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For those unfamiliar with him, Randy Quaid is a character actor of the National Lampoon's Vacation series and Independence Day fame. For the last four years, he has been hiding out in Canada with his wife and dog, convinced that a Hollywood cabal is out to murder him, just as they did—he believes—David Carradine and Heath Ledger. The conspiracy only gets weirder from there.Two weeks ago, he released a video of himself looking like a member of the Duck Dynasty family on a paint-huffing binge with his wife in the background in sunglasses and a bikini. After going on a rant about Rupert Murdoch not thanking him for saving the world in Independence Day, he asks his wife to put on a poorly constructed mask of Murdoch's face, then says to the camera, "You wanna fuck me? I'm gonna fuck you." And that's just what he does.Some might find the video somewhat funny—Quaid still has a spark of thespian wit inside him—but considering it depicts two crazy people living in what looks like a cheap hotel room, screwing while their dog barks and Quaid yells out lines from his past successes, it's mostly just sad.
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While Quaid was going for a bit of dark whimsy during his YouTube rant, when former Creed singer Scott Stapp posted a similar video of himself in a hotel room, there wasn't a lot wisecracking going on. This was last November, a time when Stapp says he'd been living out of his truck, penniless and starving. Like Quaid, Stapp laid out vague details of a conspiracy, claimed he was the victim of theft and unpaid royalties, and emphatically denied he was on drugs. His wife filed for divorce the next day, citing in the divorce petition that Stapp had been "doing so much amphetamines, crystal meth, and steroids that he has become a paranoid shell who has threatened to kill himself and harm his family."TMZ fed the schadenfreude beast by releasing 911 calls from Stapp, in which he claimed he'd been followed for weeks by people trying to kill him, and then 911 calls from his wife, in which she said Stapp had plotted to kill President Obama and that he believed the Islamic State had infiltrated his family.His behavior fit all the tropes of amphetamine psychosis, a condition I've unfortunately seen firsthand in some of my own friends and family members. Yet I have to admit, at first I joined my rock-snob friends in mocking Stapp. We did it partly because he's a pompous twit and partly because we were compensating for our collective shame of being Creed fans as teenagers. But pretty soon, I started to feel guilty for making fun of Stapp and had to ask myself: What is this man guilty of besides making shitty music?
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This would explain the success of Amazon's Fire TV campaign featuring Gary Busey. For the last ten years Busey has probably been the celebrity most known for mental illness. Having suffered brain damage during a 1988 motorcycle accident, Busey's ability to temper his impulse control was severely impaired, according to a doctor on a season two episode of Celebrity Rehab. A once-accomplished movie star, the second act of Busey's career has been as a Puck-like reality TV star, using his reputation for clinical madness as a vehicle for drama on shows like Big Brother, The Apprentice, and I'm with Busey.
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