Okay, someone obviously taught Havrilesky in one of her writing classses (which aren't worth a damned thing in improving writing, Q.E.D.) to have a "unifying theme" in whatever she wrote. Thus her navel-staring essay on time, her bitch of a teacher and how traumatized she was. Well, that might work for a Steven Wright monologue (which can only be delivered when the person delivering it is smacked up on heroin, to produce Wright's slow, brain-damaged delivery). But it's egotistical and clunky as an essay.

Is it surprising that a techno-thriller like 24 is based on time and panic? On anal-retentiveness and viciousness? Especially when it's been often reported that this show is Dick Cheney's wet dream? (Or maybe his blueprint for the whole administration's behavior?)

What IS remarkable is that those first four episodes were available almost immediately on DVD at Best Buy. And that people were actually buying them. And that some people who were internet-savvy got them all before the first one aired. (Perhaps NBC "leaked" the episodes to build some word of mouth.)

The important question is, having provided such a slam-bang opening, how will they finish off the rest of the season? Will it all be Bauer and company running around the viaducts and abandoned warehouse districts of Los Angeles, barking into their cell phones, trying to keep up the sense of panic? It might be better to take a step back from the panic, and show what would happen to America sociologically. Showing America's latent racism boiling over, having street shootings of anyone looking even vaguely Middle Eastern, and having the voices of sanity and reason drowned out by screaming loons. (Very much like this letter column when anyone calls Saint Havrilesky on the carpet.)

This is a turning point for 24. Five seasons is a long time for such a program to last. It can't keep repeating the nail-biter format. It will have to evolve into something else, hopefully something with more meaning than Syd Field's ticking clock. That's the real issue over which nails should be bitten.

Top Chef is a REALITY SHOW. The first thing you must learn is that there is NO reality in a reality show.

Now, I didn't see this show. I have a disadvantage in watching shows like this; I'm not gay. But I don't need to be gay, or to have watched the show, to make some reasonable assumptions about what happened. Either the producers encouraged this fight, to try to up the drama on this show, or the combatants decided to do it on their own for some self-aggrandizement.

Cooking demonstrations used to be featured on noontime newscasts and "happy homemaker" shows. Those shows have been shoved aside for hard-core local news; weather, sports and who got shot last night. To make a cooking show interesting enough to run in prime time, even on a minor cable network, something has to be added. They went with anger and Jerry Springer/Geraldo Rivera attacks. Now me, I would have gone Battle Royale with it, with the winner of the cooking contest stabbing the loser and mutilating the corpse on-camera with the sponsor's brand of kitchen knives. My method would have insured larger ratings, and fewer contestants. But that's just me.

It shouldn't be long until we have this situation; if you doubt it, see George Carlin's recent HBO special. And you reality show fans are just stupid enough to lick this up.

I'm sure that the people who posted before me, all probably fans of Pat O'Brien and Kato, his little blonde gay troll on "The Insider," are still tittering and giggling over the fate of these celebrities. The real point has passed them at Mach 2 over their tiny little heads.

Which is that psychiatry and rehabilitation are pretentious, phony institutions that allow the guilty - at least the wealthy guilty - to get off scot free. Now, psychiatry CAN help if the person wants to reform, and so can rehab under the same circumstances. But the entire process must take place within the person, and that person must admit that he or she has a problem they want to correct.

The only problem these folks admit is that they got caught. I can't imagine a man as powerful as Gibson, who can get all the free sex he wants with a bat of his eye, ever feeling real regret for his contemptuous behavior towards women. And Isaiah Washington's prejudice against gays is far too common, even in "sophisticated" Hollywood, for anyone except gays to complain about. The people protesting him are probably just as homophobic, but they had the common sense not to speak their prejudices in public.

These celebrities killed the albatross, and they hired expensive, babble-talking help to try to cover up the dead bird around their necks with some bling, and maybe a sensitivity slogan t-shirt. And I'm not even angry at them for this. I'm angry that, to people who DO need help and might possibly afford to get it, this will make all psychiatric help seem like a lie to them.

If the American Psychiatric Association was truly moral, they'd decry this business. But then, they're the ones who are making the big bucks off these phony consultations, aren't they?