news of a non-geopolitical nature

[shin]

Apparently the fucking idiot does, in fact, care what people think about her:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- For once, Paris Hilton wasn't happy to be the center of attention.

Hours after paparazzi swarmed the Hollywood police station where the celebutante was booked for investigation of drunk driving, she told radio host Ryan Seacrest people were making too big a deal out of her arrest.

"Everything I do is blown out of proportion and it really hurts my feelings," said Hilton, who called the incident "nothing."

[skvorisdeadsorta]

She isn't dead yet?

[rockysigman]

Only inside.

[limitdeditionlayla]

Oh no, I was wrong about Paris Hilton caring what people think of her. How embarrassing. I'm so glad I was corrected.

[Mary]

In the grand scheme of things this is extremely minor news, and I have no idea where to post it, and it probably only matters to me, but nonetheless I felt like posting it somewhere:

One of the most famous independent bookstores in the world, Cody's, just closed its flagship store - on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley. I spent endless afternoons wiling away the hours digging through the film and music aisle, the philosophy aisle, the "radicalism" aisle (ahhhh berkeley - further broken down into marxism, anarchism, labor radicalism, and situationism), and the excellent selections of recommended current fiction and nonfiction books. This place was as iconic as you could get in Berkeley - Telegraph Ave is the the most (in)famous street in Berkeley, a carnival and a cesspool at the very same time - and the block where Codys stood was its most wonderful block, also containing Moes, an enormous independent used bookstore, Shakespeares, a smaller independent used bookstore (thus indicating there were more bookstores on one block of Telegraph Ave than in all of downtown Memphis), and of course Amoeba, the world's greatest and biggest used record store, and the Cafe Med, a famous cafe where The Graduate was filmed and where 60s revolutionaries planned their failed revolution 40 years ago. I loved that block, it reminded me even if 50% of the people around me were complete and utter nutjobs, they were complete and utter nutjobs who loved to read and to learn about the world, and that I was in a genuinely intellectually inspired place. And a historic place, as well - if you look at the classic photos of political unrest in Berkeley in the 60s, you see Codys in the background of so many pictures - you see the antiwar activists lined up in front of Codys staring straight into a swat team, the civil rights activists marching past Codys, the protestors/misguided idiots holding up signs for Peoples Park next to Codys, etc etc. It's a historic location, and a great bookstore, and I took it for granted every time I wandered down from 3 blocks from campus with a few hours to kill between classes to browse its storied aisles. I miss it already. It's going to make me terribly sad to go back and visit and see that historic spot empty and abandoned, waiting for god knows what terrible chain store to lease it instead.

Here's a grim but fascinating article about the closure of Codys, contemplating the future of bookstores in general, and what factors are contributing to the death of independent bookstores:

www.alternet.org/story/40490/

(i would cut and paste it, but it's really, really, really long....)

*sniff* goodbye to codys - it will be missed.

M

[Mary]

Why we loved Codys - one tiny quote from the article:

When Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses spurred Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to call for Rushdie's execution in 1989, many American stores refused to carry the book. Cody's stocked it even after someone hurled a firebomb through its window.

I love it when books actually matter.

Cheers,
M

[Mary]

Another reason to love Codys..... although it perhaps doesn't display the keenest business acumen:

Ross says he'll never forget the day in January when he printed out the latest list of titles that hadn't sold and would have to be returned to their publishers. "On the list was Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason." He pauses, swallowing. "A basic, fundamental book of Western civilization. One of the greatest works of Western philosophy. It hadn't sold. I didn't return it. I said to myself: 'I can't. What's left, The Devil Wears Prada?'

[phil]

Open season on Paris ... ? ?

Forget who they're talking about here ...

Those articles make very interesting comments
about our societies ...


