Some pop culture obsessions I can understand. The romantic ins and outs of various impossibly gorgeous celebrities help us perpetuate the fantasy that love is beautiful and exciting, it's fun to watch rich and famous people fall from grace when most of us will never reach those heights, and it's even acceptable to pontificate on the most recent nominees for meaningless entertainment awards. But I just don't get why so many people are interested in some of the more bizarre, banal or just plain stupid elements of the pop world. Every week there's some collection of ridiculous stories that somehow qualify as entertainment news. The only reason I can imagine anyone actually being riveted by this stuff is because they're pop culture junkies and they're desperate for a fix.

So, step right up you metaphorical crackheads. I've got vials full of what you need. You wanna talk about the very embodiment of the wretched suburban housewife and the recent absence of her awful, awful hair? Fine, let's do this thing. Kate Gosselin of TLC's train wreck reality series Jon and Kate Plus 8 has done her level best to be a stand-in for an entire nation's worth of crazy, shallow soccer moms and for some reason everyone remembers her horrible hair style just as much, if not more, than her abhorrent personality and utter deficiency of character.

To recap some of Kate's grand moral maneuvers, she used her divorce from husband and marquee partner Jon as an opportunity to publicly gut the man for the sake of ratings, encouraged TLC to essentially take back all the money the network had paid Jon for his services, and she decided to get rid of the puppy dog that represented the last shred of innocence and joy in her children's lives because she didn't want any more responsibility.

Now Kate continues to devolve into an example of everything that is truly wrong with modern society by trading in her already horrible mom-do for a load of bleached hair extensions. Recent interviews have hinted at Kate's plans to turn her life on film into a reality dating show, recasting herself as some kind of sexy go-getter. The only way this could turn out well is if Kate starts dating Tiger Woods and the sheer density of their shared pop culture awfulness creates some kind of existential black hole that swallows TLC.

But why obsess over the repulsive sexuality of flesh-and-blood celebrities when there's the promise of bestiality-lite CGI sex just around the corner? In what I can only assume is a bid to drum up DVD sales, James Cameron has launched a rumor campaign suggesting that the home video release of his billion-dollar blockbuster Avatar will feature a sex scene he decided to cut from the theatrical release to maintain a PG-13 rating. The scene reportedly takes place between one of the blue feline aliens and the alien-like avatar of the protagonist, and it was steamy enough to get censors in a tizzy. Now, because human beings are perverted curiosity hounds, enough people are salivating at the idea of watching two half-cat video game characters getting it on.

There, that should fix you right up. Remember, the first taste is always free.