Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Funny Face was funnier than I thought

Hey, remember last season when Scott and Tessa sought a moment of our time? Put out a random-seeming first person video from Paris (TEB), batted their eyes, told us they were taking an "extra day" in Paris? They were excited to tour all the typically Parisian places, emphasizing the plan was to take photos at the classic Funny Face highlights around town? They mentioned the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre.

There she is.
Jessica Dube poses for Scott Moir a la Audrey Hepburn 
by the Louvre at TEB 2011. Kind of like a modern spin
on Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face.
Except it doesn't look like Scott's camera is even aimed at Jessica.
Remember how Tessa smiled and shared that she wanted to have a crepe? It was weird because apropos of nothing they were skyping the fandom to tell us about their "extra day" and it seemed random. Were they taking baby steps?

Above is a little whack-a-mole from Absolute Skating from last year's TEB, captioned: Jessica Dube poses for Scott Moir.

See Jessica's pose with the arm flung up and out. Isn't this adorable? She's Audrey to Scott's Fred. And down below, they're in front of the Eiffel Tower. This is awesome.

Tessa and Scott keep producing their own do-it-yourself version of Jackass. This is typical of the 'nice things' fans are deprived of because of the blog.

Did any of us expect jack shit from Scott and Tessa from Paris? No.They sought us out especially to share their excitement about this special extra day. They were so fresh-scubbed kidlike about it.The clever - it never gets old. 

ETA - as a comment under this post said, Scott and Tessa's conceit is really something. At this point they're working only off their fantasy of what they think their celebrity must be in Canada.

Even when they compete, attendance at the big events is poor. There were people watching Canadians who didn't know who Scott and Tessa were. There are tumbleweeds blowing through some of the fan sites and threads set up to talk about Scott/Tessa right after the Olympics. The people who reliably tweet and post about them the most are at this point such a small group we can all name them.

It's obvious the fans who have a good idea there's no Jessica and there is a Scott/Tessa are keeping their mouths shut in public.  It's all down to Team Virtue Moir's own petty resentment and pride at this point. Insist on your right to lie, Tessa and Scott. If there's a place you can't lie, you'll take your toys and leave. 

Speculation was they planned a Funny Face-related photo shoot to spring upon us for Canadians or Worlds. But the photos many fans assumed they were talking about never surfaced.


Remember when they did this?
Scott and Tessa:
"We. We we we we we we we. We're staying an
extra day. We want to see all of our favorite things in Paris.
WE are staying an extra day because WE want to take photos of all
the classic Paris sites. That's what WE are doing.
All the famous stuff even idiots like you would know were part
of Paris. We are doing this. Photos. Us. We. Keep an eye out."
When they did the above video, anyone with a working memory would figure they were up to something. The blog immediately called out what they were doing and consequently, no photos from their fun extra day in Paris were ever shared with us.

Wouldn't it have been fantastic if Charlie and Meryl had approached fans to enthuse about the great love for Vienna they both shared, how they loved it so much they were going to spend an off-ice day in Vienna taking photos at places that evoked Die Fleudermaus? But it turned out to be Charlie photographing Tanith who was aping a contemporary version of Meryl's character, even though Meryl and Charlie had killed themselves leading fans on to think it was gonna be them? So charming.

I suspect that Tanith and D/W would have considered the idea pretty assy. I bet Scott and Tessa don't see the parallel. Tanith is the real gf, and D/W are platonic. That's way different than Scott really being with Tessa, and using a fake gf as a blind.

But, we're supposed to believe the fake gf is real, so that means for people who believe, it comes off ASSY.

And for people who know better, it also comes off ASSY.

Great role models. Manipulative by default. Vain, bitchy, treacherous, malicious, competitive and trying to one up fans for sport. What kind of egos are these? Oversized, but made of glass?

What kind of people are they besides douchebags who play at being snobs? Scott once said he wasn't a classy guy. I think he meant "refined." But dude. You were still on point.  
They meant with Jessica!


Dessous Le Tour Eiffel! With Jessica!
Goodness. We know there are photos of crepe-eating, demitasse-sipping, Seine-boating, stair parading Jessica all over the place from TEB circa Funny Face, with Jessica cutesily posing for Scott, and they had to put those photos on ice. It must kill them, the stuff on his old facebook, the stuff they took time to photograph, all wasted!  All this great stuff they never got to use to... to...?