The Trash Princess
Kay S. Hymowitz

Why Americans love to hate Paris Hilton

Maybe 500 channels and an epidemic of bloggerhea mean that Americans have less of a common culture, but we all still share . . . Paris Hilton. The naughty blond heiress is, like, wallpapering our brains. Even if you don’t read the tabloids, you can’t escape her. There’s a (topless) Vanity Fair cover, a Barbara Walters interview, a best-selling single, a CD, a jewelry line, a best-selling book, a nightclub chain. Madame Tussaud has immortalized her in its wax museum. She can command $100,000 just to show up at a restaurant or club opening for an hour. She is among the top Googled people in the United States. And don’t think you can just get on a plane, go to (say) Auckland, and live Paris-free. In 2005, she was among the most popular search topics in New Zealand—not to mention Germany, Japan, and Australia. She is also a huge lure in Mexico, Turkey, France, and Sweden (so much for the enlightened sexuality of the Scandinavians). Who could top her in the fame department? Liberal commentators have dubbed estate-tax repeal “the Paris Hilton tax cut,” and the term has stuck. Madonna never had a piece of federal legislation named after her.

Now despite her fame and good fortune, for most sentient adults Hilton personifies the decadence of our cultural moment. With her nightclub brawls, her endless sexcapades, her vapid interviews, her rodent-like dog, and her lack of ostensible talent, she reeks of every vice ever ascribed to our poor country. She has become a synonym for American materialism, bad manners, greed, “like” and “whatever” Valley Girl inarticulateness, parochialism, arrogance, promiscuity, antifeminism, exposed roots and navels, entitlement, cell-phone addiction, anorexia and bulimia, predilection for gas-guzzling private transportation, pornified womanhood, exhibitionism, narcissism—you name it.
Paris deserves almost all of this. You don’t need to share Osama bin Laden’s view of America to see that Paris mirrors us at our contemporary worst. But something still doesn’t compute: Why, if Paris says so much about us, do Americans—not just college professors and the commentariat but celebrity watchers and tabloid junkies—hate her so much? And why, if she is so offensive, is she so ubiquitous?

Well, hating Paris Hilton is fun: Americans always enjoy a good sneer at the undeserving and decadent rich. Paris Hilton is our communal dartboard; skewering her gives the American public a chance to reaffirm who we are.

... Read more

www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_urbanities-paris_hilton.html


So long, Paris

For years we've been paralyzed in the tractor beam of her brainless celebrity. Now it's time to kiss the creepy dollie goodbye.

By Rebecca Traister

Dec. 11, 2006 | You know that point in a Stephen King novel when you've sort of figured out that the creepy dollie -- the one with the plastic hair and serenely stupid eyes that roll in two different directions -- is actually an animate object wreaking havoc and destroying people and you wonder why the townspeople haven't cottoned on and crushed the damn thing under a truck or something?

I think it's safe to say we've reached that point with Paris Hilton. We need to acknowledge that Hilton is not simply a tabloid diversion but a malevolent blight on the pop culture landscape.

For too many years we have sat, paralyzed in the tractor beam of her wall-eyed celebrity, watching mutely as bad things happened to her band of D-list compatriots. We have witnessed the declining personal fortunes and liver health of her rotating cast of skuzzball BFFs, boyfriends and frenemies -- Bijou Phillips, Nicole Richie, Kimberly Stewart, Lindsay Lohan, Brandon Davis, Stavros Niarchos, Tara Reid -- because, really, who the hell were those people, anyway?

But then, a couple of weeks ago, Hilton started messing with Britney Spears, weighing down Spears' Phoenix-flight from her crapola marriage to grody Kevin Federline by dressing her up in tutus, taking her partying till all hours, and encouraging her to flash her whiskerless nether regions to paparazzi. Now, we all know that Spears is perfectly capable of attracting the interest of Child Protective Services all on her own. But this most recent visit from the state, as reported by Page Six last Wednesday, cuts deeper than any baby-dropping seat-belt infractions ever did. That's because we suspect that it has not been prompted simply by Spears' legendarily poor judgment or naiveté. No. Those unfortunate qualities just made her an easier mark for the pernicious influence of the world's most famous succubutante, and the rope line of gaunt, twitching bodies in Hilton's wake tips us off that it's unlikely to end well for her latest victim.

It's time to admit that Paris Hilton, that creepy dollie, must be destroyed. Metaphorically, of course.

... Read more

www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/12/11/paris_hilton/

[phil]

"That's the way God planned it
That's the way God wants it to be ..."


