Blogicide

I'm not really questioning the basic premise of this New York Times article - that frequent blogging may lead to an unhealthy lifestyle. It's pretty obvious if you think about it. When you blog, you're sedentary. You don't want to take a lot of time away from the computer to cook or go grocery shopping, so you're probably eating junk food and crap. And because the Internet has made people accustomed to a 24-hour news cycle, anyone wanting to stay on top of all breaking stories in their area of specialty may be inclined to skip a few hours sleep each night. It's clearly not as active and healthful a career as being, say, a personal trainer, or high-priced call girl.

But I am questioning whether or not it's appropriate to turn the deaths of two bloggers and the illness of another into a fluffy trend piece like this, based on zero evidence that any of their assorted maladies had anything to do with their occupation. I mean, couldn't three middle-aged men suffering from health problems related to coronary disease within six months of one another be coincidental? A lot of middle-aged men have bum tickers, even ones who spend little to no time on the computer.

The headline on this piece is Bloggers Write Till They Drop. I'm sorry...this is just insensitive and inappropriate. There's no indication that these Marc Orchart or Russell Shaw died as a result of blogging, and even if they had, "drop" is not a polite way to describe someone's passing in a major newspaper. I didn't see "Heston Drops at 84" on any mastheads today. Plus, neither of the deceased bloggers were blogging at the time of their death; Shaw was sleeping!

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

This whole thing strikes me as a really thin basis for a story (I mean, complaining about sleep disorders and weight gain is way different than Death By Blog). It kind of comes off as another subtle swipe by the mainstream media at blogs in general. (Especially all this "it's a young man's game" stuff, which may be true of certain kinds of blogging, but not all...There's plenty of middle aged political bloggers and they all seem to be feeling fine, and ace political blogger Steve Gilliard died young.)

So when will the NYT run a piece about how all journalists and hopeless out of shape alcoholics who either burn out by the time they're 40 or become puppets of a corrupt establishment?

RIP Chuck Heston

Chuck wasn't the greatest actor (and he was kind of a wacko, politically)...but he definitely had a sense of humor:



One need only recall his brilliant cameo in Wayne's World 2 to know the guy could laugh at himself.

And though his performances tended towards the overblown and cheesy, the guy wound up in a lot of notable, and in some cases even classic, films. Touch of Evil, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, The Ten Commandments, The Three/Four Musketeers, El Cid, Ben-Hur...It's quite a resume.

The Far Horizons is also kind of a memorable film, though maybe not for the right reasons...It's a weird retelling of the Lewis and Clark story starring Heston and Fred MacMurray. Donna Reed plays Sacajawea, who gets it on with Heston's Clark, much to the chagrin of MacMurray's Lewis and the ludicrous French stereotype who had previously bought her from a warring tribe. This movie confirms that, if you're going to make a movie that's historically inaccurate, it's best to push the inaccuracy as far as it can possibly go.

Again, many of these are not great films, but they are big, memorable films, and Heston is the main, driving presence in them. The guy was a star, and though I was never a huge fan, you've got to give credit where it's due.

More Fun Stuff with Ellen DeGeneres!

This is just...not appropriate at all. Check out Ellen DeGeneres' front page today:



Fun!

Ledger Domain

As my job largely concerns news aggregation, I spent most of this afternoon compiling pages about Heath Ledger's untimely demise. It can get a bit grim around the Mahalo News section on days like today.

Anyway, I realize that, in some ways, this implicates me in the media's saturation-level focus on grim celebrity news, whether it be Heath Ledger's and Brad Renfro's deaths, Eminem's weight problem, Owen Wilson's suicide attempt or even La Lohan's trips to the police department and/or rehab. My excuse is actually identical to the archetypal "sleaze journalist." I write pages about whatever's being searched. Majority tastes dictate my focus.

A look at Google Trends right now, hours and hours after the news of Ledger's death broke, confirms that he's the main concern of Americans at this moment in time.

Among the top searches are Ledger's name, searches for "Keith Ledger" by idiots who don't know his actual name and presumably don't know how to get to any news sources to find out, his former fiancee Michelle Williams, the term "heath ledger found dead," his daughter Matilda Ledger, his film "10 Things I Hate About You," the term "michelle williams heath ledger," his film "Brokeback Mountain," Gemma Ward (a model Ledger was rumored to have dated) and "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," the Terry Gilliam film which Ledger was in the midst of filming.

