Leave it to Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Casey Anthony

It's been a tough week following the sudden death of my mother in law and I can't thank my blog followers out there enough for your kind comments that I will respond to shortly.

It's also been a week when I have been rethinking a lot. It occured to me this week that giving 120 percent all the time at work can be rather unproductive. You still end up being kicked around while the people who give 20 percent will be promoted. There was a tale, that may be urban myth, about a worker who died at his desk and nobody noticed for 24 hours. It struck me that this could easily happen to me; in fact people would probably have one sided conversations with a somewhat dead me and not even notice until I failed to comply with a piece of unnecessary paperwork.

So it really is time to revamp my life but how? I have read about people whose blogs make them vast amounts of money but I can't really see how this would happen. Brits experienced something of a spike in readers just over a year ago, and slid down the virtual Matterhorn to level out at a respectable but hardly earth shattering 150 or so views a day.

I think Brits isn't going anywhere fast because I haven't mentioned Justin Bieber enough. I know a bit more about who he is than a year ago and I still can't see the point. But I have forgotten the mantra and neglected Bieber. Have I said I haven't mentioned Justin Bieber enough.

But a lot of people have him on their easily distracted little minds a lot, it seems. A recent survey found Bieber was the most searched person on line in 2011.

And the second most searched person I'm quite mortified to say was Kim Kardashian, a character who gives the Biebs about as much depth as Albert Einstein in comparison. Kim and Justin don't have a lot in common but they do succeed in looking rather like waxworks of themselves.

The most searched news story was the trial of Casey Anthony and somewhat surprisingly the most searched for sports star was Maria Sharapova.

The most searched for musician was - I don't need to say, of course - and the most searched for show was American Idol.

This list is somewhat depressing because it reveals how shallow we have all become; if we weren't that way to begin with. It's the stuff of reality TV junkies and disaffected bloggers desperately seeking a bit more SEO juice guv.

Weird tourism and Casey Anthony

I'd like to thank Tim Riley for using a guest post that I wrote some time ago on America's weird and wacky tourist attractions over at Life of Riles.

Sometimes the road can be long and featureless in America so we all need the odd naff tourist attraction or two to spice it up.

Talking about attractions I'm not sure how half of the country will cope now the Casey Anthony murder trial is over.

At the time of the verdict there were a lot of shocked messages on Facebook and Twitter but what can we really expect if we turn the legal process into a circus?

I tend to agree with Marnie here that Casey Anthony is a sociopath. At the same time I may be in the minority but I believe the jury reached the correct decision based on a complete lack of solid evidence. I'm sure Anthony knows what happened to her daughter but I'm not conviced she killed her. Or more accurately I'm not sure she intended to kill her.

If the prosecution had gone for a manslaughter charge rather than a murder charge with the death penalty - presumably to boost ratings - they may have achieved a more favorable result.

I also tend to agree with Jennifer that if Anthony had been black or unattractive, nobody would have cared about this case.

Other than that my thoughts on this case haven't changed much from my posting Casey Anthony - What the hell, last month.

I haven't paid much attention to this case but small snippets of information have crept into my random brain from it being on TV in the background. And now I feel I have already reached my dysfunction quota for the year.

At least until the next funny family from down south makes it big with Nancy Grace.