I get the idea the whole "photo shoot" had already happened when Scott and Tessa set us up in that video, so they were lying about going to do it. They'd done it already. How much you want to bet?

This photo shoot and sting was the month after the profile photo stuff on Scott's facebook and after the birthday wishes sting.


I want Tracey Wilson to tell us what the "good reasons" are for Tessa and Scott to behave this way.

Are Scott and Tessa just too shy to come out and say it? "We laugh at you, and how many ways do we have to prove it? Jesus, you people are stupid!"

Maybe they want fans to get the point already. What fans would stick around to be treated like this by people who make a point of using their most lovely-seeming qualities as a decoy? A way to set fans up to mock fans for liking them and being interested?

"Look at us flirt and laugh and smile! You fall for that shit all the time, don't you! Get a clue you dumb fucks!"

Do Scott and Tessa pump filtered oxygen into their bubble, so their lungs aren't contaminated with air the ordinary people breathe? You know they've looked into it.

Look at Scott and Tessa when we know they're lying. The very serious-faced interviews they gave recounting the rift over her shins, the communication blackout that never happened (they were living together in London where both were based during that period). I don't mean the fidgety, we're not a couple stuff, but the video above, for example.

Then look at video when we can reasonably believe they're telling the truth.

Manipulative.

They have had an exclusive environment because they trained for an elite sport throughout their formative years, have been in love with each other forever, and feel rarefied. They're not interested in not being rarefied, even though they're 25 and 23, married and parents. They want to keep living in a bubble, and they want to remind fans, through mean stunts like this, that the bubble is exclusive and not meant for the likes of the public in any way, shape or form. That's a weird combination of insecure and dickish.
 
I think what I love the most is they're the ones working people over but for all the world they (or those who've helped them) come off like they think the people who don't like to get played by them are haters, and they're just going to rise above. But this isn't really about those two, even though they think everything is about them. It's about fans, and how they treat them. There's nobody who deserves what Scott and Tessa have done with fans, and it wasn't and isn't called for by anything in Scott and Tessa's circumstances.*

It's not only the athletic track that has produced these two. It's also money. Insulated from the real  money concerns that preoccupy most figure skaters (not abstract concerns about business or long-term planning, but basic and fundamental insecurities about money - rent, food, medical bills, etc. that concern many of their teammates), Scott and Tessa can afford to toy with fans for sport.They can afford to think of themselves as extra super duper ultra "unique".*

Other skaters would be afraid of alienating the public, because popularity is their ticket. Scott and Tessa can literally afford to indulge themselves with their effete preoccupation with pranking the lowly fans who've presumed to show interest in the two of them.

I think they are more than the product of an exclusive athletic environment and personal relationship combining to produce a couple of people who miss bigger contexts, who miss connections, as it relates to public relations.This is not a consequence of their skating life. They get this from their families. And as they're both well into adulthood, this is who they are as people, not skaters. "Where are their families"? is a question that gets asked, as if surely the grown-ups would see how bad this is and set things to rights. If not the Moirs, then the Virtues.

This IS their families. And as for the Virtues, Tessa goes out of her way to paint her relationship with her mother as so close that any guy she's with better expect a threesome.

It's nearly enough to make one feel bad for Jessica. Scott and Tessa believe fans deserve garbage. And so what the fans got is a big load of Jessica Dube.
_______________________
*I love how they do extreme shit like these scams and hoaxes, stings and set-ups, all to fend off the crowds of nosy fans that apparently encroach upon them, but then Tessa turns around and describes being in the parade at the Gold Medal Celebration as a case of her looking around to see where the REAL celebrities were in the parade. Or when she wrote about the invitation to dine with Queen Elizabeth when the Queen was in Canada, and this first Canadian Olympic gold medalist in the sport of ice dancing gushed "But what could we have done to deserve such an honor!" That girl could cut the disingenuous starry-eyed stuff in half and it would still be overkill.
 
The way Scott and Tessa have exploited their privileged circumstances makes the privileged D/W and the Shibs look fantastic.