So it's not a mystery why Mahalo or anyone else is covering the story so enthusiastically. That's what the public wants, and the media only exists to inform and entertain the public. Interestingly, right now, all the cable news channels are running with the story on their front page. CNN.com, MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com clearly think that's what everyone wants to see. Unsurprisingly, FoxNews.com goes with the most melodramatic, tabloid graphic, showing people crying at a Ledger memorial:



"Tears for Heath"...Wow...

I'd also like to point out that this was featured just below the Ledger story on FoxNews.com just now:



It's an O'Reilly Factor INVESTIGATION! I actually saw a bit of this interview at work today (I watch Fox News at work! Just like Dick Cheney!) and it was hilarious and awesome. I'd love to embed it here or provide you with a direct link, but FoxNews.com has apparently not updated their technology since the late '90s, so it's only available in the next 10 minutes or so on their actual website, in a shitty little pixellated box after you watch an ad. I guess they blew the entire year's website budget on Sean Hannity's Brylcreem. The best part of the segment was when the (I swear this was his caption) "Expert on Demonology and Mystical Theology" said that he has scientific evidence of demonic possession. It's like, "did he just say that on national television? Cause...that's clearly not at all true."

But back to Heath. I was intrigued that, though obviously the Google-searching public and the cable networks felt this was Top Story material, a lot of newspaper's websites (like NYTimes.com) and even web news sites didn't feel the same way. This was the headline box on Yahoo! News just now:



Heath's not even in second place! Is this based on genuine market research, I wonder? Does Yahoo! know that it's news readers are primarily concerned with politics, then economic and business news and then celebrity gossip? Is this just an editorial decision by the staff of Yahoo! News, who personally felt that the story about Bush lying was more important than the movie star who took too many sleeping pills? I'm curious...

RIP Heath Ledger

Wow, this is surprising. I never thought of him as one of the REALLY TROUBLED, NEAR DEATH celebrities. I'm sure we'll get more info in the days to come.



Is it bad that my first thought was, "Oh crap, I hope this doesn't impact the release of The Dark Knight!" At least I had the class to regret this reaction afterwards...

Criss Angel Disproves Shit You Already Knew Was False

So, apparently NBC has this show, "Phenomenon," that's like "American Idol" for magicians, and one of the two judges is that Criss Angel "Mindfreak" guy who pretended to have sex with Britney a little while back. Now, I would never watch this show, because I'm generally not a huge fan of magic, but this clip is HI-larious.

One of the contestants is this immense goober Jim Callahan, who claims that he can physically contact the spirit world. He has Raven-Symoné choose a mystery object at random and put it in a box filled with salt, then allows a spirit to actually use his body to write out the box's contents live on stage. (She chooses a toy truck, which is so Raven!)

Honestly, it's one of the silliest performances I've ever seen. He jerks around and makes noises and rolls his eyes into the back of his head - he even has the host caution the audience that his gyrations may be disturbing beforehand. Whoopi Goldberg doesn't take her performance this far in the film Ghost, and she's playing the scene for laughs.

Anyway, Callahan correctly "guesses" that the object in the box is metal and has four wheels. He's being coached by a ghost and he still can't come up with the word "truck"? What, does this ghost only speak in puzzles? Is it the ghost of Frank Gorshin? We're supposed to find this impressive somehow? I mean, seriously, this is such an old, tired line of bullshit...Fake mentalists used to pull this routine all the time, sending assistants into the audience to find random objects which the performer would then identify using code words. (For example, the assistant would say, "Can you tell me what I hold in my hands?," and this meant it was a pocket watch, whereas "What is the object I'm holding now?," would mean cigarette lighter. I'm sure Callahan's act is based on something similar.)

Criss Angel is having none of it, and just completely faces this Callahan guy on national television by holding up two more mystery envelopes and demanding to know what's inside. The ensuing tantrum, with Callahan calling Angel an "ideological bigot" (for not believing in magic!), may be one of the year's TV highlights:



That video was actually posted to YouTube BY Callahan, who seems to think that Angel's a hypocrite for not believing in spiritual possession. I'm not actually sure whether or not Angel has ever insisted that his magic is real and not just entertainment-themed illusion, so I can't speak to the claim of hypocrisy, but I do know that the term "ideological bigot" is really stupid and that Jim Callahan is a massive, ridiculous fraud. And not just a fraud, but an angry, insecure fraud. Which is funny.

