One oddly comforting thing about this week...

and the disastrous tsunami, is that it's shredded to bits the obligatory "year in retrospect" recycled news we are bombarded with at this time of year.

So, too, has a time honored tradition of the NY Times been shredded- "The Lives They Led."

Between the untimely death of Jerry Orbach (who will what's his name get to replace Lenny Briscoe as a partner?), Artie Shaw, and the aforementioned Susan Sontag (arguably less influential than Hunter S. Thompson - for good or ill) it's clear that when the media ignores 2% of the year to focus on the rest of the year (or, more properly, when the media focuses on 2% of what happens 98% of the time and 2% of the time ignores everything else, since in the US, the media ignores pretty much everything), every so often the Law of Large Numbers makes the media creators look like asses.