CNN spent an hour of its evening telecast last night discussing, analyzing, picking over with vermin like acuity the death of Anna Nicole Smith, a fat, drug addled, possibly retarded ex-stripper who, not content to rest on those laurels, had managed to get some rich old guy to marry her thus making her putative heiress to a disputed fortune and consequent to that glory had now it seems stepped into eternity amidst the gaudy confines of a Floridian hotel suite under the ersatz glare of a gaudy Floridian sun. Led with a full hour on this - that I know of - displacing all other news.
I had thought when earlier in the week a female astronaut, in a delirium stoked by a love triangle with other accomplished, highly intelligent extra-terrestrial types and being so stoked had apparently driven all diapered up cross country with a plan to presumably turn said triangle into a mere vertex with aid of knife and steel pipe, when this paragon of excellence and achievement and hard work shuffled bedraggled and shamed into court [Florida again!] to be charged with attempted murder I had thought then that maybe America had finally turned down that dark road we've long expected and there was nothing left to be dispirited by regarding it.
Leave it to a now erstwhile everything erstwhile stripper slash erstwhile oil heiress to remind me of just how wrong I can be - as if anything else mattered. Despair indeed.
