Soul Sisters

What do Maureen Dowd and I have in common? We’re both filling today’s entries with sorry, half-hearted excuses for a subject just to fill space. In today’s Times, Ms. Dowd pens 1,000 words comparing Holly Golightly to Betty Draper. She throws in generous chunks of quotations from the original Capote novella and recycles quotes from a Vanity Fair interview with the author of a new (and very fun) book about the making of the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At one point she even resorts to describing retail window displays in her own neighborhood. It makes one wonder if she trolled the streets of Georgetown early Saturday morning desperate for ideas.

As much as I enjoy reading Maureen Dowd and appreciate her insights and opinions, today’s column is pure filler. Every once in a while her column will reek of that “synergy” thing they trumpeted a decade ago when media conglomerates were swallowing up other entertainment behemoths and cross-pollination ran rampant. Our Maureen sometimes plugs books or movies by people whom one suspects are good buddies. But this column today? I dunno. One can picture her typing away with one eye on the word counter, her breath coming in shallow gasps as it approaches the one-thousand mark.

Shameless! Shocking! How anyone could write a column about nothing just to have something to post is beyond me.