figure out what it was about, though. Eventually, I went to the trouble to look up Rula Lenska somewhere. It seems that sometime back in the '50's or '60's, or perhaps the '70's, she was a first-, or perhaps second-runner-up in the Miss Poland beauty pageant.
You see where I'm going here. If I'm going anywhere at all, I guess this is about famous-celebrity as famous-celebrity. Why should one bother with actual accomplishment if one can simply get on stage and pose? It's the new concept of success. Don't work to become a musician; go directly to being a Pop Star! It's all about image, nothing about substance. Sort of like being a politician, when you think about it.
At any rate; good luck Sanjaya! Someday with a little luck, you'll be able to get a gig like Rula Lenska's