R.I.P. Ingmar Bergman and Sherman Torgan

From CNN:

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died Monday, the president of his foundation said. He was 89.

"It's an unbelievable loss for Sweden, but even more so internationally," Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, which administers the directors' archives, told The Associated Press.

For more info, we already have a Mahalo page up.

Also, everyone should read this New York Times piece featuring some of Woody Allen's writings about Bergman.

It feels kind of crass and unnecessary to discuss the guy's films just because he died, and I don't really have anything grand and insightful to say about his work that you won't read in that Woody Allen bit or other obituaries. Really, it's difficult to talk about Bergman dying because so many of his films discuss the nature and practice of doing that very thing. It was like he'd spent decades preparing us for this inevitability. Woody quotes Bergman's memoirs:

‘’I suffered from several indefinable illnesses and could never really decide whether I wanted to live at all.'’

He was 89, after all. These things happen. Still, I think the case can be made for Bergman as one of the reigning geniuses of the cinema, one of the most natural and well-rounded filmmakers of all time.

Sherman Torgan, owner and manager of LA's New Beverly Cinema revival house, was regrettably taken a bit sooner: he died earlier this month at the age of 63. I've clocked a lot of hours at the New Bev over this past decade. (They show awesome double features for five dollars!) I knew Sherman by sight, but not by name, and to be honest, I'd always found him a bit unapproachable and gruff.

But he did a spectacular job running that place, which routinely boasted double-bills of amazing films. It's the kind of work that's thankless unless you have a true love for movies. And not just watching movies, but watching them in a theater, with an audience, they way they were always meant to be seen. You have to respect that kind of devotion to a dying art form.

As a hardcore movie nerd, I owe Sherman a great deal. The New Bev hosted the monthy "Grindhouse" night that introduced me to a whole world of underground movies I'd never have seen otherwise. I watched Pasolini's Salo at the New Beverly, watching disgusted patrons head for the aisles in droves during the rightfully-infamous banquet sequence. One troubled night, when I was living in Hollywood, I went alone and watched Platoon and Wall Street. You know, to ease my nerves. Most of us LA movie fans probably didn't know Sherman's name, unless I'm just particularly aloof and insensitive, but we'll all miss him...

Oh, yeah, and also dead today were Tom Snyder and some football coach guy. The end.

RIP Steve Gilliard

I never met Steve Gilliard, but I used to read his blog all the time, so I sort of felt like I knew him. He died today, too young, at 41. He'll be missed...

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

My first favorite novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, died today at the age of 84.

It would be impossible for me to sum up the guy's genius in a little blog post, nor his impact on my life. Vonnegut books, particularly Slaughterhouse-Five and Galapagos (which he sometimes referred to as his favorite), essentially introduced me to literature. I had read books previously, for school or pleasure, but never attentively. They had remained little more than narrative delivery systems - authors wrote stories and I read them, finding the results either entertaining or disappointing. But Vonnegut books were funny and outrageous and packed full of ideas, some of them unconventional and new (to me, at least). Unlike most of the drab authors high school students read, Vonnegut was a fun guy to be around. His books were compelling, not like homework.


In particular, my younger self loved Vonnegut's dry, sarcastic prologues. Most of his novels open with self-deprecating prologues describing what the author was doing in the months (or, in some cases, years) before the novel's publication. His description of romantic love from the opening of Slapstick has always stuck with me. I'm not sure if it's because it reminds me of myself or the person I'm most afraid of becoming:

"Love was never at issue...It does not seem important to me. What does seem important? Bargaining in good faith with destiny.

"I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as 'common decency.' I treated somebody well for a little while, or maybe even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in turn. Love need not have had anything to do with it. Also: I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs."

In addition to brilliantly satirical science-fiction novels like the three mentioned above, Vonnegut wrote short stories, plays and really insightful, darkly funny and, of course, horribly pessimistic essays. I'd recommend Fates Worse Than Death, an extremely frank series of autobiographical pieces in which Vonnegut discusses his work, his family and his failed attempt at suicide a few years prior.

