Last night I went out with my friend for his 34th birthday (I’m writing his age under the assumption that people over thirty have their priorities in order and have accumulated a significantly larger amount of wisdom than me in their extra 6+ years on earth). This is a friend who also claimed to never have heard of Timbaland the summer that Shock Value everywhere. My friend is a DJ who listens to obscure German techno and reads Russian literature so I wasn’t too surprised when he lectured me on good entertainment vs. popular entertainment and how the too are often separate. Yet last night, after a good four hours of intoxication under his belt, he starts talking to his buddy about the figures in Tiger Woods’ new prenup- in detail. I thought this was the stuff you know if you buy Star Magazine, but my friend was discussing the prenup with the confidence and validity of a NY Times feature article (honestly I wouldn’t be surprised at this stage if it is, link here is provided by Yahoo Sports)

So I have to wonder, has he changed or has something in American society changed over the last two years? I think it’s a cause and effect: serious news sources are becoming saturated with entertainment both in the sense of what they’re broadcasting (CNN’s coverage of the Kanye West/Taylor Swift fiasco) and the delivery itself (Glenn Beck is more of an entertainer than a serious newscaster. He’s also an idiot). And since when is everyone dying to find out when Anderson Cooper is going to come out of the closet amidst reports of him vacationing in India with a his gay club owner ‘boyfriend’ and staying in the suite that comes with a hot tub and the bed is draped with rose petals? Or what about Wolf Blitzer making an ass of himself on Jeopardy? Are we really gonna trust this guy in the Situation Room?

More and more people are becoming ‘celebrities’ and celebrities are ranking more and more in some strange middle-place between our intimates and our unknowns. My friend doesn’t know Tiger Woods personally (I presume), but he now knows what may possibly be the intimate details of his prenup, courtesy of some news somewhere that is not Perez Hilton. It seems as if things are peaking now with Balloon Boy and the White House Crashers; hopefully the serious media will stop indulging these attention seekers by donating half of their news day to them, even it is calling them out on their faults. Just ignore and they’ll stop! I was at work the day the Balloon incident happened. When someone first heard about it we were all watching it play out on the Internet and even on TV. How are they going to bring the balloon down? Did the boy fall out? Is he dead??? About fifteen minutes later someone read on TMZ that this family had been on Wife Swap- twice. Everyone just went, “Oh…” and we all just stopped paying attention. That’s what should have happened with the media the second that it was determined that the boy was hiding in his garage. Just shut these idiots off.

After the Tiger Woods conversation, my friend also enthusiastically told me that he and his wife saw Cate Blanchett on the street yesterday. During their recount of the incident there was a debate on how tall she actually was: 5’5 or 5’7. I had to laugh. I won’t hold this against him because Cate Blanchett is one of the best actresses around and I’d be pretty psyched if I saw her myself.

Oh, and here’s what Hugh Hefner had to say about Tiger’s shenanigans:

“I think the only surprise in it, quite frankly, is that anybody would be surprised. If you’re a good-looking guy and young and healthy, the notion that there would be something else going on, well, marriage is just a convenience. It’s very nice for raising kids, but the notion that monogamy lasts forever is a wish!”