Thanks for Keeping Me Posted on MJ's Every Move

I confess that I watched the O.J. Simpson trial routinely. I knew all about it: names, locations, timelines, shoe brands and of course the finer points of DNA analysis.

I'm not sure if it's the trial itself or if I've just changed, but I'm completely disinterested in the Michael Jackson proceedings. And what makes it worse is that my news headlines stay jammed with the man's every move: he's sick, he's late, he's tired, he's hospitalized, he's waving, he's lethargic, he's denying it all, etc. etc.

When O.J. was involved in the high-speed chase--er, "the low-speed follow,"--I didn't even have an e-mail account. The only thing I knew was that a good friend of mine at college had just gotten some sort of new-fangled thing on the computer that allowed people she knew to "send her messages." And she could reply--again, through the computer.

It would be several more months before I got my first e-mail account while a graduate student at Auburn in 1995. But even then, I wasn't getting news on the Internet. All the O.J. coverage I got was through CNN, whose own breakthrough coverage of Gulf War I was just a couple of years old.

Now it's Michael Jackson on trial, and oh how times of changed. I wonder if I would have been as interested in O.J. if I'd had the Internet then ...