The No Kool Aid Zone

Just a Post Before I Go…

Posted by Byron February 16, 2005 at 9:38 am
Filed Under In a Handbasket | 1 Comment |

This headline from USA Today appeared in the “Life” section yesterday:

Magazines Can’t Break Up with Brad and Jen

Have you noticed this? The checkout line fairly assaults us every week with the latest goings-on of Hollywood celebrities, as though these things mattered one whit. The latest “big thing”, of course, is the breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. USA Today informs us that US magazine has featured the couple on the cover for five consecutive weeks (I haven’t opened an US magazine in at least a decade, I imagine–and then, I must have been sitting in an insanely boring muffler shop, with the TV tuned to Rikki Lake and the other magazines of choice being Ladies Home Journal–but I think that that statement tells me exactly everything I need to know about US magazine). The February 7 issue, we are told, sold 1.25 million copies. The article goes on to note a few other tidbits of interest…check that, “interest” is overspeak, such as the cost of their wedding four-plus years ago (a cool million) and the comparison in the public’s interest between this breakup and other celebrity breakups (and temporary stay-togethers, such as Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey—I say “temporary stay-togethers”, of course, because the chance of a long-term relationship flourishing between amoral Hollywood twenty-somethings approximates roughly the chance that Kim Jong Il will win a Nobel Peace Prize. Actually, check that, Kim’s chances are much greater, given the screwy choices that the Nobel committee has made in the past.).

Here’s my question: how utterly bad, how meaningless, how banal must your life have become, for the marital status between two inconsequential people to interest you to the point of purchasing a magazine to read about it?