In The Case of Anna Nicole Smith, Please Cut Out The Chase

As you may have noticed - and hell, hopefully appreciated - I've been trying to practice an Anna Nicole Smith Circus-Free zone. That this woman's death is the same catastrophic, more-foolish-than-humanly-possible train wreck her entire adult life seemed to be makes me sick. My sympathy, however, is reserved only for her five-month-old daughter, but not because she lost her mom; sadly, I suspect by the time the girl was three, had Vicki Arthur (Anna's real name) lived, the little girl would have been raising her.

Three points make me raise the issue. First, I am aghast at how the story of a woman who never did a moment's useful anything in her life is all-consumed by the mainstream media. We appear to be on the brink of war with Iran and all I hear about is Judge Larry Seidlin, the former Bronx cabbie who presided over the Florida court case to determine where Anna's dead body should go.

Second, last night, Saturday Night Live did a parody of Wolf Blitzer and his Situation Room handling the Anna Nicole Smith saga. It was OK, up to a point. But the skit, with Darrell Hammond as Wolfie, gave FAR too much credit to Blitzer for trying to regain control over his own program. Wolfie has been so blindly consumed by this story that even Lou Dobbs gladly bitch-slapped him one day on air by announcing that on Dobbs' show, there would be NO talk of Anna (someone told me that CNN itself cut into Dobb's show that night for an Anna Nicole "still dead" update but I cannot say with certainty this happened).

We got satellite reception back from the Valentine's Day 38-inch blizzard for the first time on Thursday and man, I tell you... I apparently had missed NOTHING because between the three so-called news channels, I saw 8 Anna Nicole "specials" listed in a two-night period. WTF?

Third, I just had the most annoying email exchange with someone who someone made the gargantuan leap that, since Anna Nicole Smith got illegal methadone prescriptions using the fake name of Michelle Chase while pregnant (illegal because law forbids a prescription written to a pseudo ID), that somehow I must know Anna Nicole because the name of my blog - and indeed, my last name - includes the name Chase. Now, with a leap like this, I'm fucking amazed this person could figure out how to contact me via email. But he or she did.

Anyone who is paying much attention at all to this pathetic piece of garbage passed off as fluff... well... whoa...