Getting back from a long walk this afternoon, I turned on CNN to catch the latest on the whole world going to hell in a handbasket thing. And what do I see when I turn it on? A shot of a white car, slowly moving down a LA freeway followed closely by cop cars.

Oh no, not O.J. again. Talk about bad acid flashbacks.

But wait, it's not O.J! It's Robert Blake, Baretta! He's being charged for the murder of his wife! And this, of course, is worth live video footage of him driving his car home. As well as Larry King doing the round-table thing with experts on the case.

Hoping that it's just a Larry King thing, that cable news networks have learned from their past mistakes, realized that the world is too dangerous for such frivolous things about the doings of has-been half-celebrities, I switched to MSNBC. Lucky me, I flipped right at the exact moment that they cut away from Ashleigh Banfield, somewhere in Israel probably talking to someone about the latest developments there, and cut to the live footage of Robert Blake driving his car.

Let's see, what's going on in the world. Plane crashed into a high-rise in Milan. Powell's trip turned out to be an unqualified disaster and what went down in Jenin is looking really, really ugly. The Senate voted down Smirk-Boy's half-witted plan to drill in Alaska and the House passed a huge tax bill. I also saw that India is erecting a wall on the border with Pakistan and Israel has captured one of the major leaders of Hamas.

But nothing. Nothing, is more important than what's going down with Robert Blake.

Sometimes I think we're doomed.

PS- I see much later that night, CNN's already having the "should we be covering this" debate? Love it when the cable news stations know they fucked up, so by covering their ass, they have debates about whether or not they should of fucked. Like a crack-addict thinking it's okay that they just took another hit because they know they screwed up and they won't do it again.. Or Cara on the Real World thinking that she doesn't have an eating disorder because she's aware of it.