three things about O.J. Simpson

1. I know a lot more about his acting career than I do about his football career. I watched the Naked Gun movies. I never saw him play football.

2. One sunny Sunday morning in 1994, B. and I were married. That very night, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered. I just don't cotton to that concatenation of events at all.

3. A few days later came the famous Bronco chase. I happened to turn the TV on at the end of it. The car was just sitting in the driveway with nobody getting out of it, but the newspeople were yammering on at full force as if this were the most dramatic sequence of events in the history of the world.

This was the moment at which I decided to stop watching television news.

I've kept to that decision ever since. Of course I didn't watch the trial. By the time of 9/11, I'd figured out what to do instead when there's a major breaking news story. I open up a tab to a reputable newspaper site. I go about my other computer business, and every half hour or so I turn to the tab and hit the refresh button to see if anything has happened. Usually it hasn't, but I've been spared being made frantic by it.