Almost every day....

I read the news and jot down "headlines" for my friends to read.  I enjoy doing it and a few of them tell me they enjoy reading it.  It serves multiple purposes.  My enjoyment, their enjoyment, and it means I am writing almost every day.

Before I do them today I was thinking about how much of the news that we are given by the media matters, and how much of it really doesn't.  For example, the story has just broken that Octo-Mom Nadya Suleman has gone back on welfare.  Is this really news?  Major news?  No.  But there is a fascination with her because she gave birth to eight babies from one pregnancy.  Apparently that made her a major celebrity all by itself.  Is this a new phenomenon?  No.  One words tells us that and it's a proper name.  Dionne.

Not quite 80 years ago, in Ontario Canada, a woman gave birth to quintuplets.  It wasn't the first time that had occurred but it was the first time they survived beyond infancy.  There were five Dionne and they all lived to be at least 20.  Actually, three of them lived well beyond their 75th birthday.  The Canadian government declared their parents to be unfit and they were housed in a facility specially built for them.  Their popularity was so strong that 6,000 people per day would visit the observation gallery that allowed them to observe the girls.  "Quintland" was nearly as popular as Radio City Music Hall at the time and attracted more visitors than the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

Now here we are decades later and the fascination with amazing multiple births continues.  But that's just one example of how what makes news isn't necessarily newsworthy.  The lead headline on the L.A. Times website is all about the impending fight over the choice of Chuck Hagel as the next Secretary of Defense.  CNN's headline is about what may or may not happen in Syria and one world leader's comments on that situation.

But there's also a lot of interest in the fact that the women's track coach at the University of Texas has resigned over an affair she had almost ten years ago with a student.  Everyone wants to know if the guy who gave a jar of his sperm to two lesbians in Kansas will have to pay child support because he didn't go through a licensed physician.  More people seem fascinated by and interested in Rex Ryan's tattoo of his wife wearing Mark Sanchez's Jets jersey than care about the upcoming debate and vote on raising the ceiling on our national debt above $16.4 trillion.  One has no real impact on their lives, but considering that for every six people who pay taxes, five are getting some kind of direct benefit payment or service from the government, raising the debt ceiling has a real impact on almost everyone.

What does that say about us as a society?  That we're so focused on things involving celebrities rather than the real things that impact our own lives is indicative of our desire to escape our own boring, frightening realities?  Is it that so few of us are properly prepared for the future that we don't want to live in our own present?  Are our lives so dreary that we're forced to get involved in the lives of famous people to find pleasure?  I have no answer.  I can only pose the question and ask you to consider what all of this means.

I'll keep jotting down the headlines both newsworthy and more along the lines of interest/gossipy.