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You (Yes, You) Are Keeping Zack Taylor Down
Pity the poor gossip blogger! That is what Zack Taylor would have us all know. Canada turns upon its gossip bloggers like it does its homegrown celebrities.
Now, perhaps you might be asking yourself, “Who the fuck is Zack Taylor?” You are not alone. And lest you be confused, let us assure you that he is not the Black Ranger from Power Rangers. Torontoist, and many other media outlets besides, were spammed yesterday by Mr. Taylor, who will have you know he is “Canada’s answer to Perez Hilton.”
According to Wikipedia, Zack Taylor is famous because he’s the guy who posted those nude pictures of Toronto Maple Leaf forward Jiří Tlustý back in 2007.
According to Zack’s own bio, he is famous because he’s the “creative mastermind” who “teamed up” with hotornot.com as a gossip blogger (apparently “teamed up with” is now synonymous with “was employed by”) and who also “ran” hotornot.com before his “success and popularity continues [sic] to soar,” and now Zack Taylor blogs about celebrity gossip on a daily basis for his “millions of viewers.” (A quick glance at independently collected statistics for his site suggests that if he has millions of viewers, they must all be sharing the same computer.) And according to most of Toronto’s media industry, Zack Taylor is famous because he tells everybody how famous he is on a daily basis, or sometimes even more often than that, in a never-ending series of emails from his personal PR agency spammed out to absolutely anybody who might at some point need Zack Taylor’s services and a whole lot of other people besides.
And Zack is mad.
[W]hen I first started my website a couple years ago, many media outlets in Canada couldn’t get enough of me… I was asked to appear on TV shows, and provide my opinion etc. etc. But the second I accepted my media invitation to attend The Oscars, American Idol, Teen Choice Awards and other A-list events across the United States, some of my Canadian friends/partners decided they would no longer support my initiatives… Programs such as The Much Music Awards, which are based in my own backyard (Toronto) have now rejected to have me at their show…
Torontoist would perhaps suggest that Mr. Taylor consider that maybe his ostracization has something to do with his inability to correctly use the word “rejected” or his weird habit of italicizing words seemingly at random. But then again, this is new media and nobody cares about grammar or spelling or shit like that any more, so it can’t be that, right? Heck, have you seen those kids today and their texting messages? They make words that don’t look like words!
Of course, one might also consider that getting a press pass to cover a major American event is really not difficult or that the MMVAs in particular have always been a bit more selective about offering press access because the venue doesn’t have a lot of space. However, none of that matters, because Zack Taylor knows the truth. And the truth is conspiracy!
I’m not complaining here, I could do what everyone else does and keep quite on this issue and just go about my everyday business, but I want it to be known that I DO SUPPORT CANADA and I want to do my Canadian peers a favour by using my media/popularity around the world that I’ve worked so hard for, to help showcase the CANADIAN acts performing/presenting at this event & others… Just my own country isn’t allowing me to do so.
We’re all in it together, actually. Last week the entire country held a secret referendum about whether or not to let Zack Taylor be a gossip blogger, and nobody told Zack Taylor about it. That’s how Canada rolls.
Seriously, though: Zack Taylor’s cry of injustice is, big shock, completely self-serving. This is because Zack Taylor isn’t actually famous in any meaningful way, no matter how many exclusives he gets with Brody Jenner’s girlfriend. Zack Taylor’s influence in the entertainment world is about one-tenth of that of the corpse of Tiny Tim. Consider this scientific study of Zack Taylor’s Q-rating as measured by his popularity on Twitter:
(We would like to take this time to tell George Stromboulopoulos that we are very disappointed in his poor showing. Work harder, Strombo!)
We can’t blame Zack Taylor for wanting to be a career blogger. Speaking from experience, jobs where pants are frequently strictly optional are few and far between, and it’s pretty awesome getting paid to surf the internet. (You can get paid to surf the internet at most office jobs, but then you have to look busy.) But Zack Taylor seems to believe that becoming a famous important blogger person is something you can manage by sheer force of will; if you tell enough people you’re a famous blogger, eventually you will become one by osmosis or something else involving science of some kind.
The sad truth is not everybody can be Perez Hilton, or even “Canada’s answer to Perez Hilton.” There just isn’t enough serendipity in the universe for someone as useless as Perez Hilton to strike success in the same horrifically miraculous way that Perez Hilton did. Come to think, calling yourself “Canada’s answer to Perez Hilton” is kind of like advertising yourself to be “Canada’s answer to disease-ridden rats.” Actually, given the choice we’d probably rather have the disease-ridden rats than Perez Hilton. The rats wouldn’t try to tell us which big stars might be gay this week. They’d just give us the plague; rats don’t care about the cast of The Hills. Because they’re rats.
Such responses and rejections as the one above make it easier for me to look more towards making home-base in The United States, where no matter how big you get, you will always have support from some major networks. No wonder stars such as Elisha Cuthbert, Howie Mandel, Keanu Reeves, Rachel McAdams, and Ryan Reynolds have all bought homes in the States and hardly come back home to Canada unless its to visit family or film a movie/show. Some Canadian stars have gone to the extreme and ditched their Canadian residency to become American citizens!!
Presumably those famous stars bought homes in the United States because that’s where they work, because the American film and TV industry is massively larger than ours is. Canadian celebrity careers have a distinct arc to them: you get hot, you move to the States, you have a great career, and then eventually people stop taking your calls so you move back to Canada where you’re still a big shot. It worked for Norman Jewison and Colin Mochrie, and Neve Campbell should be making her grand return any day now.
Zack at the 2008 MTV Video Music Awards, wearing a shirt we swear we haven’t Photoshopped.
If some of them get American citizenship, it’s not because Canadians felt the need to knock them down; it’s because they felt that America was now their home. It happens when you live somewhere else for years and years. Hockey players who move to Canada because they play here get their Canadian citizenships all the time. Your citizenship is a big deal. People don’t change it because their feelings might get bruised. (Except for Conrad Black.)
I know that if I keep trying and trying to support Canada, and in return all I get is rejection, maybe I to will jump-ship like the others.
NO, ZACK TAYLOR! Stick it out! In a few years, with a little effort, you could be one of those people on eTalk! Like that girl! Or the guy in the suit! You probably can’t be the next Ben Mulroney—come on, there’s only one Ben Mulroney—but you could be the very next closest thing. ETalk is perfect for physically attractive people who want to be famous but lack any actual talent or skill, and having gone through your archives extensively for the purpose of writing this article, believe us: that’s you.
Photos from Zack Taylor’s MySpace.