Celebrity gossip

I'll admit it, I follow celebrity gossip. Well, I follow who is sleeping with whom, I don't follow what they're wearing. That stuff bores me to tears, but Clare Danes hooking up with Billy Crudup a couple of months before his girlfriend Mary-Louise Parker is due to have their baby? That stuff, I follow.

I've been thinking about why that is. Betsy had a good post about it over on Coffee Betsy as did Chris Moreau, but I think of it a little differently. I think we all like to gossip. It's an easy conversation starter and, frankly, it's just fun. But you can't really gossip about your own friends. Partly because they're not doing anything as interesting as having four kids under four, three from foreign countries like Brad and Angelina. But partly because it's not nice to speculate and gossip about people we know. With celebrities though, we don't know them so it's okay. Britney Spears a bad mother? That's a safe topic, but talking about how annoying a friend's boyfriend can be isn't. Tom Cruise's masterful domination of Katie Holmes is fair game, but the war in Iraq? No, that's too personal somehow.

In some ways, it's too bad that we would rather follow the lives of these people we don't know more than the big stuff that is really affecting us. In other ways, it's such a relief to have such an easy conversation piece that you know isn't going to get you in trouble. So did you hear that Paris Hilton is going to jail?