I really needed something to laugh about today, and this article did the trick

The Britney Spears interview on NBC’s “Dateline” offered several lessons worth noting, the most significant of which is to remove large wads of gum from one’s mouth before engaging in a conversation. One surefire way to nick one’s public image is to go on national television chomping open-mouthed like a shill for Bubblicious.

It is also best not to wear a denim miniskirt so short that when seated it practically disappears beneath the protuberance of one’s pregnant belly, producing an image that is more gynecological than fashionable. Instead of making a statement about the sexiness of impending motherhood, it suggests that the mother-to-be appears to be unfamiliar with the usefulness of a full-length mirror and the term “ho-gear.”

Pregnancy cleavage can be a beautiful development, but serving up one’s bosom like melons at a picnic is aggressively self-indulgent, enormously distracting and, unless you’re auditioning for a spread in Penthouse, unnecessarily vulgar..

After that, however, the tone of the article is more tragic than comic. It sounds like Britney is a phenomenon whose time came and went.

It’s always sad to see someone in decline, but Britney never deserved her fame to begin with. Her winning formula of being a below-the-age-of-consent sex kitten luridly strutting her stuff while lip-synching truly wretched written-by-computer junk music had to fail as she grew into a woman. She had her full 15 minutes of fame and exploited it to the max, capitalizing all the way on raw teen sexual energy. For her now to complain about the paparazzi chasing her, as she does in the Dateline interview, is ludicrous. She invited them in with open arms; her sexploitation is entirely self-generated and it’s hard for me to feel sorry for her.

(That post just sort of wrote itself. Maybe I’ll delete it later – I didn’t mean to be so hard on poor Britney. After reading that article, however, it’s hard to feel much compassion, and I’ve always wondered how someone so devoid of talent could be catapulted to such lofty heights.)