You know what? I am absolutely fed up to the the third wrinkle on my forehead with this "Madonna adopting/Madonna not adopting", Madonna in general, business.

What is it with this ridiculous fascination with anything celeb? Why does anyone care? Okay, I can see a mild interest arising from the fact that the name rings a bell and the face sparks recognition, but any more than that?

I understand why newspapers and magazine want to repeatedly blast, ad nauseam, irrelevant minutia randomly everywhere they suspect it could stick ... after all, they're in the business of trying to get people to care enough about the irrelevant minutia to fork out for the material. What mystifies me is that this ever works.

And that it works so spectacularly well that an entire industry worth billions of dollars has risen from the murky bog of gossip, rumor and celebrity butt-kissing is a fact of modern, Western life I find almost as baffling as the physics behind a wormhole in space.

I wonder what the future holds for worship of the notorious. With technology bounding and leaping through all sorts of limitations previously assumed to be unbounable and not likely to be leaped, won't we soon be in danger of almost everyone in line to achieve household name status?

It the guy across the street is getting a million hits on his blog every month and running 24-hour video of his life as a suburban geek, and the girl next door gets her million hits giving online lessons in body piercing, and the kids down the street have a big following for their air guitar concerts, are we expected to send out the news hounds if any or all of them decide to adopt a child in Africa?

I suppose the publicist in charge of the image Madonna is a very happy disseminater of aforementioned minutia, as the job description basically reads: blather, blather and more blather. Maybe even the star-tidbit du jour is pleased.

And maybe I'm totally off base. Perhaps keeping up with the private lives of people who sing songs, act like other people, or look nice for a living really is vital to the world as we know it, and every column inch of tittle-tattle is protecting us from some terrible fate.

Fine. I'll follow this post with one full of blather ... just in case.