it fat enough, along with America Ferrera and Queen Latifa to feed a tribe of cannibals for a month.

I do feel sorry for her but genuinely talented people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe have been flaming out in public since mass culture began. Please, no more nonsense about "young women" and "body image" and the like. Oceans of ink have been drained and forests clear-cut to give Britney her moments in the sun and her season in hell, while genuinely important stories have been ignored. I'd take one damaged Iraq vet for a thousand Britney Spears. Britney Spears is sad, but not important!

if you can stomach looking at his letters, you can see his spelling/punctuation/general attempts at verbal expression have fallen even more to shit than before, if this is possible.

I was wondering why Ben Dover's been so quiet lately...

It turns out he's become BBWlover!

Hey, BBWlover, how's those MBAs from Yale and Princeton working for you these days?

I'm not sure if Brit is fit or fat, but almost nobody on earth would have looked good in that bikini. It was very unforgiving!

But of course, almost nobody on earth would have tried wearing that bikini on TV.

Ethical and moral questions aside, I see certain practical problems with Britney's attempted "comeback." Basically, she was trying to be the same bikini-clad, prancing-around pop tart that she was in days of yore. But she's not the same as in the past; none of us are frozen in time. She should be pulling a Madonna and going for a complete change in image.

Think of Chrissy Hynde singing those lyrics in "Middle of the Road" -- "I'm not the cat I used to be, I got a kid, I'm thirty-three."

Career-wise, Britney should embrace the new phase in her life and work it. That means covering up a bit more -- hey, what mother of two toddlers is fit enough to strut around in a bikini, anyway? -- maybe pulling out a guitar and going to a folkie, earth-mama image or something. Anyway, something different from the past schtick.

Now, ethically and morally, I have mixed feelings about the Britney train wreck and the response to it. I'm pretty much appalled by the Sarah Silverman-style piling on. But Britney is an adult, a mother and apparently not living up to her responsibilities, so she is at least partially to blame for her own situation, if not entirely. It doesn't quite wash to blame everything on her show-biz childhood, either. There are plenty of former show-biz kids who grew into perfectly responsible, respectable and successful adults. Starting with Shirley Temple.

Spears tries to re-make her career, but only by wearing skimpy outfits and flashing people offstage, subjecting herself to the cruelest responses. Baring herself in public, for whatever attention she can get.

Traister watches Spears, reacts just as insensitively and jeeringly as the audience but acknowledges what she does and turns in an article for Salon. Like a criminal who admits to criminal actions without showing any inclination to reform, Traister's "confession," her "candor" is just a con, a dodge. And, like Spears, she's throwing out half-concieved performances for a profit. Baring herself in print.

Both seem covered in armor at the moment they are presumably exposing themselves, so you know they aren't really selling themselves no matter how low they sink.

Spears in performance, Traister in print. Show me the difference.

Hey girls! You can be the woman who strips for profit, or the woman who denounces her for profit. Those seem to be your options. And that's the real tragedy facing young girls today. Which do you want to peddle for a profit, miss?

shit! The media doesn't force women to starve themselves or put a gun to their vacant heads and force them not to eat. Christ, get some new material. Britney is fat. She is white trash.

kbrunkhorst:

But as a trained professional musician, I strongly object - no, let's skip object, and go straight to resent - your calling her a musician. I see no evidence of any musical skills on her part, and singing in itself is not musicianship.

As a vocalist of some thirty years (and who plays about 7 other instruments) who only recently began formal vocal training, I was to warn kbrunkhorst: when you don't know whence you speak, your mouth is best used for chewing. Have some beef jerky, man. You're talking through your behind.

Sure, "anyone can sing," but there is a great deal of technique to produce quality sound with the voice, It takes relentless practice, breathing and muscular exercises, and diction exercises. Voice training is at least as intensive as piano, though the voice is a lot easier to wear out than a piano and you must treat it gently.

So stop dissing vocalists as "lacking in musicianship," you're only demonstrating your own ignorance.

That said, Brittany isn't and never was much of a vocalist. She has no technique to speak of, nor much musicianship. I don't get why her "music" is so darned popular, except that it's catchy. She's no musician, vocalist or not.

But, I feel sorry for her implosion of late. It has to be hard to fall apart much less to have to do it on the covers of tabloids all over America. I keep telling my daughter not to judge Brittany, we don't know what's going on inside. We only see the outside--and hear from the people who want us to think she is the worst screw up on the planet. She's not fat by any stretch of the imagination. Wish I looked that good after 2 kids! But that bikini... not the best choice.

I hope Brittany gets it together. For Brittany... and maybe for her kids.

and this week Britney is the winner. Ah, now Amy Winehouse has to try harder (or is it less hard?). Wouldn't it be wonderful if we found the health and sanity of these people as entertaining as their spiral into hell and surely a possible early death? As Mike Gravel stated "Americans are getting fatter and dumber" and with that in mind it makes sense that Miss Spears is the poster child for this mess we are in(although I would never call that bod of hers 'fat'...sheeeeesh. All the men I know keep telling me they think she looks sexy this way....not sure if her method of achieving it is too healthy however) All I know is that if this were my daughter I would have made damned sure she got the help she so desperately needed a long time ago and I would have never let this kind of circus go on at her expense. Is there really a big pay off for this kind of absurdity? If we ignore this kind of behavior instead of rewarding it with attention perhaps we can start to set the bar a little higher for ourselves and our youth.