I have a confession to make. I am not a rabid watcher of Jon and Kate + 8. I know, it’s amazing I can even hold my head up in polite society. I don’t know how I make it through the day, so bereft am I of hot conversational topics such as “is she or isn’t she OCD?” and “is he or isn’t he boffing a 23 year old?”

I’m not a rabid fan of the show but catch it from time to time because my 10 year old daughter (who may in fact represent the show’s true demographic) is. I’m so rank amateur that I cannot even name all the ‘tups’ and define the two older girls as “the one that makes me actually want to slap a child” and “one who genera lly doesn’t.”

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Twins are becoming so common in Hollywood (congrats to Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O’Connell, btw - even though your baby names sound like racehorses) that if you have just one these days you kinda look like a slacker.  Seriously, twins are such a non-story that at 5 p.m. yesterday the news of the Romijn/O’Connell babes was one of the featured headlines on Starmagazine.com and by 6:30 they had been knocked off by Patricia Arquette’s divorce, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s broken engagement, and Tim Allen’s first grandchild - oops, I mean new baby due in the spring.  

I predict that by 2010 twins in Hollywood will no longer be that rare and the really hot Celebrity Moms will be having triplets, then eventually more and more at a time.  Colleges and universities will start offering degrees in How to be a Hollywood Nanny and trendy boutiques will pop up on Rodeo Drive offering coordinating – yet unique - $250 baby outfits.  Laws will be passed that give double and triple strollers right of way on LA sidewalks, GM will start building Escalades with fourth and fifth rows, and eventually, as all these children follow their parents into the business, every character in every movie and television show will have an evil twin. 

Well, it’s been almost a year since I wrote my first critical post on Jon and Kate Gosselin. Of course I had no idea what I was getting into. Never could I have imagined that a reality TV show would be met with such ardent opinions, with Kate Gosselin turning out to be quite a polarizing figure. The very mention of Kate Gosselin to those who have caught the show conjures up resentment on one side and admiration, and even sympathy (dare I say “pity”), on the other.

I have mentally divided the “pro” Kate crowd and the “anti” Kate crowd and even though I don’t watch the show on a regular basis (I lost a lot of interest after the first few seasons), I do happen to catch it once in a while. I was never a super-fan, but found some redeeming values in Jon and Kate and can now admit after catching a few reruns that I really can’t stand Kate Gosselin. There, I said it. Now, lest I be associated with the obsessive-stalking-loathing-Kate camp, I wouldn’t waste anymore bandwidth on the subject matter than this post is taking up. Subscribing to the KIA philosophy (Kate is an a-hole), is priority number 16,232, after plucking a stray eyelash out of my eyelid. And even though I have come to terms with the disgust for this woman, I’m not as prepared to run with the KIA crowd. In no way do I want it to be part of my identity. First of all, I have many internet friends who happen to like her, and I have been known to reach across party lines to embrace those with differing opinions [Ed. note: You're such a maverick]. Second of all, I kinda like having my very own villain. Even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I kept on watching the reruns while cursing at the television. In fact, the more angry I got, the more I stayed glued.

So, either Kate Gosselin is an a-hole and doesn’t care, or she’s an a-hole who knows how to keep viewers entranced or enraged. After all, Howard Stern gained his popularity by listeners that hated him more so than from listeners that loved him. Something tells me that she isn’t that smart though.

Or is she?

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