I have to say

Something I am very tired of in our culture is the apparent increasing need to air one's dirty laundry in public.

This morning, I stayed home a little later than usual - I don't teach on Thursday, and with the new "designated faculty parking" I don't have to get in at the crack of 7 am in order to be able to park within a half-mile of my building any more. And I had to do some packing for some meetings I'm going to this weekend.

I had had the local NBC affiliate morning news (which is marginally less stupid than the local CBS affiliate's; the NBC folks have one of the "morning mouths" from one of the local radio stations in regularly to vent his poorly-formed opinions or make drooling comments about the hottie-of-the-moment, but the CBS affiliate devotes an inordinate about of time to the "Pathologically Worried Mom's Corner" or to the "Relationship Advice that if you Don't Know it Already, You Probably Don't Deserve to Be In a Relationship." And they tend to have fewer actual, you know, NEWS stories).

Anyway...the network morning show (ummmmm...Today? Is that the NBC one? I'm usually at my desk by 7 am so I kind of forget) was on, and Paul McCartney's most recent ex was all over the screen - I heard a soundbite about how she was apparently being vilified in the press and really really wanted it to stop.

And you know? I do not care. I am not interested. Okay, maybe the press IS being unfair to her - but I have no grounds to evaluate it as I do not live in Britain and do not read their newspapers. And if she is being vilified as bitchy or unpleasant or a gold-digger, wouldn't it be best to kind of fade from sight, and let the press latch on to the next convenient target? Or something?

I mean, it's kind of like Larry Craig in a way: he got caught very possibly doing something he should not have been doing. But instead of starting off issuing a simple denial and then refusing to comment, he's just been all over the place. It's become a joke.

I was raised to believe that the best thing to do when you're in trouble is to quietly fess up, fix what can be fixed, and then shut up about it.

People seem to have forgotten the shut up part.

and the "quietly" part.

and the "fix" part, at least a lot of the time.

But I don't know...If I were married to some famous guy and we decided it wasn't working out, I'd probably ask for a settlement big enough to buy a very small house far, far out in the country (if I didn't have enough money of my own, and if there was some reasonable reason for me to ask for a settlement - like I put my own career and earning-potential on hold to help him, or something) and go there and just hang out until the next flavor of the month came along.

That said: why do there even have to be flavors-of-the-month on what is ostensibly "serious" or "semi-serious" news? Don't we have an "E" network that's devoted to this stuff? And three- yes, three- of the local affiliates here run "Entertainment Tonight" during that break between early-local news and prime time. So it's not like we're starved of our celebutainment.

But I look at all of the stories about Britney, about Craig, about what's-her-butt-McCartney's-ex and I wonder if it's kind of a bread-and-circuses thing - something we're being fed to keep us distracted from what's really going on in the world.