On beating horses into a lumpy paste

I was halfway through this week's column before I realized I was drifting into a dead horse territory. And not just any dead horse, either. We're talking about a dead horse that I've beaten, over the years, into a lumpy, unrecognizeable paste.

Of course, by then, it was too late to turn back.

The idea started out well enough -- wanting to write about the absurdity of Britney Spears' divorce actually making significant headlines on the same day that the American midterm elections were taking place. But after a few paragraphs, I realized that the ultimate moral was the same moral I've said so many times that even *I'm* getting bored of it. And that is:

Media, stop feeding us crap and calling it news; and

Audience, stop demanding crap from your news agencies.

I salvaged the column about the only way I could, by acknowledging my awareness of the beaten, broken, dead horse. Even so, it's weeks like this, when I cover the same ground I've covered so bloody many times, that I wonder why I still bother writing this stupid thing every single week. Clearly I don't have a whole lot of anything interesting to say.

Given that my alternate column idea -- writing about Microsoft's announcement that they'll be delivering television and movie content over their Xbox Live service, directly competing with Apple's announced but unreleased iTV service -- was dumped because it felt like I would be, you guessed it, beating a dead horse, makes this feeling even worse.

I need to get out more often, or visit different web sites, or...read a book or a newspaper or something. I need to expand my brain. I need to expand my horizons. I need to either get some damn variety in my column, or just retire the stupid thing and be done with it.