We certainly love our celebrities...especially when they're dead.

So this whole Anna Nicole Smith think got me thinking a little.

When is it enough?

I know all about our fascination with celebrities (as a culture). And I'll be honest, I'm not totally immune to it. I'm not at the level where I'm DVR-ing every episode of Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood, or watching the E! channel 24-7, or even remotely believing what the supermarket checkout line magazines are telling me about this person's eating disorder or that person's illegitimate child. But I do enjoy the occasional bit of gossip I might hear in the course of my day. I don't mind a little bit of water cooler discussion about some famous person's latest train wreck.

But to stay with that analogy, while seeing something smashed up real good in a train wreck holds some marginal interest, what I'm not interested in seeing are the bodies on the ground.

What I mean by that, is that shouldn't these people at least have some peace in death? Isn't that the time when we should maybe leave them alone? Obviously not, judging by the huge amount of coverage this story is getting.

Now I realize that we're dealing with a singular case here. I know only a handful of things about Anna Nicole Smith for certain. She was in Playboy. She gained a lot of weight and then lost some of it. She married a guy that was like 90 years old. Her son killed himself. That's about it. That's what I know. But I also know peripherally that apparently her life was extremely fucked up. Because I do see those supermarket checkout line magazine headlines. You have to read something while the woman in front of you is buying three dozen cans of cat food and a cup of yogurt. I do know the speculations that she married for money, the speculation that her newborn child was conceived by her and her son, the allegations of drug addiciton. I hear about these things, but they're past the threshold where I've stopped paying attention. I don't know them to be true, I don't know know them to be false, because I don't care at that point. There's only so much about a celebrity's life that I care to know. But these will probably be major stories or addendums to stories over the next few weeks as her death is being reported on.

I guess there's no reason to think that the vultures that circle the rich and famous are going to stop once they've died; vultures prefer dead meat. And to be fair, if we as a general public didn't care, than they would not "report" it. But you'd think, and I'd hope, that there's one place a person could find solace, and that would be in death. But obviously it's not the case.

I'm sure it probably has been said, but I've yet to hear it. And in case it gets lost in the shuffle of speculation and muck raking, hopefully someone will think to say: rest in peace.