Today, we are all balloon boy

This is what happens when I take a "sick day" and avoid all news or news-type information for a day: The biggest non-story of the year breaks. It's got everything one would want in a hyped-up piece of bullshit: A missing child, home-made mylar balloons, an amateur scientist experiment gone wrong because of meddling kids, live video of an inanimate object, and vomiting. It's like the OJ's white bronco chase, without the tragedy of a murdered white woman.

So no one died, or even suffered a disfiguring injury. Which is a shame, because now it's open season for jokes about the situation, instead of just callous assholes like myself making inappropriate and possibly offensive comments. For example: The kid's name is "Falcon" which would have been awesome if he had in fact fell to his death. Because he couldn't fly, you see. But no, now yesterday will go down in history alongside such hilarious media overreactions to non-moments as the day Paris Hilton was arrested, the Michael Phelps bong picture, and Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face. Such is life.

Was it all a publicity grab? Is it wrong to exploit the hysteria of a 24-hour news cycle for another chance to appear on the television show Wife Swap? I don't think it's wrong to say anyone who deeply cares about the travails of this family should be publicly flogged. In fact, that could just be the shiny new non-event that next captures the public's imagination. A game show in which idiots compete to see who cares the least about the latest Wolf Blitzer inanity, with the threat of corporal punishment for the loser(s). The bottom line is with any luck at least a few of the lives in this family are ruined forever, wilted in the glare of the harsh spotlight in a world they never made.