Tutmania - The Curse

Brad Dickson's guest column in the Daily News expounds today that:

Los Angeles is in the midst of a mania. I speak not of the housing market, but of Tutapalooza.

As the King Tut exhibit makes its sophomore appearance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, elitist East Coast critics hover over the preserved artifacts dating to around 1323 B.C., stunned by the thought, "Los Angeles County has a museum?"

Forgetting Tut for just a second, I wanted to focus on some of the sarcasm weaved throughout the column to provide you all with a laugh on your Friday morning. Here's a few of the better ones:

1. Every couple of decades, the Egyptians send Tut on tour, making him their Cher.
2. From L.A., the exhibit moves to Fort Lauderdale in November, where Tut would have caused a sensation as one of the state's younger people.
3. Maybe we're enthralled by a civilization able to erect gigantic pyramids, Los Angeles being a civilization whose elected officials are unable to repair a pothole.
4. We're also possibly intrigued by the fact it took Egypt roughly the same amount of time to build a Great Pyramid as it did for us to complete four feet of subway.
5. Some psychoanalysts assert that Tut represents implied immortality, a life that never ends -- something many L.A. inhabitants crave, but only a select few (Robert Evans and Dyan Cannon) achieve.
6. The exact cause of his death is unexplained, which helps account for his popularity in L.A. Tutankhamun is one long "CSI" episode.
7. The publicity blitz peaked when the charismatic Tut proposed to Katie Holmes atop the Eiff -- wait, wrong P.R. blitz.

But the icing on the cake must be the following -

Ironically, all the ado surrounding Tutankhamun flies in the face of historians largely branding him one of the least important pharaohs. Tut was a leader of little consequence in his lifetime. The analogous situation would be if 3,000 years from now, multitudes of people were to line up to view the preserved remains of Mayor James K. Hahn (which are eerily similar to the actual James K. Hahn.) Or if some day society turns out en mass to witness the antiquities belonging to, say, City Councilman Dennis Zine.

Happy Friday!