Cost of a Commercial for the Super Bowl Hits $3 Million:  The commercials are often more of a draw than the game, but this is an annual installment of unnecessary news.  Maybe the silver lining is that we are interested in money, and this will translate into free markets and free people.  We can dream.

Charlie Sheen Checks into a Hospital after 36 Hour Party:  With the reduction in people’s attention span that we keep hearing about, it is terrible to think that a person’s only consumption of news for a particular day contained the words “Charlie Sheen”.

Insiders knew what Bernie Madoff was up to:  If you are an observer of the news, this story has surfaced on a regular basis since Mr. Madoff was revealed to have been running a Ponzi scheme.  The latest incarnation of this is that the owner of the Mets (Fred Wilpon) knew about the scheme, since he was friends with Mr. Madoff.  Perhaps we just can’t accept that this is just a bad guy, and he screwed his friends as well as people he didn’t know.  Other than banks, the list of victims is a who’s who of connected people and big wigs.  List of victims (http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/st_madoff_victims_20081215.html).  You would think this would appeal to the populist angle of many news sources.  A headline like “Big Banks Get Screwed the Most by Madoff”, would attract many readers.  He could become a cult hero in today’s anti-bank climate.  I guess it just feels better to blame Madoff for why the Mets stink.

What are we not learning about while we consume these Stupid Stories?