P.S. I wonder if Scott and Tessa smirked at the idea fans would believe them going around Paris doing cheesy like posing Funny Face-ily. They've been to Paris tons of times before.

15 comments:

  1. I remember that TEB video of them saying they were staying in Paris to visit the sites! The implication was clearly they were doing this together. Geez, if Jessica really was Scott's GF, why not just come out and say, "and my GF is staying also and we'll be touring Paris together..."

    This is disgusting. Why now? What kind of idiotic scheme are they concocting this time?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I just think they were frustrated pissed that the photos had to be tabled and the sting had to be called off, all because of a fucking blog run by probably a fucking fan. It gets under the skin. They keep score. They want to "win", so they slid one in now.

      In the entry below this one I said that after the blog started and the facebook settings were restricted, they started in with whack-a-mole - meaning, trying to figure out ways to display Jessica/Scott photos and drop Jessica/Scott mentions where it would seem genuine. The first I remember was icenetwork.com, which was absurd. Suddenly a retired, non-2010-Olympian SC figure skater gets an article on his wedding, Barb sets things up by tweeting about it and the whole thing came off like - and we need to know this why? (The only technique Barb & Co. seem to know is back dooring the lead). Except for that "Jessica Dube, Scott Moir" mention on the abbreviated guest list. Then Barb profiles Craig's wedding again in Above the Crowd, and as cover, also mentions the wedding of someone working in her own office and her own department's (a former skater) wedding. Christ on a cracker - the camoflage story wedding didn't get a guest list, but Craig's did again, this time only four names mentioned, but Jessica and Scott's names were of course included, separated by another name, so that means they can't be the actual reason these two skaters abruptly get their wedding covered in Above the Crowd. Funny how there was no "Summer Wedding" feature this year. Why is that?

      Barb was an "attache'" at Vancouver 2010, she wasn't even director yet, and Craig wasn't on the team. Yet she's at his wedding tweeting away

      Delete
  2. This follows the same pattern as before: Right before the beginning of VM's season, as well as around the time of any upcoming public appearance of Tessa and Scott, to have some kind of public activity between facebooks (usually Moir-Jessica), and then also release/flaunt photos of Scott and Jessica.

    Well, whaddayaknow. V/M's season is about to begin. The Moirs have locked down their facebooks - what to do? Have Cara Moir "like" Jessica's public facebook picture, and immediately after that - voila - new Scott and Jessica photo. Their conceit is breathtaking, that even after designating Jessica an ex-girlfriend and cutting off as much fan-communication as they could think of, they still go and find a way to set-up and sting the fans. I'm just - I have no words to describe how outrageous this is.

    You are absolutely right. They give every indication of ENJOYING pulling these stunts. However, I'm not feeling any sympathy for Jessica. Sure, she's being used, but she's not stupid and she must have figured the cost/benefits to herself were worth making a fool of herself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Remember that they can maintain their nicest kids in the world image because none of this is targeted at the mainstream media. A lot of the regular media that covers Canadian figure skating are familiar faces in the loop or they're the next thing to groupies. They're not following social media.They don't know all the dirt Scott and Tessa have done to the fans. Considering "the fandom" is a category lower than dirt in the eyes of most media, any objections can be dismissed with an eye roll cause we know what fans are like, nothing more needed to be said. The media will never track what was done because they didn't follow it. They stuck with the more sedate denials and sweet jokes that were aimed at the legitimate media. It's the fans who got played and played.

      Delete
  3. You should hire a private investigator to find the marriage/birth certificates/announcements.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. IMO at this point it hardly matters what is real. I don't see any other celebrity-skaters playng the fans this way, fake SO's or real. What's the purpose of pulling these kinds of stunts? Not just once but repeatedly! What ***holes.

      Delete
    2. That's the thing - even if we accept a privacy premise as the reasons for the sham, the premise doesn't justify these jackass stunts and stings. The set ups aren't needed whatsoever to maintain privacy or whatever diversion they want - it just calls attention to their behavior and makes them look like tools.

      I think Carol Moir using G-Mac's flipping the bird as a profile picture, in retrospect, may have been illuminating. These are their special, unique family members (Scott and Tessa). They GET to work fans over this way. We don't know (that's a popular social media whine - don't judge people if you don't know their journey). Well, problem is, we, the general public, are the ones getting played, so it kind of becomes an area for us to judge.

