It's 2010, but I don't go back to work until Monday, so I want to do a retrospective of the five gigantic news stories that I somehow managed not to care about this year.  I mean, everyone loved the Jon and Kate soap opera and Levi Johnston's Incredible Adventure, but some stories were just so annoyingly overexposed that I eventually found myself just not watching TV when they were mentioned.  So without further ado, I give you...

5. Susan Boyle

Yeah, I get it.  She was frumpy/ugly/scary/a man, baby, but when she opened her mouth to sing it was beautiful and everyone loved her and now she has a singing career but all the fame made her melt down and blah blah blah blah I don't care about any of it.

See, the thing is, the whole episode is indicative of something very wrong in our society.  It was so impressive to everyone because everyone assumes that you can't sing if you're ugly.  You can only sing if you're pretty.  You know, like J-Lo.  Patsy Cline would never have made it in today's music industry.

I can't bring myself to say anything mean. Her music makes me cry. But this face could never sell albums today.

So for me, it was all a non-issue, because all I saw was a homely woman with a very pretty voice that I knew would be just another novelty act, soon to be swept aside for the next 16-year-old porn star who can juggle ping pong balls with her cooch.

I'm looking at you, Miley.

4. Oprah's Gone

Oh my god, you guys.  Oprah's leaving her show.  Who's going to devote whole shows to idiotic nonsense like The Secret now that you're gone?  Who's going to give us free cars that we have to pay taxes on?  Who's going to do unintentionally offensive shows about transgendered teens and the parents whose lives they ruined through their selfishness?  Who's going to carry your torch as a strong black woman and champion of women's rights?

Oh please oh please oh PLEASE let it be Wendy Williams.

I honestly don't think that most of the people complaining about this realize that she's leaving the show so she can run her own cable network.  It's like getting all sad that your best friend dumped her loser boyfriend for that physicist with the rock hard abs and amazing personality.

Except she can't have Phil Plait. He doesn't know it yet, but he's my boyfriend and we're very happy together.

I wish Oprah well in her next phase of her plan for world domination, but I really am finding it hard to care.

3. Adam Lambert

He sang, he screamed, he screeched, he completely outclassed everyone on the show, and yet the gay rumors caused him to lose that utterly pointless contest known as American Idol.  I wonder how Kris Allen's debut album is coming... oh wait, no I don't. 

I looked it up and apparently it got all the way to 11th place on the Billboard charts...

Here's the thing.  I kind of like Adam Lambert.  I think For Your Entertainment is a great song with an awesome hook.  I think he's quite talented and will do well.

... aaaaaand Mr. Lambert got to 3rd place and has nearly gone gold.

But the drama about his orientation?  Meh.  Everyone knew he was gay - so much so that when he took so long to actually came out some of us were kind of pissed because at that moment he made it abundantly clear that winning Idol was more important to him than his identity.

I will admit that I was quite impressed when I saw his AMA performance with the bondage and the boy-on-boy kiss. I thought, "finally, here's someone who's willing to embrace his identity and just go for it and mothafuckin be entertaining!" And then came the pointless bickering and his Good Morning America interview getting cancelled and ABC's acknowledgement that a girlfriend-abuser is more welcome on their network than someone who snogged a dude. 

Yeah, I know, we all saw the pictures, but at least he's not a homo...

2. Twilight: New Moon

I'm not going to bother talking about how Twilight basically takes the Mormon concept of celestial marriage and puts it into a fantasy setting complete with vampires that have SPARKLE MOTION! - writers far better than I am have already done that.  All I'm saying is that I really do not care, at all, in any way shape or form, about anything having to do with Twilight.  I don't care about the books, nor the movies, nor Teams Edward and Jacob, nor the surprisingly copious amount of scholarly writing that has been done about what is basically glorified fanfiction, and that by all accounts is apparently badly-written fanfiction at that.

Behold, the only thing that is even remotely interesting about Twilight.

To give you an idea of how much I don't care about Twilight, I am having a very difficult time trying to find anything else to say about it before I move on to the next thing I don't care about. 

1. Michael Jackson's Death

I will admit that I was shocked when it happened, but only because I had expected the next Michael Jackson-related news to be that he had been abducted by aliens to be their new leader.  But instead, no, he was dead.  And as soon as I heard it, I turned to my best friend and said "we're really never going to hear the end of this, are we?"

The thing is, I like his music as much as the next guy.  Thriller was an excellent album (and song and video), and I really don't have a lot of bad things I can say about his work.  He pretty much invented the long-form music video.  And he was eventually found innocent of all the charges of  kid-diddling, so there's that, too.

The jury's still out on this guy, though.

Jackson's death turned the world on its side.  Suddenly he had eight albums at the top of the Billboard charts, which still blows my mind.  But the bigger story to me was that we suddenly, finally realized how incredibly fucked up all the men in the Jackson family are.  Every one of them is a money-grubbing bastard, with Joe Jackson suddenly the king of money-grubbing bastards.  How callous do you have to be to try and profit off the death of your own child?

Even a tick stops feeding after you die.

And by far the saddest part of the whole thing to me (and incidentally, the only part I care even a tiny bit about) was seeing his kids at that memorial ceremony.  I admit that I got a little choked up when Paris said that he was the best father you can imagine.  The loss she felt must have been incredible.  But then I realized, no Paris, you are sadly mistaken.  You do not have the best father I can imagine.  I have the best father I can imagine.  My dad, for one, is not so completely disconnected from life that he has to have someone give him anesthesia just to go to sleep.  That is dangerous shit, and it is just one little glimpse into how incredibly out of whack Mr. Jackson was with the world.

The one thing I really appreciated about the Death of Michael Jackson is that it did serve to end the Heidi and Spencer news cycle that had been plaguing my TV.  I couldn't turn on my television without hearing about Heidi and Spencer and how they were Christians and how they had melted down and all the drama surrounding that stupid TV show... so in a way, Michael Jackson's death was a breath of fresh air.

I refuse to give Heidi and Spencer more exposure, so here's a picture of some kittens.