Good piece Heather and a reminder to me to be grateful for how oblivious I am to so much of what is termed "popular culture", for what seems like years I thought Paris Hilton was a building in France. Maybe it is highly developed spam filters deftly deleting any item not worthy my attention. I choose what it is I will give attention. Maybe it is having had my own some several meltdowns, blow ups,distressing public moments,other people's don't interest me or bring on bad memories. I have been aware of an excess of interest paid these "stories" and find that unfortunate. Alec Baldwin is an interesting actor, his family problems not so much. We are blessed with many striving to master some art or craft or make a difference, I doubt few do so with hopes of some day being the object of vapid gossip. I like those stories and seek them out to give my attention. Thank you

I've always been curious about celebrity gossip, but until recently, my consumption was limited to reading the headlines in the supermarket check out aisle. I was too embarrassed to actually pick one up and read it, let alone pay money for something like People or Star or the National Enquirer.

But now, with the blogs -- Perez, TMZ, etc -- the latest celebrity gossip is free, it's at our fingertips, and nobody has to know we've been reading it. These days, I don't know why you would buy the magazines unless you didn't have a computer. The magazines break stories, but the blogs reprint everything before it even hits the stands.

Best of all, the celebrity blogs are funny. The magazines have this tone of "Oh my gosh guess what!" while the blogs are snarky, sarcastic, and generally fun to read. They indulge both our lust for scandal and our petty desire to mock the rich and famous, to roll our eyes like we are obviously smarter than those wrecks.

So I went from catching celebrity news by accident to reloading Perez and TMZ pretty much all day. I'm not proud of this, but I know I'm not the only one. The blogs have taken celebrity gossip to a whole new level and to a whole new audience.

I find it very hard to defend the concept of 'celebrity privacy'. It's not like someone puts a gun to their heads and says 'you're gonna' be famous dammit'. If anything it's the opposite. How long do you think it would be when Brad Pitt/J-Lo/LaLohan et. al. lose their celebrity cache before they'd be the next guest in celebrity house, or whatever, on VH1. Not very long. The whole concept of 'leave them alone, there just like you and me' is laughable. Being a celebrity is a choice. You can choose not to do outrageous things to get attention, you can choose to stay home and play scrabble. You can chose to eat right and not be anorexic. But the don't, the crave the attention. If they wanted the big bucks, and the privacy, they would have gone to business school and worked on Wall St, where you make as much, or more, that a Hollywood actor, but no one outside your office knows your name. But they don't

E.g, I recently saw the Kiera Nightly interview on CBS Sunday Morning recently, when she talked about suing a Newspaper for publishing non-doctored photos of her anorexic frame while claiming that she was shocked when she heard what they said about her. WTF, you don't like someone pointing out your health problems, yet you wanna be the next Meryl Streep.

Or when Kirsten Dunst was talking about how Spiderman was so over yet she's making $20Mil per picture. How much you want to bet that in ten years she'll be like remember me, I was in Spiderman. I'm looking at you Rick Springfield.

So when someone gushes over seeing so-and-so on Houston and Bleecker, you shouldn't be like, you're a psycho what's wrong wit you. I say move to Iowa or France or whatever if you, as a celebrity, don't want someone noticing you, god forbid.

It came from the remarkable book written by Richard Schickel, a really good (if elitist) media critic, Intimate Strangers: The Process of Celebrity. Look it up on Amazon; it should be cheap, since it was ignored by almost everybody, but it happened to predict this stuff.

Included in the book, besides an examination of celebrity in the days of silent Hollywood, are two sensible critiques of the celebrity lives of Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando. How these two sought transcendence through celebrity and how they failed in their individual ways.

One other interesting thing: Schickel recognizes the assassins of our day as being seekers of celebrity, too. Specificaly John Hinckley, Jr., who seals the connection with his attraction to Jodie Foster and Taxi Driver.

If you don't believe it happens today, wait for the inevitable post in this or another entertainment thread by a guy named Gary Owen. No, not the radio announcer. He sits and tells you how many people were killed in Bush's war for oil - as if he gave a damn about them, or anybody but himself. If the war were to end tomorrow he would find something else to bitch about like traffic accidents or AIDS or shin splints. Much as I complain about Havrilesky's ignorance, intellectual laziness and conceit, not even I would be cruel enough to wish her a visit from Owen.

Dylan had at least part of it right. Let us pray he had it all right in the end. This article has certainly given me pause because of the scandalous, lunatic atmosphere which has evolved recently. It's not bad enough that we are a people obsessed with things we shouldn't even know, but that we are willing to pay the price both in terms of cash and of pain to be on either end of this fork which has prongs on either end and a handle (the media) in the middle.

How proud we must be that not only are we free to violate the privacy of people who are "protected" by money and fame, but that the criminal element in our government is happy to continue committing crimes in the name of God and country while we waste our precious few brain cells digesting this crap that is peddled to us as relevant.

Somewhere people are dying and our nation is suffering from root rot, but we are too busy practicing our "Somebody's worse than me!" routine to pay any serious time or attention to the truly terrible things going on around us.

It's times like this when I feel especially grateful for Salon, where the majority of participants at least care about causes with meaning, even if they sometimes lose grasp of their critical thinking skills and common decency in the process (see the first letter in this thread).

We are an interesting species, that's for sure.