Oh...my...god! Yay! Wow! Super exciting! It's time to shower random celebrities with golden statues again! Golly, how could it possibly get any better than this? Sorry, I just fell asleep. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the vanity awards. How could I forget? There is nothing new to see here per se because you have seen it all before. A bunch of rich and famous people come together every month to shower each other with gold. You can almost taste the arrogance and smell the putrid stench of vanity wafting through the air. Each individual Emmy cost $400 to make; that is a week's salary for many people in this country. The total cost for every Emmy statue combined for the lavish award show is $46,400, far more than the median income in the United States, which sits at a paltry $34,486. That means that the Emmy statues, which will end up collecting dust on some celebrity's shelf, and eventually being pawned for drug money by one of their relatives or the celebrities themselves, is worth more than the average front line worker during this deadly pandemic. Wow, it sure does sound like we are getting back to "normal" fast; one statistic and already I feel like nothing I do matters in this country. Yep, super normal, American style. But the waste of money and time does not stop there. I am just getting started. When the Emmy's first started they were open to the public and you could get in for five bucks. That may sound surprising, but it's really not. I mean, you are paying to watch celebrities stroke each others' egos for five or six hours; they should be paying you to do that. Nowadays, the Emmy's are no longer open to the public because Hollywood hates poor people and has successfully excluded them in a way that Donald Trump could only dream of. I'm pretty sure Trump had his face laminated with a melted down Emmy, but that's another story for another day. The Emmy tickets are sold to friends and relatives of celebrities, as well as what are known as "seat fillers", basically professional extras who pretend to like Hollywood for a living. The cost of these tickets you ask? One will run you about $225. Oh and no free programs, that is another $425. Seem reasonable during a time where a record number of Americans are out of work? Then you must have been doing some of the free cocaine that comes in those little statues (joking here, but you never know with Hollywood). Even if it does seem reasonable to you, that is not all. There is also what is known as an Emmy "campaign". Emmy campaigns are elaborate marketing schemes that networks use to bring home the statues; they do this because it increases network ratings, which means more money and even more statues. If you notice, the same shows and actors win every year; this is because they pay a pretty penny for those wins. "Networks shell out big bucks to get those winged ladies sitting in their offices. TV Guide reports that an average Emmy campaign costs between $150,000 and $500,000. In 1993, HBO reportedly spent $1 million on its campaigns, an investment that paid off when the network took home more awards than most broadcast networks for the first time." That's right, HBO did not become popular by merit. They paid to be popular. But it does not stop there. "According to Variety, the 2017 Primetime Emmy Awards resulted in $30 million in revenue for the organization, which spent $10.9 million on the show." So they spent 11 million dollars on production alone! You can feed a small town with that. But why do that when you can organize a fancy circle jerk contest about how wonderful you and your friends are?