Frozen in time: the disabled nine-year-old girl
who will remain a child all her life

· Parents fiercely criticised over 'offensive' surgery
· Disability groups say case raises troubling issues

Ed Pilkington in New York
Thursday January 4, 2007
The Guardian

Ashley's parents call her their Pillow Angel, a moniker that is a reference to the love and joy they feel for their nine-year-old daughter and the severe disabilities she has suffered from birth. She cannot sit up, walk or talk, is fed by tube, and, as her parents put it, "stays right where we place her - usually on a pillow".

Ashley won't know this, as she is brain-damaged and has the awareness, her doctors say, of a baby, but she has become the subject of a passionate argument in disability circles and beyond. Her name is becoming synonymous with the debate about the acceptable limits of medical intervention in the care of disabled people.

The cause of the controversy is the "Ashley Treatment" - a course of surgery and hormone supplements devised for her at her parents' request and with the blessing of doctors - that will for ever keep her small. It involves surgical operations, including a hysterectomy, and hormone prescriptions that will, in effect, freeze-frame her body at its current size.

Although she has a normal life expectancy, she will, physically, always be nine years old. Her growth has been suspended at 4ft 5in (1.3 metres), rather than the 5ft 6in she would probably otherwise have become. Her weight will stick at around 75lb (34kg) rather than 125lb.

This week Ashley's parents, who have chosen to remain anonymous and have only let it be known that they are "college-educated professionals" living in Washington state, have posted on the internet a lengthy explanation of their desire to stunt her growth. It is the first time they have given a public account of their actions. The explanation is accompanied by a gallery of photographs showing Ashley over the years, from her as a smiling baby a few months old, through to today when she is seen nestled in a sheepskin rug.

She was diagnosed, they explain, with brain damage with unknown causes just after birth and has remained at the same developmental level since about three months. Three years ago she began to show early signs of puberty, and they grew anxious about the impact of fertility and of her rapidly increasing size and weight on the quality of her life. In discussions with doctors at Seattle Children's hospital they devised the treatment: removal of Ashley's uterus to prevent fertility, excision of early buds on her chest so that she would not develop breasts, and medication with high doses of oestrogen to limit her growth by prematurely fusing the growth plates of her bones.

The parents insist that the treatment, carried out in 2004, was conceived for Ashley's benefit and not their own ease or convenience. With a lighter body and no breasts, Ashley will have fewer bed sores and lie more comfortably. And a smaller Ashley can be cared for and carried. "As a result we will continue to delight in holding her in our arms and Ashley will be moved and taken on trips more frequently instead of lying in her bed staring at TV or the ceiling all day long," they write.

But as news about the treatment became known, Ashley's parents were surprised by the virulence of some of the response. Comments on chatboards have included: "Ouch - this smacks of eugenics"; "I find this offensive, truly a milestone in our convenience society"; "This smells, I can't agree with this".

Outrage has also been expressed by organisations representing disabled people across the US, with many asking why a course of treatment that would not be countenanced for an able-bodied person should be allowed in this case. "People have been horrified by the discrepancy," said Mary Johnson, editor of Ragged Edge, an online magazine for disability activists.

She said she felt for Ashley's parents and could understand why they had made the decision. But she feared that the treatment would open a Pandora's box that could have adverse effects for other children. "What will now be said in the case of a child with spina bifida, who you could argue has the same physical challenges but whose brain is fully functioning? This is very troubling."

Debate has raged among doctors and medical ethicists. Jeffrey Brosco of Miami University has co-written an editorial in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine criticising the procedure as an experiment without proper research controls. "This is a technological solution to a social problem. I work with severely disabled children and know how hard it is on families, but what we need most is better federal funding so that they can be cared for properly."

State help for caring for disabled people is available through Medicaid, which is restricted to poor families. Ashley's parents would not qualify, and say it is impossible to find carers they can afford.

The ethical row is likely to deepen as the Seattle doctors, led by Daniel Gunther, say they are considering other children for similar treatment, though only after monitoring by the hospital's ethics committee. The doctors accept that Ashley's hysterectomy was contentious, given the dark history of sterilisation of disabled people in Europe and America, and that there were risks involved in the operations and oestrogen doses.

But they argue the benefits outweigh the risks. Ashley has, they admit, been "infantilised" but question the harm that would do a person whose mental capacity "will always be that of a young child".