      I think now they are simply at a crude baseline of we're not going to give our critics the satisfaction! Sort of ridiculous considering they were the ones who were abusing the fans, not vice versa, but they're affronted over being called out. Again, Scott and Tessa are SPECIAL.

      Delete
  4. Do you think they're saying Scott and Jessica are to be considered a couple again, or is this just a way to laugh at the fans and not specifically about who is dating who? It's strange this would get a green light to be released at this time, a year after the fact and after Scott said he had an "ex gf" when everyone knows there's not an "official" ex but Jessica.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Don't know, but I think they don't like someone else or something else cramping their style, even though the blog isn't doing a bloody thing to them. They're free to do whatever they want, including continue the sham. I didn't force them to shut things down, find new ways to play gotcha, or force them to try and outmaneuver.

      That's on them. I think they published that photo to get a little bit of satisfaction because last year they went out of their way, personally (Scott and Tessa) to set fans up, actually talked directly to the fans, and they were called out. Man if they're going to do that kind of acting, THEMSELVES, no surrogates, actually CHAT directly to US, the people they ignore, they want it to pay off. But it had to be aborted because the blog named what they were doing. That's really frustrating. They're not the type to do something for nothing.

      Photos actually were taken (although I believe most likely before they did that video), which meant time and some energy. And they couldn't use them!

      That upsets them, IMO. I'm just interested in how pissy and vulgar and bitchy they are about being called out on their punking of fans.

      It's like these wonderful, decent, best kids in the world can do whatever they fucking want to the public and the public isn't allowed to say anything because it's them, Tessa and Scott and they're protecting something much more precious than any of us could ever understand.

      I think the picture was published now because TEB is coming up and why not and it reminds fans Scott had a girlfriend last year so all this nonsense about marriage and baby can't be true. And because they want an excuse to at least put some of that effort last year to use.

      It also reminds fans just how malicious these two can be. Considering the intent behind the video, it was like Scott and Tessa were playing the most popular kids in high school punking poor Carrie in the movie "Carrie". We like you! We like smiling and sharing with you! Oh, never mind we seemed to be avoiding you before - we're just busy. Let's all of us sit here together and be charming a bit more!!

      Then we fall for it and the bloody bucket is dumped on our head. So fun!

      They not only want to do this, they want to control how we react to it. I really don't know where they get the idea that they're entitled to control how people respond to their bullshit, but they do think we're supposed to play it the way they want us to.

      Delete
  5. I don't feel bad for Jessica. She knows the score -- she's posed next to Scott and the Moirs for years now, with full agreement to play the fans. She shows the same contemptuous attitude toward fans, and like VM, makes no attempt to have any sort of social-media presence specifically designed for reaching out to the fans. What is baffling in her case is she doesn't have the celebrity recognition nor financial resources to afford this fan disdain. She hasn't positioned herself well for the future. Not only that, because of her lack of fan outreach Sebastien has also been left with nothing to build on, such as a webpage of the D/W team, or official facebook page, or twitter. Jessica is really stupid to have allowed the sham to be her PR legacy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The best bet for Jessica's future was always Bryce, and she took care of that. That association would have carried her past the end of the sham.

      Delete
  6. "I kind of get the idea the whole "photo shoot" had already happened when Scott and Tessa set us up in that video, so they were lying about going to do it. They'd done it already. How much you want to bet?"

    Yep, I bet you are correct on this point.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Wait, I am a little confused. Was that photo of Scott taking a photo of Jessica published on her fb page recently? Suggesting that they are still a couple. I am disappointed.

    ReplyDelete
  8. yes. who published the photo you are referring to??

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They aren't "still" a couple as they never were a couple. "Absolute Skating" published this photo among others from Nebelhorn 2011 and TEB 2011.

      Do yourself a favor and never be disappointed. They're about as invested in the "don't admit it and you save face" concept as they can get. Whatever workarounds they do to hint at their real status, they will always hedge, especially during the height of competition season, with sham. It's ridiculous. They are not the celebrities they'd prepped to be, in part because of all their scamming.

      Delete