Like a man in the desert lamenting the absence of Evian water.

Every now and again you see a post that jars the perspective back into the proper focus, like this Catherine Harmon post on "Hey Britney, it was never about your singing!" on the misinterpretation of the reaction against "America's favorite skank":

That being said, I must admit to finding the media backlash against Britney the last few days fascinating. It says so much about what our culture values. Our complaint isn’t that the 25-year-old former pop princess cavorted around onstage in a black bikini and knee-high boots, it’s that she did it with less-than-rock-solid abs. We aren’t in an uproar because the mother of two young boys pranced through a sexually explicit dance routine to a vulgar song entitled “Gimme More” on national television; the really atrocious thing is that she couldn’t make it through the dance moves with the precision and skill of her jail-bait teenage years and that she frequently slipped up in her lip-syncing. Brit isn’t being derided all over the Web for looking and acting like a prostitute or stripper; she’s the object of sarcasm and pity because she looks like a woman who has had two babies in the last two years and who maybe isn’t doing 1,000 crunches a day anymore.

OK, that just about does it for one of my rare forays into popular culture.