Hands up....

...if you're sick of the Oprah hoopla. I mean, you'd think Aristotle or Socrates were retiring, that all human intelligence was about to be lost forever, that people were about to sink into a black morass out of which they would never be able to climb. Come on, she was a weather/traffic girl who morphed into a talk show host. Maybe I was too busy with my own life as a multi-tasking working mother to notice, but I never got her.

She was also archetypically American -- another reason I did not relate. That, plus the fact that she was a black woman who had dug herself out of the proverbial urban ghetto. I was a middle-class white one surfing and sliding despairingly along the professional working ghetto, just trying to keep from drowning in everyday BS. (OK, that last part we have in common.) But the millions of Canadian women who have wept and wailed on the public airwaves about not being able to tune into her every day amaze me. There are apparently scores, rafts and scads of them who will simply be unable to cope without regular fixes of her "wisdom". It is to be slack-jawed.

Maybe watching too much Oprah is the reason the school board in Middlesex England has now banned parents from showing up in pyjamas when they visit their kids' schools. And that includes wearing jammies to parent-teacher interviews. Yes folks, it's pathetically true. You could not make this up! If Oprah is on, the responsible parent has a sacred obligation to tune in -- no time to get dressed, you might miss Tom Cruise or Jenny Macarthy imparting a critical pearl of parental wisdom.

And speaking of inane tv, just switch to 'The Bachelorette'. Now there's a freak show. We no longer have Barnum and Bailey, but luckily we have this side show in which to indulge our naked voyeurism. Watched it for the first time last evening. Here we have one woman -- of course she's named "Ashley" -- whose affections 25 guys are desperately and mysteriously competing for. And she's not in the least sexy. She's attractive in a cupcake, 'Seventeen' magazine way, but not in the way that grabs you and says, "Sophia Loren"......or someone on that wow level. I can't even get into it. The whole time I was hiding under the sofa suffering cringe moment after cringe moment. But I could not tear myself away 'cause you could not predict what stupid thing someone would next say or do. Naturally, she bypassed the 24 nice guys and went right for the bad boy.

Seems nothing has changed.