Ashley cannot say what she thinks. But in a telephone interview with the Guardian last night, her father said that many people had assumed he and his wife had to agonise over their decision.

"We didn't. It was easy," he said. "We clearly saw the benefits to Ashley's quality of life. We have also been criticised for harming Ashley's dignity. But for us, what would be grotesque would be to allow a fully formed woman to grow up, lying helplessly and with the mentality of a three-month-old."

Hormones

There is a long history of hormones being used to control growth in children. In some cases they are used to counteract a hormonal imbalance or genetic disorder. But there have also been sustained attempts to control body size for cosmetic reasons.

In 1956 MA Goldzieher became the first to report using high doses of oestrogen to treat exceptionally tall girls. Over ensuing years thousands of tall girls were prescribed oestrogen to prevent them tipping over the 6ft mark, protecting their marriage prospects. As the stigma against tallness in women has declined, so has the practice, though it still continues.

Boys considered to be shorter than the norm have recently begun to be treated with a growth hormone, often for cosmetic reasons. US federal restrictions have been loosened, allowing private paediatricians to offer the treatment that can cost up to $40,000 a year.

[phil]

72-Degree Day Breaks Record in New York


By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: January 7, 2007

Hundreds of tourists and locals packed the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center yesterday, pretending that it really was a cold, snowy day in January as they circled beneath the giant Christmas tree. In Brooklyn, eight members of a cold-water-braving organization known as the Coney Island Polar Bear Club walked toward the waves, some wearing nothing but swim trunks.

The only thing that ruined this winter imagery was the temperature, which reached a record-breaking 72 degrees in Central Park yesterday.

And so the make-believe winter collided with reality: People wore T-shirts as they ice-skated on the wet and slushy rink at Rockefeller Center, and the Polar Bears held a moment of silence, turned their backs on the Atlantic and headed toward the boardwalk, a protest, albeit an underdressed one, against global warming.

Louis Scarcella, 55, president of the Coney Island club, said the weather has been so mild that he is considering canceling the group’s winter swimming season, which usually runs from November to April. A club season has not been cancelled since the group was founded 104 years ago.

“I have not made the decision yet,” Mr. Scarcella said gravely. “I have to meet with my board.”

The warm spell shattered records around the city and the state as well as throughout New Jersey and Connecticut. In Central Park, the high temperature at 1:37 p.m. — 72 degrees — broke the date’s previous high of 63 degrees in 1950, the National Weather Service reported.

It was the highest temperature recorded in the park in January since record-keeping began in the late 1800s, sharing that distinction with a 72-degree high on Jan. 26, 1950.

In Bridgeport, Conn., the weather service said, the high of 68 was 15 degrees above the previous record, in 1949; and in Newark, the high of 72 was 11 degrees over the old mark, from 1950.

Although global warming is a popular theory, the weather service is citing a specific cause. “We have a mild air mass that we’re in right now, kind of tropical in nature,” said John Murray, of the National Weather Service in Upton, N.Y.

[phil]

There goes the "Traditional American Values" right out the widow !

Welcome to the Third Millenium !!


51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: January 16, 2007

For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results.

In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.

Coupled with the fact that in 2005 married couples became a minority of all American households for the first time, the trend could ultimately shape social and workplace policies, including the ways government and employers distribute benefits.

Several factors are driving the statistical shift. At one end of the age spectrum, women are marrying later or living with unmarried partners more often and for longer periods. At the other end, women are living longer as widows and, after a divorce, are more likely than men to delay remarriage, sometimes delighting in their newfound freedom.

In addition, marriage rates among black women remain low. Only about 30 percent of black women are living with a spouse, according to the Census Bureau, compared with about 49 percent of Hispanic women, 55 percent of non-Hispanic white women and more than 60 percent of Asian women.

In a relatively small number of cases, the living arrangement is temporary, because the husbands are working out of town, are in the military or are institutionalized. But while most women eventually marry, the larger trend is unmistakable.

“This is yet another of the inexorable signs that there is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives,” said Prof. Stephanie Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonprofit research group. “Most of these women will marry, or have married. But on average, Americans now spend half their adult lives outside marriage.”

