Waste

Los Angeles (CNN) -- Legendary pop singer Whitney Houston was found dead at a Beverly Hills, California, hotel at age 48, officials said Saturday night.

The entertainer, whose incredible talent was discovered at an early age, was pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m. (6:55 p.m. ET) at the Beverly Hilton despite resuscitation efforts, a police spokesman said.

She had one hell of a set of pipes and for whatever reasons or personal demons, she threw that talent away for drugs.

Update, 2/13/12: If Frothy and the Cylon had gotten into a gunfight on Sunday, I doubt if anyone would have heard a word of it on the Monday morning news shows. GMA, at least for the first 30 minutes, transformed itself into the Whitney Houston Memorial Channel. I say "30 minutes", because that was all that we could stand. "Tragic case of entertainer who loses his/her career over drugs and dies early"-- haven't we seen this goddamned movie before? Yeah, so she got into drugs, married an alleged scumbag, et cetera, et cetra.

That doesn't pass the So What Test. You can go into every neighborhood in this country and find at least one kid who had a shitload of potential, if not actually starting to do something with it, and then that kid got into drugs or drinking or gambling or some other addiction and then proceeded to toss his or her life away. I'll bet that in everyone's extended family, you can find someone like that.

It's a tragedy for her mother, her daughter and her friends. And I can understand the celebrity news channels going batshit over this. But as for any serious news network, if they have devoted more than two minutes to this story, their editors and on-air reporters should be flogged with heated barbed-wire whips.