Do me a favor the next time you are flipping around the vast regions of cable television and count the number of television shows devoted solely to the goings on of celebrities, including what they are wearing, who they are dating, who else they are sleeping with or their crazy religion.

You may be stunned.

Among the myriad of television shows that waste our time with these subjects are “Entertainment Tonight,” “Access Hollywood” or the entire “E!” network.

In fact, CNN has an entire portion of its daily 24-hour broadcast called “Showbiz Tonight.”

You can also go to your local grocery store and while waiting in line, scan the number of magazines devoted to those same topics. Us Weekly and People are among the useless magazines on your grocery newsstand.

At what point do we realize that it’s a little much? Why do we care so much about what goes on in the lives of people we are never going to personally meet? Why do we care so much about Brangelina (or is it Bradgelina? Or Polie? BradAngPiJolitt?)?

We waste so much of our time caring about other peoples’ lives that we lose focus of our own.

Did you know that Toledo’s own 13 ABC news website has an entire page just from TomKat?

I don’t care if she is from Toledo. It’s ridiculous.

I have heard the arguments about why we should worry ourselves with these matters.

There is the “it gives us an escape from our own lives” argument. We have too much escape. With soaring divorce rates, gas prices, childrens’ weight gains and so on, we need to get away from our escapes, get back to reality and fix the problems we have on our plate.

There is also the “celebrity fashion gives us cues on how to look” argument. I’ve seen red carpet shows- who can afford to buy those clothes?

Also, women in this nation are at a complete loss because they want so much to look like Jessica Simpson and Jessica Alba that they develop eating disorders to try and look that skinny. By emulating those skinny twigs, we set the bar too high for what women should look like to be accepted as attractive.

The point is that we should not care what celebrities do with their free time.

If we have learned anything from these celebrity outlets, it should be that celebrities, in general, are certifiably insane.

So why invest our time and money into finding out what’s going on with these crazy people?

By focusing on their lives, the entertainment industry is suffering- we concentrate too much on the player and not enough on the play.

For instance, I saw Mission Impossible: III. It was incredible. I absolutely loved it. It had great action, good performances (yes, even by Xenu’s disciple Tom) and great style. And yet, it did poorly in the box office because people have hang-ups about Tom Cruise. The people I told about how great the movie is responded with “Yeah, but I just don’t like that nut.”

People forget that Tom Cruise has made a ton of great movies, Top Gun, Born on the Fourth of July, The Last Samurai, the other two Mission Impossible movies and so on. If MI:III would have come out at least a year ago, before the whole Scientology fiasco or before Tom Cruise publicly blasted Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressants to aide her postpartum depression, I wager that millions more would have flocked to see that splendid movie.

We never cared so much about what movie stars do outside of their movies than we do now.

Nobody cared in the golden age of Hollywood that Cary Grant was married and divorced five times, that although John Wayne was an outspoken advocate of the draft in the Vietnam conflict he never himself served or that Clark Gable was also married five times and had another child out of an affair with actress Loretta Young.

We still regard these actors as some of the finest in the movie-making business and we do not worry ourselves with their personal lives. We remember the still classic movies they made as some of the best movies.

We should leave the personal lives to the celebrities themselves and celebrate the films they are making today.

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