No! Ellen!?! Gay!?! How absurd that her sexual preference is the stuff of headlines. Here's poor Bill Clinton trying to keep his sex life out of the media, and the charming and talented Ellen is putting hers on the cover of "Time." It used to be you could pick up a "Time" magazine and get the latest on world affairs, not the affairs of the Kennedy boys. Lt. Kelly Flinn has been getting a major amount of press just because she slept with a married man. Gosh, Wally, sexual misconduct in our armed forces! Who'd a thunk it? And all this debate over Tiger Woods! Is he black? Is he Asian? Is he Lee Trevino in disguise? Who cares? He's still wearing the green jacket and you're not, so get over it!

News in general has gone the way of the tabloid. With all that goes on in the world, I find it hard to believe that a group of wackos who think God is on a spaceship is front page material. Which reminds me of a joke: Did you hear that they found one of the Heaven's Gate guys still alive? He was under the kitchen sink, hiding behind the Comet. Ba-dump-bump. Why, when there's real sex scandal going on involving our own Slick Willy, do we have to be subjected to the trials and tribulations

The answer, I suppose, is that we, the people, are more interested in the dirt than in whether China is overtaking us in the quest for world dominance. It's a little closer to home. We have no idea why China wants to be more powerful, can't pick out China on a map, don't even know any Chinese. But we sure know someone who's gone through a messy divorce, a la The Donald and Marla. And it's possible we've even been in the shoes of Ivana, who finally got a bit of divine justice. Maybe we're snickering with glee over the breakup of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, because she really was just a little too perfect, wasn't she? Reminded us of a girl we went to high school with.

The magazines and television shows just feed us what we're hungry for: junk food. We don't want a nice nutritious apple or whole wheat bread - we want Twinkies and Doritoes. In a world where we don't know a Tupac Amaru guerrilla from Tupac Shakur, seeing the miserable lives of the rich and infamous is like a security blanket. We can cling to it, knowing that even if we have boring meaningless jobs, at least we don't work for Martin Lawrence. If our husband is an insipid jerk, at least he's not picking up male prostitutes. And if our mother gets on our case about our clothes and hair, at least she wasn't 63 when she had us. And if we memorialize her, should she be depicted in her wheelchair or out?