I personally never cared for her. Her music was abysmal. To my knowledge she never acted in any kind of dramatic presentation (you have to have some life experience to act). I feel sorry that she's finally realized her fifteen minutes is up, and that she can't find any sense of worth in her life. The only thing I could do to affect her life was not support it with purchasing any of her music.

However, let's not shuffle off guilt. You can't exclusively blame the media. There are tasteless people in it, of course. But most of them are doing this coverage because (a) we're still in the sweeps period and (b) you demand it.

Like it or not, the movie version of The Green Goblin was right. To paraphrase Norman Osborne, the only thing the public loves more than a celebrity is to see a celebrity fall. And in either direction, the rise or the fall, the celebrity is treated like a hunk of meat. In that sense, the last time Spears attracted any attention outside of the celebrity press was when she added some hunks of meat; when she appeared for taping a Nickelodeon kid's special whipping her new implants back and forth in a belly shirt.

Now that meat is past its expiration date, and people have the inexpressible joy of deriding the pork chop they used to claim they loved. It shows how much they've "grown," until they come across someone who is new and even more value-free to worship.

To the poster who thought that there is some improvement in society, because a few people have been speaking out about how horrible this is - grow up! There is no bottom to this abyss. In a year or two you'll see Pat O'Brien standing by the deathbed of the next celebrity to die, filming the death and trying to get responses out of the dying person, probably poking her with a stick.

Meaning, an idea from the creators as to where the show was eventually going to go. This was also the problem with Twin Peaks, where David Lynch demonstrated he was good at producing mood but treated everything else - the plot, the actors and the audience - like irrelevancies. (As does Havrilesky, with her reviving the damned "chickens" insult again - but that's all I'll say about her this week.)

Lost could have been a television classic. Remember when people were comparing it to The Prisoner? (In fact, Patrick McGoohan's magnum opus was actually fairly slipshod in its continuity, but he had a vision, which is more than the people at Lost have.

As for the Oscars, most of the show's reason for existence has been rendered irrelevant. Entertainment pseudo-news and the more obviously paid-for forms of PR have made us aware of what is in the theatres. And it still isn't enough to get butts into the theatre. It might have been different when the studios were small companies trying to compete for our attention. Then there was competition and some creativity at risk. Now that they're basically divisions of megacorporations - and all of them will be a division of Wal-Mart in a few years - there's no real tension, no triumph, no anything.

Even worse are the attempts to entertain. They're as staid and as staged as the last TV specials Bob Hope made. Ellen DeGeneris hosting the show is some kind of breakthru? Not even if she ripped off her clothes and assaulted Judi Densch in the audience.

It's all as exciting and as relevant as the election for president of a high school's student council, and if the declining ratings for the broadcast are any indication, that's finally dripped down into the consciousness of the average citizen. And the tragic part is, Oscar pretty much closes out the expected entertainment specials for the year. The networks gave up trying to create entertainment specials for the benefit of us viewers years ago; the only specials they run these days are about news disasters or cheap "reality" shows like "World's Wildest Police Banquets." From here it's a long, slow slide to September.

The characters on Lost wouldn't be allowed to ask those questions, if the situation they were in were real. They are captives of an immense, powerful group who want to torture and kill them. For them to have their own logo (a swan is just half of a stylized swastika) on food and medical products indicates their obsessiveness and power. And no responsible scientist ever conducts "experiments" on living beings without their consent or full disclosure - ever hear of the Milgram experiment or the Stanford prison experiment?

You were right that the abductees have been too passive, but "asking questions" in such a situation is like a Jew asking a Death's Head Division soldier "Excuse me, why are you killing me?" They should have been fighting - and killing - these so-called "Others" from the moment they showed hostile intent. That stupid doctor in the underwater holding tank should never have shut the access hatch, letting those Dr. Mengele types die, even if it meant his own death. That was the precise moment in the show that infuriated me and made me decide that Lost was a lost cause.

Aside from that, Mr. or Ms. Shrike, you've shown remarkable intelligence. Would you like Havrilesky's job? It seems to be open; especailly after the complaints about this week's column, it's clear she's not doing it. You only have to promise not to urinate on the readers as she does - even if some of the readers seem to like it. (What are they, the abductees on Lost?)