The headline was…well, I was going to say priceless—but I found it kind of depressing as well.

Here it is, verbatim: “Travolta’s dogs killed; Miss USA pole dancing.”

No, I didn’t lift that from The Onion. It appeared under the “Entertainment & Community” section of The Virginian-Pilot’s web site.

According to the first brief that followed, the driver of a service vehicle at Bangor airport accidentally struck and killed John Travolta’s dogs last Thursday.

How sad, you say. Or perhaps if you’re of a darker turn of mind, you might say, it’s just as well—he’d probably already condemned the animals to a life of scientology. Still, if a story about a celebrity’s dead pets qualifies as “entertainment” these days, we’re a lot closer to complete cultural decadence than I thought we were.

Miss USA pole-dancing? That’s another matter! I want see that. (Not for prurient reasons, of course, but because the images subvert with sweet irony the sexist beauty-pageant paradigm.) I also wanted to find out whether the pole dancing had anything to do with the dead dogs.

Turns out the headline was bit of false advertising. The pics show virtually no skin at all. “That’s fun,” the newspaper’s anonymous commentator reassured us. “Still, Miss USA officials are investigating.”

What a silly institution that pageant is. Thank goodness our daily newspapers and television shows uphold a higher cultural standard.

- TR