One of his best and most overlooked works, the novel Deadeye Dick, ends with this statement:

"You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages - they haven't ended yet."

This sentiment sums up so much of his writing. Things are horribly difficult and the only way we can muddle through is to hope that someday things might improve (though probably not) and to laugh at the ridiculousness of our circumstance. As a frequently lonely, somewhat alienated young person who worshipped comedy and comedians, I found this outlook entirely relatable. It summed up what my life at that time was pretty much all about - laughing in the face of pain, rejection and frustration.

The bleak pessimism, by Vonnegut's own admission, became kind of overbearing later in his life. He had sworn off writing altogether for a while, feeling incapable of rending his sour observations about the world into humor that could potentially be enjoyed. Here's a piece from Fates Worse Than Death in which he explains the nature of his humor:

"Jokes work this way: The Jokester frightens the listener just a little bit, by mentioning something challenging, such as sex or physical danger, or suggesting that the listener is having his intelligence tested. Step two: The jokester makes clear that no intelligent response is required of the listener. This leaves the listener stuck with useless fight-or-flee chemicals in his or her bloodstream, which must be gotten rid of somehow, unless the listener wants to slug the jokester or do jumping jacks.

"What the listener most likely will do is expel those chemicals through the lungs with quick expansions and contractions of the chest cavity, accompanied by grotesque facial expressions and barking sounds.

...

"But jokesters are all through when they find themselves talking about challenges so real and immediate and appalling to their listeners that no amount of laughter can make the listeners feel safe and perfectly well again. I found myself doing that on a speaking tour of campuses in the spring of 1989, and canceled all future engagements. This wasn't at all what I enjoyed doing to audiences, and yet there I was doing it. I wondered out loud onstage, for instance, what I and my brother and sister and our parents might have done if we had been German citizens when Hitler came to power. And reply would be moot, but almost certainly depressing. And then I said that the whole world faced a problem far worse than the rise of another Hitler, which was our destruction of the planet as a life-supporting apparatus of delicate and beautiful complexity.

"I said that one day fairly soon we would all go belly-up like guppies in a neglected fishbowl. I suggested an epitaph for the whole planet, which was: 'We could have saved it, but we were too darn cheap and lazy.'

"It really was time to quit."

He felt badly not because humanity was on the verge of wiping itself out (things have not improved since '89, I'm afraid), but because, in some way, he felt like the Earth deserved better than us, like there had been some promise or hope for the world out there on the horizon but never delivered upon, possibly because people had come and mucked it all up with our selfish, lazy thoughtlessness. And this guy was a humorist. As he says in his last published work (I think), the autobiographical A Man Without a Country:

"Do you realize that all great literature - "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" - are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?)

"Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee."

So what to make of all this now that he has passed on? I'm not sure.

I suppose it would be wrong to be terribly overwrought and sad on this occasion, and Vonnegut was never one to romanticize death. (Perhaps the most famous, iconic phrase from his writing is the resigned "So it goes," repeated throughout Slaughterhouse-Five whenever something tragic happens). This "calypso" from the fictional Bokononist religion of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, sent to me this evening by a particularly alert and web-savvy friend, feels somehow appropriate:

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.

I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud
that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.

(True, Vonnegut wasn't much of a God guy, nor a "Last Rites" guy, but it's the sentiment that counts.)

In Which We Discover That I Am Psychic...

This is seriously fucking weird and creepy. I'm unsettled.

From my sarcastic obit for Anna Nicole Smith yesterday:

The person who epitomized this phenomenon to me as a child was Zsa Zsa Gabor. I was too young to know that she and her sister had at one time actually performed in real, authentic vehicles of entertainment. I only knew there was this horrible old woman with a horror-movie accent that seemed to make a living being famous (and, on occasion, assaulting police officers).

Now, at the time, there had been no established connection made between Zsa Zsa and Anna Nicole. They are two totally separate public figures who simply shared a trait I wanted to note in passing - they were famous for no good reason.

Here's Yahoo! News from today...

The husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor said Friday that he had a decade-long affair with Anna Nicole Smith and may be her infant daughter's father.

Of all the celebrities in the world...MAN, that's an odd coincidence. But it gets even stranger.

