Since When Is This News??

I booted up Internet Explorer at work to search for a phone number. The headline read "Trey Anastasio arraigned on drug charge".

Who??????????

And so it goes again. More space cluttered up for mindless updates of the goings on in the Celebrity world. I had to google that name to find out that he was once with the group Pfish. I know little about them, but what I do know tells me that this charge should come as no surprise.

Apparently I'm not the only one who is fed up with being bombarded with the constant barrage of celebrity updates everywhere I turn, yet it continues in full force. Every time I turn on the tv, every time I stand in line at the supermarket, and every time I boot up IE, there it is, staring me in the face. I don't care that Lindsay Lohan needs an appendectomy. I don't care that Nicole may be back with DJ AM again. The fact that I even know those names scares me.

Don't get me wrong. I am a fan of some people - actors, musicians, etc. When I was a teenager, I bought Tiger Beat and whatnot, but mainly for the pictures. I always found the articles mind-numbing. Case in point: I have a complete collection of New Kids On The Block trading cards - both series - hold your comments please - you were once 15 too. They come with such interesting factoids as "Joey likes Cheeseburgers" and "Jonathan likes girls who respect their parents". It's nothing new. My 1967 Monkees trading cards tell about how they love french fries and the like.

What slays me is how you just can't get away from it any more. It's constantly in your face. Time was that if you didn't want to hear about it, you just didn't watch stuff like Entertainment Tonight or didn't buy tabloids. Now it's in the local newspaper, on the local news, and I can't seem to get away from it. I know that every generation has scandals, but since when is the fact that actress "a" is divorcing actor "b" because they have a nasty online porn addiction breaking news of any importance? How about helping real people - everyday schmoes - who are addicted to bad things? Everyone cares that Nicole Ritchie has a drug addiction, but how about my late Uncle, who struggled all his life? No one shed a tear for him. Unwilling to saddle his family with funeral costs, he donated his body to science. Who was there to help him? Most certainly not Paris Hilton......

I was pleased to see celebrity name combinations was on the most recent list of stuff that should be banned from the English Language. I once had the misfortune of helping to try and moderate a forum largely populated by teenagers, which was for a tv show. The talk was always "Who do you like better: Cranny, Crashley, Spaige, Pemma, Jaitlin, or Jiberty?" . It got so they'd argue over what was the best way to conglomerate names, and they finally demanded a FAQ be pinned with the "accepted" name conglomerations. Needless to say I did not last long there. Then again, some of these kids thought that "Growing Up Gotti" was a great show to provide role models for them. Yes, they actually said that.

To the people who just can't get enough of Tomkat: please pay a little more attention to your own life and perhaps we won't be bombarded with so much from theirs. Hey - I can always dream, can't I?