As part of its ongoing commitment to haemorrhaging neurons so you don't have to, Lost in Showbiz this week turns its attentions to the world's finest celebrity magazines, who are facing down the August news slump with their customary blend of painstaking investigative work and stuff you go to hell for even thinking.
So to Globe Magazine, whose Pulitzer-whoring cover offers a timely reminder that journalism is not simply the rough first draft of history. It is also the rough first draft of tragedies that haven't yet happened. Do feast your eyes, then, on WHO'LL DIE FIRST, wherein "psychologist and leading age expert" Dr Lillian Glass waves her witch doctor's staff over some celebrity lifestyles and asks: which of their lights will be snuffed out first?
And so to the death pool. According to Lillian, the kind of therapist you just have to pray has no contact with actual patients, "Ailing Liz Taylor will outlive wild child Lindsay Lohan." Yes, despite knackering her back in that fall on the set of National Velvet sometime in the mid-Cretaceous period, the hard-to-kill Dame will be flogging her cubic zirconia jewellery on basic cable long, long after Lohan has graduated to the great blow-fuelled car chase in the sky.
Lohan's got four years left, according to Dr Glass, who I note from her website specialises in "self-esteem issues", and is the author of a book called I Know What You're Thinking. (Do you, love? In which case, I'll rig the rope up for you myself.) Further tomes designed to extract a wedge from the miserable are Toxic People, and 50 Ways My Dog Made Me Into a Better Person, which I imagine is quite the Brothers Karamazov of any bookstore's Mind Body Spirit section.
Anyway, according to Lillian, there's good news for fat-free fertility miracles Nicole Richie and Angelina Jolie, who could see 60, though Michael Jackson's fragile exoskeleton will fatally shatter before the decade is out. Sad news too for Barbra Streisand, who appears to have cried "farewell tour" once too often, while Oprah Winfrey will be preaching her sacred doctrine of closure till 2013. And with "just a few years" left in him, George Bush is advised to break ground as soon as possible on what surely promises to be the smallest presidential library in American history.
We leave Britney Spears till last, as the Globe giving her just five more years actually manages to look like favourable coverage next to that from their newsstand colleagues. In the past few weeks, the attempt to gain ownership of the singer's apparent meltdown has reached epic proportions, descending into a kind of Britney arms race, in which warring titles compete to amass the most damning accusations.
This week, OK! magazine have thrown all their resources into "Britney's new lover - and yes, it's a woman!". Life & Style fight back with "Brit's Losing the Babies!", while Us wheels out the big guns with "Brit's nannies tell all", with the nature of this "all" hinted at in cover lines reading "Bizarre nudity" and "Demands they share her bed". But it is Star magazine that goes all out to assure its berth in heaven, with "Britney to her kids: YOU WERE BOTH MISTAKES! She makes out with men in front of the boys, refuses to change their diapers, puts whitening strips on their teeth - & MORE".
Mmm. Never mind the global stock crash: buy shares in Ritalin today ... I suppose we should feel grateful that In Touch opts to rise above the fray, hitting the stands this week with "BRAD GIVES UP". But really, which of us isn't beginning to know how he feels?
