Headline on today's USA Today: Bush Approval Rating Lowest Since 9/11. Woo hoo!

Thank god everyone seems to be slowly wising up. Me, I've been too busy trying to keep up with Joe Millionaire, the Bachelorette, and Surreal Life to watch the news. Yeah, I know it's trash, and 'beneath me' and all that shit, but so what? I still read books,have a large vocabulary and solid moral values. I'm not a Neilsen family and I pretty much never buy stuff I see advertised on TV, so I have absolutely no influence over future programming. On Sunday I managed to fight with P's mom, the widow of a showbiz screenwriter and an admitted snob, over whether "reality TV" meant the End of Art and Culture. I said that reality shows get on the air because they're both popular and inexpensive to produce, and therefore highly profitable - End of Story. But she thought that the "artists" in Hollywood had the responsibility to bring more refined entertainment to the screen (and, I presume, the unwashed masses who don't know any better). She was forgetting that the artists (writers, actors) don't have anything to do with choosing programs; it's all about the money, and it always has been. She also said things like "and the people on these shows are so uneducated! The people who watch them are so uneducated!" Uh, except for me and a bunch of my egg-heady friends, I guess. I know she's just getting her husband's back, defending the screenwriting trade against the money-grubbing producers who save a buck by using "unscripted" television. But does she have to be so blatantly elitist about it? Can't we all get along here? What bad will happen to the world if we watch trashy TV shows? How can she think to presume most people are too dumb to watch these shows responsibly? She's a better liberal than me; and aren't we supposed to not tar swaths of the population with the same brush? Obviously there are more than a few smart people out there (see above USA Today headline).

Anyway. Long story short: Joe Millionaire picked the substitute teacher, which is good, and dumped Heidi, which is very good. But how could he have picked MoJo? Girl, know when to shut up.