The singer's old house is up for sale ? complete with a shark tank and a 'knotty pine' spa area
This week, Lost in Showbiz turns to face you with brimming, confused eyes from which the scales have recently fallen, palms turned upwards in supplication and the words "Who knew?" forming on its lips.
Who knew that when the "on-air" light went off, the pundits on Sky Sports didn't immediately return to a longstanding debate about whether Elaine Showalter's concept of gyno-critics was a valuable means by which we can develop new models for women based on the study of female experience, or an entirely essentialist and limited construct that has no place in a poststructuralist world that denies the existence of the fundamental female self? Who knew there might be a culture of leering sexism abroad at a station that brought us the object lesson in female empowerment that is Soccer AM's Soccerettes feature ("introducing the ravishing Rosie Jones! The Page 3 girl is an Arsenal fan and the new face of Big D Nuts and we reckon that this girl has big things in front of her!")?
And who knew the full extent of the services on offer from American rehab centres? For some reason, Lost in Showbiz had always assumed that rehab was essentially somewhere you went to deal with a chronic alcohol or drug problem. Thank God the manager of minor US teeny-bop star Aaron Carter was on hand to put us right, informing the press that his charge had gone into rehab to "heal some emotional and spiritual issues he was dealing with, which, in turn, will help him on the musical journey he's about to undertake". It's totally different from the time he appeared on the US reality show Celebrity Rehab to overcome his chronic drug problem! He's basically just spitballing a few song ideas in there!
Most importantly, who knew the kind of bargain you can pick up on the American real estate market in these straitened times? Let Lost in Showbiz get all Kirstie Allsopp on your ass and ask you a few straightforward questions. Do you have $3.5m (�2.5m) to hand? Do you lie awake at night, tormented by the fear that you'll never find a property with a living room that will accommodate 100 people? Are you in desperate need of an ensuite bathroom with a showerhead valued at nearly $7,000? Do you own a shark? I know, I know: who doesn't? Then hasten at once to Chicago: your sleepless nights are over.
Lost in Showbiz can't understand why 1010 West George Street, Lakeview, Chicago, keeps changing hands and has recently undergone a price cut of nearly $400,000. After all, it boasts an array of indispensable features. Lost in Showbiz regards the estate agent's blurb and boggles at the 1,600 gallon shark tank and the dog-wash bay area. It looks wistfully at the Toto Neorest automatic toilet. Lost in Showbiz knew nothing of the other, better world, in which celebrities' bums are attended to by "a nozzle the size of a pencil that comes out from underneath the toilet seat and squirts water". Once again it turns to you and asks: "Who knew?"
The fact that this property is still on the market is self-evidently nothing to do with prospective buyers feeling creepy about the former owner, "a person", according to the estate agent, "who simply lives larger than life", which is certainly one way of describing R Kelly.
After all, R Kelly was acquitted in 2008 of all 14 counts of child pornography relating to a sex tape that, at first glance, appeared to have been filmed in the property's charming-sounding "full spa area with knotty-pine walls".
For the defence, forensic video expert Charles Palm explained that it was entirely possible that the video had been faked. Dark forces could have snuck into the house and filmed the charming-sounding full spa area with knotty-pine walls or built a set replicating the full spa area with knotty-pine walls; availed themselves of the services of two actors who, for a fee, were pleased to have sex on his camera; sourced hitherto-unseen footage of R Kelly or an R Kelly lookalike pulling I-am-having-sex-in- a-charming-full-spa-area-with-knotty-pine-walls facial expressions and used technology to comp the latter onto the footage of the actors having sex, then comp them on to the background.
To clarify how this might be done, the prosecutor evoked the comedy film Little Man, in which a diminutive jewel thief passes himself off as a baby: "They took the head of Marlon Wayans and put it on a midget and it looked real, didn't it?"
The jury was convinced, which means there's no reason to feel peculiar about following the estate agent's advice and relaxing in the sauna area or "enjoying a fireside libation". Indeed, Lost in Showbiz is already packing its shark, imagining the comforting sploosh of the Toto Neorest, and counting its blessings that this remarkable property is available. In the words of the house's former owner when the 14 not guilty verdicts came through: "Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus."
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