I have received several comments regarding my post of Brit’s sock.  The main comment is “why do I care”?  Well that is a good question, and that is what I have been pondering the last few days.  I don’t actually “care”, I just find all the sensationalism surrounding the Hollywood celebs quite hysterical.  Other’s have found it such an interesting subject, that they have written books on it.  All the hype, quite frankly, takes my mind off my troubles.  I’m not a bit envious of their lives (their salaries, their shopping sprees – oh wait, maybe the shopping sprees).  Instead of getting mad because Brit gets away with far too much crap; or because Paris did jail time for a crime that most ordinary people would have gotten a longer sentence for, I laugh at our society and how two-faced we can be.  Celebrity gossip to me is a way to be entertained and man is it entertaining. I am not at all interested in actually reading these books, but if you are, here are a couple of books that touch on this subject – if you do care!

• “The Image” by Daniel Boorstin. Though Boorstin’s book came out in the early ’60s, it still has a lot to say about how news became “news” and how people in the news became “celebrities” — in Boorstin’s oft-quoted coinage, a person who is known for his well-knownness.
• “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. How did television, a great communications tool, become an even greater source of distraction? If you want to understand how complex issues got turned into black-and-white emotional hot buttons, Postman’s 1985 book offers food for thought.
• “Life: The Movie” by Neal Gabler. From the back cover of the paperback edition: “The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, glamour and melodrama has turned everything of importance … into one vast public entertainment.”

 Regards — Raquel