THE GREATEST REALITY SHOW OF ALL!

Over the last 10 years or so, reality has shifted meaning. It once referred to what our senses or imaginations considered real to us. Everything from that juicy slab of prime ribs on a dinner plate all the way to those juicy characterizations on a theatre stage. Lately, however, the word has been hijacked by bizarre television shows. Shows whose actors we talk about the next day as if they were real. Even more bizarre, the bizarre would-be actors the networks stick in front of cameras pretending their behaviors and conversations are important to us

Most bizarre of all, to some of us they really are...

In a wave of controlled despair, I decided to look into the reality that is my own family. Ancestry blogsites abound. What I found was a real "reality show." Just like you can, I discovered some of the early roots to the family name. Seems to bubble up from the eastern Mediterranean over 1000 incredible years ago. Greek, Turkish, Armenian -- hard to be exact. But the name first appears in written history in 1058 AD in the Byzantine capitol of Constantinople, shortly before that city watched torrents of European Crusaders invade the nearby Holy Land.

So far, so good. I mean, why should I care about some hunky island survivor or ditsy housewife on a screen, when I can virtually touch my ancestral roots back to an age when knights, caliphs and emperors strode the world?

Just as you can, I dug deeper. The written record shows the Byzantine emperor Isaac Commenus bequeathed lands to the Spatafora family in one of his domains: The Kingdom of Sicily. There the Spatafora name [meaning to-bear-swords-in-public] prevailed over the next 50 centuries. Dukes and duchesses, saints and sinners, the name of villages and the label of vineyards. For extra flavor, I even learned that in the 19th C, Al Pacino's grandfather married a Spatafora from the fabled Sicilian town of Corleone; and in the 20th C, Hitler's munitions minister Albert Speer married off his son to a Princess Spatafora from the Sicilian city of Catania. Dad, who was born in Sicily in 1897, would have loved to have heard such stories!

But back to reality-television....

Tonight there stands before the glazed eyes of America yet another cacophonous cadenza of silliness, yet another slate of television misappropriating the notion of "reality." Oh but wait -- there's an antidote available. Find an ancestry blogsite on the Internet, and see if you too can excavate the long-lost majesty to your own name, your own past, your own familial reality. It's gotta be better than "The Housewives of New Jersey" or any of the other chintzy hunk-and-ditz programs. Please, tell me I'm right....!