The claim by Prince Frederic von Anhalt comes amid a paternity suit over Smith's 5-month-old daughter, Dannielynn. The birth certificate lists Dannielynn's father as attorney Howard K. Stern, but former Smith boyfriend Larry Birkhead is waging a legal challenge, saying he is the father.

"If you go back from September, she wasn't with one of those guys, she was with me," von Anhalt told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.

I can't imagine she'd turn to drug abuse, with such a secure, stable family life.

Gabor, a onetime sex symbol and star of such 1950s films as "Moulin Rouge" and "Queen of Outer Space," has been in declining health in recent years and suffered a stroke in 2005. She was partially paralyzed in a car crash in 2002.

Von Anhalt, who is Gabor's eighth husband, said he and Smith met in the 1990s when Smith was still married to elderly oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II. He said Smith approached him and Gabor at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

"She was a very big fan of Zsa Zsa and wanted to be like Zsa Zsa," he said. "She wanted to be a princess."

Well, I think as my no-bit made perfectly clear, Anna Nicole did a fine job of stepping into Zsa Zsa's overpriced shoes. Except for the whole dying young thing...

He said the two started an affair soon after, meeting over the years in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. For much of that time, he said, Smith urged him to make her a princess like his wife.

But short of divorcing the actress, he said the only solution would have been adopting Smith. Von Anhalt said he did consider that and even filled out adoption papers, but Gabor refused to sign them.

He said he never admitted the affair to his wife, but that he's sure she knows. She would sometimes answer the phone when Smith called him, von Anhalt said.

"She was a very sexy woman," von Anhalt said. "To have an affair with her is the top, you know."

I don't know who's more pathetic. The recently deceased junkie who couldn't correctly identify the father of her child or this asshole. He was cheating on Zsa Zsa Gabor with fucking Anna Nicole Smith. I mean, I guess that's a little bit better, but we're still talking baby steps here. Doesn't his neighborhood have any attractive stray animals.

"To have an affair with her is the top"? What the fuck are you talking about, you deluded old weirdo? You weren't having a romantic affair! She was fucking you, then directly instructing you to give her money. How could that, in any way, represent the top? Because she had big cans?

Publicist Edward Lozzi, who said he handled publicity for Gabor when she was convicted of slapping a Beverly Hills police officer during a 1989 traffic stop, said he doubted von Anhalt's claim, calling him a "chronic fabricator."

"There are some people who are married to famous people and take advantage of it," said Lozzi, who said he dated Smith three times and spoke with her within the last year.

Man, this story has everything! Paternity mysteries, dead Playmates, pathological liars. Am I the only one who's curious how Ms. Smith could have been carrying on all these exciting, shadowy romantic entanglements when all the available video indicates that she had trouble standing up or walking a straight line?

Ronald Jason Palmieri, an attorney who has represented Gabor and von Anhalt for 15 years, was also skeptical about the paternity claim.

"I have to believe my client, but it's still surreal," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I would find it completely implausible that he is the father of that child, to put it lightly."

Oh, man, I hope Mark Burnett reads this blog. Here's what you have to do. You get Von Anhalt this baby, see, and then you turn it into a reality show. I'm thinking "The Prince and the Pooper," but hire some quality writers. I'm sure they can throw something together.

Hey, it's what Anna Nicole would have wanted!

Von Anhalt's royal credentials have been the cause of speculation over the years. According to stories in the British press, he was born Robert Lichtenberg, the son of a German policeman, and bought his title after being adopted as an adult by a bankrupt daughter-in-law of the last kaiser.

You can't really follow up something like that with a joke. There's no way to top a fraudulent, bankrupt prince who's jealous of a corpse. If Sam Kinison rose from the dead and immediately slumped over to the Laugh Factory to do his best 15 minutes on rigor mortis, it would still be easier to follow than a story about the son of a German policeman buying a title after being adopted as an adult by a bankrupt daughter-in-law of the last Kaiser.

RIP Vicki Lynn Hogan

There are all kinds of theories on celebrity worship. Some people feel that it's because Western Europe and America are no longer dominated by monarchies. Without royalty, we must focus our rapt attention on randomly selected alpha-specimens, based on looks or charisma or a host of other inscrutible attributes. This is a compelling theory.

