Kaitlan Collins Buys A Pied-à-terre On Nantucket

Last night I had what I can only call a medley or amalgam of every dumb recurring dream or nightmare I've ever had, probably familiar to many people, the one where I went to school in my bathrobe, the one where I can't find where my car is parked, the one where I need to use the bathroom but can't find one anywhere, the similar one where I need to find an elevator, the one where I signed up for a course, never bought the books and never showed up for class, but now it's almost time for finals -- and probably half a dozen others.

In fact, I kept telling myself in the dream, "Oh, no, this isn't a dream!", and that meant I was going to have to tell my mother I had to drop out of school. When I woke up and realized it was in fact a dream, I was truly astonished. I went searching on the web for interpretations of what these things meant, and I learned that I was insecure, or that I was preparing for new experiences, or that I was reassimilating my personality, none of which seemed to mean a thing.

As part of the dream, each time a new sequence came up, I kept asking myself, "I wonder what triggered that one?", and I kept recognizing a guy with a suitcase in a previous scene, or something like that, so it was all a little like the Salvador Dali dream scene in Hitchcock's Spellbound. But then, after I woke up, I kept asking myself the same question, "I wonder what triggered that one?" I finaly came up with an answer: CNN staffers livid after Kaitlan Collins buys vacation home on luxurious island getaway.

I realized that Kaitlan Collins's unnatural smirk had been haunting me for days. This simply isn't a real face, it's not a normal expression in repose. It can only be the result of bad plastic surgery or, as I wondered a short while ago, maybe she'd been making a face like that as a child, her mother had warned her that one day it was going to stick like that, and this had finally happened. But it's also the sort of face you see in a dream. Let's also note the dreamlike quality of the story at the link:

The turmoil over Collins' lavish new island getaway came as an anonymous source told Fox News there are 'tears on the horizon' for the left-leaning news network.

Warner Bros. Discovery's shock split into two distinctive companies is a sign the jobs and hefty salaries of CNN's top talent are on the line, media insiders have warned.

. . . Streaming & Studios' domain will be Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, and HBO Max.

Global Networks, on the other hand, will be news focused, assuming CNN, TNT Sports and Discovery, among other programming.

CEO David Zaslav will take on the leading role of the Streaming & Studios company, while CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels will become the President of Global Networks.

. . . 'Inevitably, Gunnar will look at CNN and decide he can maintain relatively similar profits at a mere fraction of the cost,' Dylan Byers, a former CNN reporter who now works for Puck, wrote in an opinion piece.

'This will have perceptible ramifications on the talent side. Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary?'

In other words, CNN can fire Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, and Wolf Blitzer, but they can keep Kaitlan Collins, an even more mediocre figure, who will appeal to the same audience for much less money. Not only that, but Collins herself has gamed this out: a normal person looking at potential layoffs by their employer might hesitate before pulling the trigger on a multimillion-dollar vacation home. But Collins figures it's the top-dollar talent who'll be on the way out, not her.

This also resonates with the actual psychology of corporate downsizing. When the committee of people who decide who goes and who stays gets together, they look at the candidates one by one and say, "Smith? He doesn't do much, but we know nobody else would hire him. We can't lay him off." On the other hand, they look at a top performer and say, "Johnson? Heck, he could get a job anywhere. He'll land on his feet. He's the one we can let go and not feel bad about it."

Thus Kaitlan Collins. When I did a web search on her, the problem of her smirk kept surfacing:

In 2023, Reddit users questioned if Collins ever had work done on her lips, citing their sharp corners. "To me her lips are so distracting the way they are always curled up on the ends," one Reddit user wrote. "Is it natural or manufactured?" Other commenters chimed with their thoughts about Collins' possible alterations to her appearance, adding that she might have had cosmetic surgery in areas like her mouth and nose. "There is definitely something totally weird about her lips," another user said. "To me at least the edges of her lips have what I would call little 'winglets' like you see at the end of the wings on a commercial plane. And that nose is really strange."

This brings me to how someone like that could be allowed in front of the cameras at a major network. This past year, there was a pseudo-controversy on On Patrol: Live over whether Dan Abrams, who had started a beard and was beginning to look distinguished in a rabbinical way, should shave it off. Sean "Sticks" Larkin, a popular alumnus of the show, reappeared to deliver the message, almost certainly from mahogany row, which went something like this: "The little I've learned about television, Dan, is that there are three key ingredients, lighting, makeup, and camera angle. It's gonna have to go." And of course, it did.

So how could television executives allow someone with a face like Kaitlan Collins, taking key considerations like lighting, makeup, and camera angle into consideration, in front of the camera? It somehow has to do with the nature of mediocrity, I have a sense. They can always fire the big-ticket talking heads, but they'll stick with mediocrity. At least until they can't -- but mediocrity will still get a long run. My dream told me that.