Professor Coontz said this was probably unprecedented with the possible exception of major wartime mobilizations and when black couples were separated during slavery.

William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, a research group in Washington, described the shift as “a clear tipping point, reflecting the culmination of post-1960 trends associated with greater independence and more flexible lifestyles for women.”

“For better or worse, women are less dependent on men or the institution of marriage,” Dr. Frey said. “Younger women understand this better, and are preparing to live longer parts of their lives alone or with nonmarried partners. For many older boomer and senior women, the institution of marriage did not hold the promise they might have hoped for, growing up in an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ era.”

...

[Kensterberg]

I'm not sure how I feel about this news. I'm glad that women have more choices, but it also seems a little sad.

Then again, considering that men live longer when married, maybe it's our loss!

[phil]

Art Buchwald Excerpts

Associated Press

Excerpts from the columns and books of Art Buchwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author who died late Wednesday:

"I know it's very egocentric to believe that someone is put on earth for a reason. In my case, I like to think I was. And after this column appears in the paper following my passing, I would like to think it will either wind up on a cereal box top or be repeated every Thanksgiving Day."

_From his last column, written for publication after his death Wednesday. "Goodbye, My Friends," Tribune Media Services.

"What is the patriotic consumer to do?

I went into a shopping mall the other day to purchase a Star-Spangled Banner Sweat Suit. The salesman said they had some from Hong Kong for $10, some from Taiwan for $15 and a few from Pakistan for $4.

`Don't you have any that were made in America?'

`No. The only American-made items we have are these Buddhist robes. They are hand-sewn in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, by the Amish people.'"

_From "The Melting Product," The Washington Post, March 10, 1992.

"I am known in the hospice as `The Man Who Would Not Die.' How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. I don't know where I'd go now, or if people would still want to see me if I weren't in a hospice. But in case you're wondering, I'm having a swell time - the best time of my life."

Dying isn't hard. Getting paid by Medicare is.

_From his book "Too Soon to Say Goodbye" (2006).

"In the good old days, smokers could be counted on to die far before their time, and therefore did not use up their Social Security benefits or health plan credits. Nonsmokers, on the other hand, live too long and to this day are a tremendous drain on the country's finances. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. So, every time we turn a smoker into a nonsmoker we're destroying the entire pension system of the United States."

_ From "Long Live Smokers!" The Washington Post, March 22, 1990.

"I don't want to be a wimp, but senior citizens have to pay $140 for a prescription. To make it up to them, they only pay $5 to go to the movies."

_ From his book "Beating Around the Bush" (2005).

"President Bush keeps referring to the discovery of Iraq's missiles as `the tip of the iceberg.'

There are some, not many, who feel that if weapons are the tip of the iceberg, then Mr. Bush is the captain of the Titanic.'

_From "Beating Around the Bush."

"Every two years I put out a new book and then make a tour of the talk shows plugging it. I can't do it any more because this year it's impossible for someone who is not really weird to get on TV."

_ From "Talk Shows, Writing the Book," The Washington Post, October 5, 1989.

R.I.P.

[Mary]

I was very sorry to see this; I didn't even know she was sick:

Molly Ivins dies of cancer at 62
By KELLEY SHANNON, Associated Press Writer 18 minutes ago

AUSTIN, Texas - Best-selling author and columnist Molly Ivins, the sharp-witted liberal who skewered the political establishment and referred to President Bush as "Shrub," died Wednesday after a long battle with breast cancer. She was 62.

Ivins died at her home while in hospice care, said David Pasztor, managing editor of the Texas Observer, where Ivins was co-editor.

Ivins made a living poking fun at politicians, whether they were in her home state of Texas or the White House. She revealed in early 2006 that she was being treated for breast cancer for the third time.

More than 400 newspapers subscribed to her nationally syndicated column, which combined strong liberal views and populist humor. Ivins' illness did not seem to hurt her ability to deliver biting one-liners.

"I'm sorry to say (cancer) can kill you, but it doesn't make you a better person," she said in an interview with the San Antonio Express-News in September, the same month cancer claimed her friend former Gov. Ann Richards.