But I think certain individuals capture the public's attention because they uncannily remind us of ourselves in ways we're not normally allowed to consider. Now, I don't mean people who are famous for a good reason, like talented or beautiful actors or musicians or news anchors or whatever. I mean, it's not hard to discern why Scarlett Johansson's famous. We've all seen Ghost World.

I'm talking about your Paris Hiltons, your Cisco Adlers, your K-Feds. The person who epitomized this phenomenon to me as a child was Zsa Zsa Gabor. I was too young to know that she and her sister had at one time actually performed in real, authentic vehicles of entertainment. I only knew there was this horrible old woman with a horror-movie accent that seemed to make a living being famous (and, on occasion, assaulting police officers).

But the phenomenon of famous-for-fame's-sake celebrities has really exploded now, what with YouTube and "American Idol" and MTV's entire line-up and the whole concept of celebrity meta-devouring itself. And I think that certain people become elevated to iconic status, sometimes overnight, because there is something familiar about them. They're social synechdoches - their accidentally exposed private parts stand for our whole.

Lindsay Lohan's totally like this. In fact, she plays the part of the perpetual adolescent so well, pivoting constantly between genuine grief over her vices and outrageous bouts of Dionysian indulgence, I occasionally feel like it must be an act. Surely, Lindsay's just the Andy Kaufman of our time, always inhabiting her rebellious junkie "persona" and never letting us know that she's in on the joke. How could anyone be this out of control for so long? It would be funny if it weren't so...Okay, it's funny.

Which brings me to Anna Nicole Smith, whose death from heart explosion today is not at all funny. So just forget I made that "heart explosion" crack.

If La Lohan reflects Americans' twisted nostalgia for the Girls (and, yes, Guys) Gone Wild they once were and Paris Hilton provides a safe outlet for our disgust at our own excesses, what service did Anna Nicole Smith's legend provide?

A high school dropout who worked at a fried chicken restaurant, a 26 year old stripper who seduced and married an 89 year old billionaire, an alcoholic whose negligence almost assuredly led at least in part to the death of her 20 year old son only months ago, Anna Nicole Smith has kept America captivated since my early teens.

Now, I'm not trying to bash the woman on the day of her passing. She had a tough time of it, particularly in the last year, and I felt badly for her more often than not.

I've followed her career largely via appearances on "The Howard Stern Show," on which she often seemed drugged, imbalanced and frequently incomprehensible. (Full disclosure: I have also seen many episodes of her ludicrous reality show, which mainly consisted of her waddling around, apparently doped up, while an extremely feminine interior decorator arranged cushions and set the cause of gay rights back a few decades.)

Clearly, Vicki Lynn aka Anna Nicole was the embodiment of the Gold Digger archetype. In essence, her life could be seen as a morality tale: It seems like getting money from that old man will make you happy, but it will only cause you grief. This only works if you're exceptionally small-minded, but we're not talking about conscious, rational connections here. We're talking about why several million Americans would give a shit about a wholly unremarkable and unappealing Texan. (They had already elected one President, after all, and that hadn't worked out too well.)

Speaking of Anna Nicole's gold, it's kind of odd, isn't it, that both she and her son have died within the span of a few months, leaving the future of J. Howard Marshall's billions uncertain? Could her shadowy lawyer and possible baby-daddy Howard K. Stern (not to be confused with the King of All Media) have done her and her heir in hoping to get his hands on the money? (This would explain the recently paternity kerfuffle as well...If he can establish that he and Anna were married and had started a family, he'd have a more compelling case for being cut in on the eventual deal.)

Or have the billionaire's children, who have long sought to gain access to the family fortune via the judicial system, given up on ever winning the day legally? Did they hire someone to get the obstacles out of the way and "make it look like an accident?" Two mysterious, sudden deaths with all this money at stake...Something must be up, right?

Now, I'm not saying that Anna Nicole Smith was definitely murdered and that I have the secret surveillance tapes to prove it, but I am saying that if you happen to represent a sleazy and disreputable tabloid newspaper, you should Paypal me $500,000 to find out. No! I mean, I'm saying that...well, I don't know what I'm saying. I just know that this is a sad and peculiar situation that somehow speaks to the tragedy that is modern American life.

She briefly represented glamour, then decadence, then physical and mental collapse. Like Kate Moss, only with curves and a more appealing, if somewhat regrettably dead, husband.