things I don't understand

[calimac]

1. What is the connection between Tiger Woods driving into a fire hydrant outside his home at 2:30 in the morning and confessing to having mistresses? He didn't have his mistress with him in the car. How did the one event lead to the other? I'm missing something here.

2. Why does everyone seem to consider it more reprehensible to burgle the home of dead people than the home of living people? The burglar says he didn't know they were dead. That makes it somehow OK, then?

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

The press already had the infidelity story, but Woods was incommunicade and they were waiting for a chink in his armour to pounce. The domestic dispute which resulted in the 2:30am collision was their green light.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Seventy-odd years ago, when a bishop innocently criticized Edward VIII for not attending church often enough, the British press took that as a coded reference to Mrs. Simpson and broke the strict domestic embargo on that story. But I thought that kind of media gentility was long dead. How long had the press been sitting on the story of Woods's infidelity, and where did the idea that a domestic dispute lead to the crash came from? I mean, that would certainly explain the very odd incident, but the initial reaction to the incident was that it was entirely cryptic, and later on both Woods and his wife vehemently denied that there was any domestic dispute at all.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

I refer to the latest bulletin from Popbitch:

Anatomy of a scandal
How to spot a celebrity stalking horse

Keen observers of tabloids and celebrity magazines can look on the Tiger Woods affair as a textbook case of how to smoke out the story of an affair.

1. The stalking horse
Magazine reveals, through un-named sources, a plausible candidate. The Stalking Horse, Rachel Uchitel in this case, is sent out to deny accusations of rumours. She can always change her tune later if she wants. This is the media testing the waters - will this bring anyone else into the open looking for a payday?

2. The reaction
The celebrity wins if he and his wife hold out for a few days looking together and calm. (The Beckhams did this perfectly.) But if any kind of reaction is sniffed out - bingo! The media war is then on. Crashing your car at 2.30am when leaving your driveway is probably as good as it gets.

3. What happens next
If plans are changed or engagements cancelled it means the real story is about to break.

4. The news-stand
The first girls hit pay-dirt. Sorry Tiger, there are more still pondering their next move.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

This bulletin seems to assume a lot of knowledge of details that I don't have, perhaps because I've not been obsessive in following this story. I'm still definitely missing some links in the chain of reasoning here.

I interpreted your first comment as meaning that the press didn't break the infidelity story until after the car-crash incident. Was that incorrect?

Since the car-crash incident was initially reported as a merely cryptic event, who came up with the idea of a domestic dispute as its cause? If the candidate denied it, what was the reason for thinking so? Is there evidence that an early breaking of the infidelity story in the first place was where Woods's wife first learned that he'd been canoodling? And again, if the candidate denied it, what was the reason for thinking so?

[neanderthalus.livejournal.com]

It comes from the fact that he was not drunk, never said he lost control for mechanical reasons, or any other logical reason for that matter. The speed was far to low to account for his injuries.

Also, his wife broke out the rear windows for some reason with a nine iron... or was it a wedge? For what reason?

Sounds like a domestic dispute.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That was not the first thought. All the early news commentaries were completely mystified as to why the accident happened. It was only after the story of his infidelity came out that this explanation of the accident gained currency.

At which point both of the Woods emphatically denied it. They could be lying, of course, but there also seems a lack of explanation as to why one would be so certain that they are.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

I don't read the tabloids, but Popbitch is written by people who work for them. I guess the public isn't in full receipt of the facts (not that we should necessarily be so).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What I'm missing from the Popbitch article is not facts that the public aren't in possession of. It's the facts that I'm not in possession of because I haven't been following the story in detail. If you had found the Popbitch article as cryptic as I did, you would hardly have forwarded it to me.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

My guess: Burgling the home of dead people feels to people like grave-robbing, a kind of desecration.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

But burgling the home of living people is ... not so bad??

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Burgling the homes of the living: bad. But the living can replace lost things and deal with the aftermath.

Burgling the dead: Worse, because it's grave-robbing, desecration, etc. A form of taking advantage of people who have no recourse and can no longer protect themselves.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, the loss of items of particular sentimental value are less likely to upset the dead.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They can't protect themselves because they weren't home, being dead. But if they'd been burgled earlier, they couldn't have protected themselves because they weren't home, being on vacation.

I sort of get the grave-robbing part, though the family is not being buried in their house, as far as I know. But I still don't get why it's worse to rob people of things they no longer have any use for, being dead, than to rob people who are alive and need the stuff, and for whom some things may be irreplaceable if of sentimental value.

The people it's actually worse for are the survivors, who now have to deal with a burglary on top of a tragedy, but it's not their feelings that the people so particularly offended by a burglary of the dead seem to be worried about.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

It's a visceral reaction that may be inexplicable if you yourself don't have that reaction. It is not a logical reaction at all, obviously.

I have two last thoughts, which is that people might have a subconscious reaction that robbing a dead person (or a dead person's home) is like a desecration of the body itself.

There's also the aspect of adding insult to injury: the implication of at least the first couple of articles I saw is that the burglars were actively looking for homes of the recently-dead to burglarize. Not to mention, the dead family, which included two children, died because of the reckless driving of a third party. So people are horrified by the apparent compounding of the tragedy AND by the crassness of the burglar's apparent approach. Something about not sporting.

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

My understanding is he was trying to get away from his wife, who was actively bashing in the windows on his car for him cheating. That makes people panic and drive wrong!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That would explain the bizarre incident, yes, but that was not the original explanation. The original explanation was that the whole thing was cryptic, and the "they were fighting over his infidelity" explanation only showed up after the infidelity story suddenly made headlines. And then both of the Woods expressly denied that they'd been fighting. They could have been lying, of course, but I've seen no explicitly contradictory testimony.

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

The initial report said she bashed in the window to "free him from the car" but that turned out not to be the case. I think she was trying to free him from his brain pan. *snerk*

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

She's the one who said she was trying to free him from the car. Again, she may have been lying about that, but that's not the part that I'm failing to understand.

[neanderthalus.livejournal.com]

I believe a few women have now come forward to admit having affairs.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That was afterwards. My question is about how the one lead to the other in the first place.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

One of the earliest reports was that Woods' facial injuries were the result of a domestic dispute whose subject was the alleged infidelity/ies. And, as others noted, the "wife smashing back window with golf club in rescue attempt" was also reported by some sleazier sources as not a rescue attempt at all but an abortive and violent attack on the car to keep him from driving away after the alleged argument.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Everything I saw in the first day or so after the accident was couched in terms of "what the heck was that all about?" The domestic dispute idea only came up later.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Well, from the beginning, I was suspicious that his wife broke out the car windows for some reason other than "to free him." And there is one obvious reason for a spouse to be doing such a thing. I'm sure that if I thought of it, the press thought of it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If they did think of it, they didn't say so, where I would read it, until after he started issuing his strange apologies.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Most reporters, even for the tabloids, don't write something like "Hmmmm, that's an odd story; I'll bet she actually smashed the windows because she was pissed at him" unless they have, or can make up, some kind of plausible evidence for it. But when he starts waffling and backtracking and such, he opens the door for them to speculate and claim the speculation is newsworthy.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes. He started apologizing for things he hadn't yet been publicly accused of (or vaguely so: he didn't specify what he was apologizing for). That was the weird part; that's where I lost track of the story.