Generic cold medicine is a wonderful, terrifying thing. Because winter is a period of pointless tortures like awful weather, extended darkness and ubiquitous disease, I'm currently battling my second head cold in so many months. Helping me in my crusade to reclaim my body from this ridiculous, suicidal virus are the usual suspects- plenty of fluids, chicken soup, hot showers and vitamin C. But they brought a friend along in the form of a viscous, green substance that predicates its entire sales pitch on a comparison to what Nyquil used to be. Over the counter medicine enthusiasts might recall that Nyquil, the old bastion of knock-me-the-hell-out cold medicine, got effectively nerfed a few years back, rendering it a useless concoction of food coloring and bitter flavoring agents. That's what happens when you're concerned about public image: you end up destroying your product just because a few idiots decided to drive after a heavy shot of the 'quil. Well, the generic brands don't care about PR, so they're still chock full of whatever it was that made Nyquil a groggy sleep drug. As an unexpected side effect, my currently hazy self doesn't give a toss about any of the following pop culture bombshells.

Michael Jackson was apparently murdered. Really, for the past twenty years there has been no reason to believe that supremely screwed up pop star Michael Jackson was going to die from something mundane. The fact that Lisa Marie didn't knife the guy in a fit of whatever-the-hell is a bit surprising in itself. It actually seems morbidly fitting that Jackson went down as a result of the quackery of a horrible personal doctor. Dr. Conrad Murray is the guy who regularly administered propofol, a beastly drug, to Jackson regularly as a sleep aid despite every recorded case of home use of the substance being linked to murders, suicides and other quote mark fodder. Well done, Doc Murray. You killed King Crazy with malpractice.

L'il Wayne gun judge hip hop jail snore. Another bad rapper with a stupid name is getting a slap on the wrist for pretending to be a big shot with some irrelevant combination of drugs, guns and abhorrent public behavior. If he spends any time in jail at all it'll be because of an activist judge or because the lawyers don't give a damn. He'll obviously not serve his entire sentence, which is still considerably shorter than it would be for any random guy on the street.

The Smurfs are getting their own awful CGI movie. Oh, this one comes so, so close to breaking my sturdy apathy shield of green cold medicine, but it just can't give enough on the follow-through. The same soulless clods over at Sony who turned Alvin and the Chipmunks into the worst thing to ever happen to film ever, ever, have gotten their mitts on the rights to those classic blue mushroom-dwellers. A more sober version of me might complain about somebody ruining a piece of the childhoods of millions, but right now I'm off my guard enough to admit that I liked a lot of stupid things when I was kid, so I don't care so much if somebody makes one of them somehow more stupid.

Thank you, generic Nyquil. I don't know if my cold is any better, but at least I don't have a stress headache.