To Ivins, "liberal" wasn't an insult term. "Even I felt sorry for Richard Nixon when he left; there's nothing you can do about being born liberal — fish gotta swim and hearts gotta bleed," she wrote in a column included in her 1998 collection, "You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You."

In a column in mid-January, Ivins urged readers to stand up against Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war," Ivins wrote in the Jan. 11 column. "We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'"

Ivins' best-selling books included those she co-authored with Lou Dubose about Bush. One was titled "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" and another was "BUSHWHACKED: Life in George W. Bush's America."

Ivins' jolting satire was directed at people in positions of power.

"The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point," she wrote in a 1997 column. "Poor people do not shut down factories ... Poor people didn't decide to use 'contract employees' because they cost less and don't get any benefits."

In an Austin speech last year, former President Clinton described Ivins as someone who was "good when she praised me and who was painfully good when she criticized me."

Ivins loved to write about politics and called the Texas Legislature the best free entertainment in Austin.

"Naturally, when it comes to voting, we in Texas are accustomed to discerning that fine hair's-breadth worth of difference that makes one hopeless dipstick slightly less awful than the other. But it does raise the question: Why bother?" she wrote in a 2002 column about a California political race.

Born Mary Tyler Ivins in California, she grew up in Houston. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and attended Columbia University's journalism school. She also studied for a year at the Institute of Political Sciences in Paris.

Her first newspaper job was in the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. She worked her way up at the Chronicle, then went on to the Minneapolis Tribune, becoming the first woman police reporter in the city.

Ivins counted as her highest honors the Minneapolis police force's decision to name its mascot pig after her and her getting banned from the campus of Texas A&M University, according to a biography on the Creators Syndicate Web site.

In the late 1960s, according to the syndicate, she was assigned to a beat called "Movements for Social Change" and wrote about "angry blacks, radical students, uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

Ivins later became co-editor of The Texas Observer, a liberal Austin-based biweekly publication of politics and literature.

She joined The New York Times in 1976, working first as a political reporter in New York and later as Rocky Mountain bureau chief.

But Ivins' use of salty language and her habit of going barefoot in the office were too much for the Times, said longtime friend Ben Sargent, editorial cartoonist with the Austin American-Statesman.

"She was just like a force of nature," Sargent said. "She was just always on and sharp and witty and funny and was one of a kind."

Ivins returned to Texas as a columnist for the Dallas Times-Herald in 1982, and after it closed she spent nine years with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001, she went independent and wrote her column for Creators Syndicate.

"She was magical in her writing," said Mike Blackman, a former Star-Telegram executive editor who hired Ivins in 1992. "She could turn a phrase in such a way that a pretty hard-hitting point didn't hurt so bad."

In 1995, conservative humorist Florence King accused Ivins in "American Enterprise" magazine of plagiarism for failing to properly credit King for several passages in a 1988 article in "Mother Jones." Ivins apologized, saying the omissions were unintentional and pointing out that she credited King elsewhere in the piece.

She was initially diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and she had a recurrence in 2003. Her latest diagnosis came around Thanksgiving 2005.

[Kensterberg]

The world is a poorer place today without Molly Ivins. She was one of the truly great Texans of the last twentyfive years, and will be sorely missed both in and out of our state.

In other news ... I generally care little for fellow ex-pat Minnesotan Garrison Keillor, but his current column at Salon.com is a wonderful little piece, and the following paragraph is IMO quite perceptive in its insights into how our world has splintered and fragmented in the last three decades, and what purpose is served by a certain type of celebrity:

People decry Paris Hilton but she serves a purpose. We're a big country and we have so little in common anymore. Television and pop music have splintered into hundreds of niches. There are no singers like Satchmo or Sinatra or Elvis whose voices everyone knows. The audience for even the most successful TV show is a small minority. Most famous persons in America are persons most Americans have never heard of.

But if we don't admire the same people, at least we can find people to despise. That is the role of ditzy pop stars and rich bimbos and the old tycoons with comb-overs and the home-run kings on steroids -- they are the village lunatics in our ongoing national fairy tale. We check on their comings and goings and then we turn to our work with fresh appreciation. Maybe your feuds aren't widely reported and maybe people aren't mobbing the celeb sites looking for pictures of you without underwear, but you have work and that's a consolation, just being good at accomplishing useful things.