Anna Nicole Smith is dead.

At 39, which probably seems somewhat ancient to most college students -she was in the relative scheme of things quite young to die. She lived a somewhat tumultuous life and had many ups and downs including most recently the birth of a baby daughter and the death of her 20 year old son Daniel, which occurred within a few hours of each other. No matter how you look at it one can't help but feel a small amount of sadness in regard to at least some of her life's story.
Just a little anyway. The rest of it makes me wonder? why?
Why does anybody give a crap?
There are of course those reasons that are obvious, such as ?Sex Sells'. Let us not forget that Anna Nicole first came to everyone's attention as 1993's Playboy Playmate of the Year. In June of the following year she made headlines again after marrying 89 year old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall who subsequently died 14 months later. As you might imagine the fact that the two met while she was working as a stripper in Houston combined with the obvious overwhelming age difference, left her open to charges of gold-digging, a charge she has continuously denied. I remain unconvinced.
The sex appeal part of her story is an understandable point of interest. In the beginning of her career and in the last couple of years I can understand a lot of the attention paid to her. It's that long period in between I don't get.
I'll admit, I never watched more than a few episodes of her television show as it just seemed too unbelievably shameless to be taken seriously as anything even remotely entertaining. What I could never understand about it, was what was so appealing about watching her do whatever it was she did on her show? I mean she appeared to have little intelligence for much of anything, rendered speech with the vocal clarity of someone wasted out of their mind on lots and lots of mind deteriorating drugs, and not the least of all, she had the appearance of a fat, nasty, cottage-cheese swilling, slob. I mean does anyone remember that? She was the personification of the ill-mannered pig.
Not to be misunderstood, this is not to say that people who have a weight problem should be ignored or are unworthy of attention. It's just that in any other endeavor where someone became famous for sex appeal, it seems completely bizarre that they would remain interesting when there remained nothing physically appealing about them. No accounting for taste, I understand. Obviously some people found her charming in some way.
In the aftermath of her death many news analysts have been quoted as saying she was known for nothing more than being famous ?for being famous,? ala Paris Hilton. At least in Paris' case she's young, thin, blond, and rich, and has a sex video somewhere out there. I still don't get Paris Hilton beyond that, but hey, it's good work if you can get it.
The importance of Anna Nicole Smith is now no longer even about her, it's about whoever might potentially get the $450 million she was awarded from the estate of her late husband, J. Howard Marshall. Even the expected dueling paternity claims by the men claiming to be the biological father of Anna Nicole's daughter is really only ostensibly about getting access to that money.
Is the interest in Anna Nicole Smith simply about sex appeal or is it about something more? Perhaps some people look at the person she was who came from humble beginnings and then became famous because it allows them to fantasize for a few moments that such a thing could happen to them.
In the end I go with sex appeal. As she proved, you can get a lot farther in life with a kind word and a big rack? than you can with just a kind word.