by Thomas Keister

Somehow, I knew it would come to this eventually. Thursday night CNBC will air a special called The Oprah Effect, covering the madness surrounding trying to get a plug from Oprah on her show. Not that the concept didn't at least sound interesting to me, as I'm sure a lot of people are curious about the influence Oprah Winfrey wields, and how that can equal success for retailers, authors, vaguely qualified talking head types, and so forth. What bugs me is how rabid the movement can be, on both sides of the fence.

Jennifer Armstrong, who wrote about the upcoming special for Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch, admitted herself to having been driven to buy a plain white t-shirt for fifty-six dollars. You read that right. $56. For a plain white t-shirt. Outfreakin'rageous. And to think, I strain to keep the prices of the t-shirts here on FreeReinMedia.com at around $20. Twenty bucks for a t-shirt makes sense, especially when one of the shirts is one of our marvelously funny shirts available now, as we speak, right here on the very website you are reading. Fifty-six bucks for a plain white shirt is absolutely galling unless you are wearing a tuxedo wrapped around it.

And people are flocking to buy stuff based on the word of a woman who has touted at least two books that turned out to have substantial amounts of bullshit in between the covers. While I can not say I am a fan of Oprah's show, or magazines, or radio shows, or whatever it is she's enthusiastic about this week, but given the results, I almost have to count myself among the crowd of those who would pawn their left testicle (or ovary, to be fair) to get such an endorsement. Of course, the odds of Oprah endorsing anything I write, create, say on my radio show, etc. are roughly that of Paris Hilton winning an Oscar for another sex tape, but hey, if you are going to daydream about Oprah, this seems the safest way to do so...just save that $56 bucks and click on the 'Merchandise' button right at the top of this screen...