but JH, I can't read anything past this: "Our head-shaving, drug-abusing, rehab-escaping, ProTools-needing, coochie-flashing, K-Fed-marrying, K-Fed-divorcing, child-welfare-endangering, bonkers-going, MTV Video Music Awards-appearance-flubbing bitch."

I am laughing too hard!

If it wasn't for the train wreck, would anyone have any reason to pay attention.

It is a splendid trainwreck, but not nearly as impressive as Mr. Bush and the whole damn country.

As Hannaham points out, Spears is a brand -- a package. I find obscene the whole process of our putting a semi-talented kid on a pedestal, applying the microscope, and then celebrating her collapse. She is a human that went through the ringer without the brains or experience to keep it together, and her life will ever be stained because of the ride. That sucks. And I'll add that not having the brains or experience to handle what she faced doesn't make her any dumber or less experienced than 90 percent of the population.

While I have never listened to her music by choice and can't claim to know all the ways in which she's screwed up, I am pulling for her to have the best life possible from this point forward.

My dear wife, god bless her, is a foreigner and she brings some strange musical tastes to the table here in our great American melting pot.

In the old days it used to be The Carpenters... In recent years the magic of Britney Spears has become a largely unwelcome [to me] presence in our life. The music makes my wife happy, however, so I bite my tongue and enjoy watching her enjoy Britney.

She was so excited today when I told her that Britney has just released this new album. Minutes later I was downloading it for her.

Britney would be happy to know that my wife loves the album!

I must confess that I enjoyed the album as well. I don't anticipate cranking it up on my car stereo as I bomb across the countryside. At worst the album is inoffensive. At best it is creative and chock full o'catchy sounds and beats.

Britney's had a tough time these past few years. Kudos to her (and her team) for getting her act together enough to release an entirely new, "competent" album!

My wife will surely get her money's worth of pleasure from the album. I doubt that she's going to be the only one.

When I was a music-consuming teen, in the heady days when Punk was giving way to New Wave, we read with amusement and astonishment about Japanese pop (which we only knew first-hand about from "Pink Lady and Jeff"), and how it cycled through cute young stars on a more or less annual basis.

In J-Pop world, stars would go from being high-schoolers in some rural prefect to being topsellers, pop idols, in six months - and then in a year or so, no more, go through a vastly accelerated process of becoming Has Been and Over. Then, back to Real Life - with the feature article always trotting out some happy 30-something housewife who a decade before had been on every magazine cover in all Japan. How different we thought, from our Real Artists - Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Lene Lovich - whom we'd love forever.

As it turns out, yes and no (Elvis lives, but I'm not sure you could pay me to listen to Adam or his Ants). What we didn't know was that the U.S. would develop a malevolent version of the J-system - one without the second act (paging Mr. Fitzgerald). It's an especially toxic (prescient title), intensified incarnation of the Hollywood Studio/Sunset Boulevard system that once reigned in film.

So, what we're left with is what Hannaham points out: the bifurcated Brand and Person, with the one running along more or less smoothly and the other crashing, sometimes spectacularly. It's happened with the Boy Banders (with the rare exception of the breakout star or two) who now populate the nether regions of what passes for Reality Entertainment; it's happened with pretty much each and every Jackson; and most spectacularly, it's happening now with "The Britney Person".

2003 Britney Brand probably has a good couple of years of buzz left; more and more, though, it seem's like the best we can hope for 2008 Britney Person is that she'll still be breathing.

The liner notes of the album are shown to include photos of her on a priest's lap in a confessional.

Did they miss it when Madonna did this "let's offend the Catholics in order to stir up a publicity storm", oh, several times over the last 20 years? Or is she (are they) not embarassed at such an obvious rip-off? Or do they think we're too stupid to recognize lazy/uncreative ploys like this when we see them?

Unfortunately, the Cathlic church ws not smart enough to ignore this pathetically blatent taunt. However, the small splash it has made (so far) at least hints that perhaps the church's response was as token an effort as the photos themselves.

What exactly is sexy about Christina Aguilera's over the top belting, fake tits and clown makeup? Look at me, I'm sexy! And yes, Madonna deserves credit for bringing that kind of calculated exhibitionism into the mainstream, but those desperate tactics - and the book on sex, in particular - marked a downturn in her career.

Spears, by contrast, has made a career of being coy, and it paid off. But now here she is, and she's just giving it away.

I say it's still working because there is a restrained and quality to the music (if not her image). There is something sexy and compelling about the minimalist beats and synth-heavy vocals on her first single. I'm not sure if Spears deserves the credit, but that's besides the point, isn't it? She may have dropped the coy act, but she's not screaming at us to look at her. She's just moaning it, lethargically.

In jaxagrams one creates all the complete anagrams one can think of for a word or words, then embeds them in a syntactical discourse. You score by squaring the number of letters in the source word and saying the square times the number of complete anagrams. In the case of Britney Spears, there are two source words, so you square the number of letters in each and add the result, then say this number times the number of anagrams.

Britney Spears is rich in anagrams. I adduce my jaxagram below. There are other anagrams, but I got tired.

I have to admit I'm getting a little tired of BRITNEY SPEARS, and it is not because I belong to the PRESBYTERIANS. It is just that I have seen enough headlines declaiming NY SPRITE BARES her tuckus again. As far as I am concerned, she is just another one of those BREASTY PINERS (thank God it's a SPARSE NY TRIBE). Her search for male love strikes me as just more STARRY PENIS BS, and she's so spacey she could be an alien. I'm almost sure I heard her say I BE TERRAN SPY. On the whole she's a loser, the sort of person who, in a poker game, would never catch the ace, but would NAB PISSER TREY.

I do have some sympathy for her, though. I know she has dietary problems. If it is on the menu, she will always BYPASS TERRINE, and she stays hungry by not eating, so don't invite her if you have barbecue stored up for a party, because she EYES PANTRY RIBS.

She has her good side. There's her charity work on behalf of Southern midgets, in which she urges us to SPARE TINY REBS. Once, alone on a boat with a bunch of net fishermen, when there was only one can of beer, she let them have it, which explains the headline the next day: SEINERS PRY TAB. In fact, the rumor is that she's giving up drinking entirely, having said BYE, ERRANT SIPS. Although she is reputed to be deficient in political knowledge, she once referred to the CIA as a BARREN SPY SITE, and when in retaliation they planted a tracking device in her head, like the one they use on the bionic woman, she defeated them by issuing the mental command, RESET BRAIN SPY.

She is no mere sea-side collage artist, one of those BRINEY PASTERS. She refrains from PRISSY E-BANTER, considering the writings of people who engage in it to be BINARY PESTERS. She shows a surprising degree of zoological and botanical knowledge. In England, she was able to tell by its cry when a nobleman's donkey was tired, saying to the lord, SPENT BRAY, SIRE. In her opinion, one should not make rope or fiber from the pulp of evergreens, because PINEY BAST ERRS. She likes to write--it has often been noted that she TARRIES BY PENS. She is athletic, having placed well in races conducted by a local greasy spoon, the BEANERY SPRINTS.

In short, although I am indeed tired of her, I must admit that she is NASTIER BY REPS than she is in person.

Score: 7 squared plus 6 squared times 23 = 1955