Did crack turn me into an addict, or did I just have an addictive personality that made crack seem pretty damn fun?

That’s the question.

In my case, the crack is this thing right here. The web. And the symptoms are not confined to addiction but have spread to my current inability to focus on anything longer than the average instant message.

I can’t read books. I can’t even focus on a magazine article without stopping every few paragraphs to email my team at Rollyo about tweaks we should be making to our new Firefox tool (or whatever happens to be to project of the moment). I can’t listen to other people for more than a few seconds. Eye contact is unthinkable (too much else to see).

I wanted to investigate whether I might have A.D.D., but I could only get as far as the first D before I lost interest.

When I am in my shrink’s office, sometimes I interrupt myself to ask, “Wait a second, whose unconscious was I just talking about?”

When I found out my wife was pregnant, I immediately set up a blog for the kid. I already know that he wants to get any of my attention, he’s going to need an RSS feed.

It took me four separate sessions in a dark and silent room to get through this blog post (and I wish I had stayed focused as the last time I got sidetracked it was to put a big chunk of dough on the Panthers in the NFC Championship. Anyone know what happened, I was flipping channels?).

But here’s the question:

Did the internet make me like this? Did the always connected, always emailing, always browsing, always IMing and always going all-in while playing online Texas Holdem gradually destroy my ability to focus and think clearly?

Or was I just a guy with a short attention span who was therefore drawn to the internet?

Did crack make me an addict, or am I just the type of guy who needed some crack?

And while we’re at it, what was I just about to do? Hmmm. Oh yeah, hit the publish button…

Hollywood is in the business of creating stars, fitting them into a package and then selling that package to movie-goers.

Colin Farrell is the hot, edgy, bad boy that hits right at the sweetspot of American movie audiences (teens) and we can’t get enough, right?

Wrong.

It turns out that Colin Farrell doesn’t move tickets. Think of the big budget box office flops with which he’s been the associated. Swat, not. Alexander, not so great. Phone booth, don’t take that call.

Yes, he’s done decent numbers as a co-star to the likes of Tom Cruise (Minority Report), but as a headliner, he hasn’t pulled in audiences in sizes that match his superstar, badboy rep.

OK, but maybe it’s just a matter of picking bad movies. Maybe no one sees these movies because of bad buzz, right?

Wrong.

Farrell’s latest flick, The New World, has been getting pretty solid reviews. But it still only managed to pull in a cool four million over the weekend.

How long do you get to be considered a major star even when ticket buyers are not buying tickets? So far, Colin’s sex tape is the only one of his movies that’s exceeded expectations (and that’s mostly because it’s a whole lot more funny than anyone had anticipated).

A simple threat of mutiny would be strange enough these days, but a mutiny on a Queen Mary 2 luxury cruise?

Apparently not quite able to completely come to terms with the disgrace and impending jail term his son has brought upon himself, Jack Abramoff’s dad Frank was deeply hurt by the relatively flaccid George Clooney Golden Globe poke: “Who would name their kid Jack with off at the end? No wonder the guy’s screwed up.”

Frank Ambramoff, hurt to the bone, not yet hardened by his son’s tribulations, and left limp by the wanton attacks, thrust back:

Your glib and ridiculous attack on my son, Jack, coupled with your obscene query as to the choice his mother and I made in naming him brought shame and dishonor on you and your profession.

What drove you to this lapse in lucidity, I can never know, but you need to know that your words were deeply hurtful to many innocent and decent people.

Come on, you’ve got to be pulling my frank…

What next—wives of Supreme Court nominees bursting into tears because someone asked a mean question?

You know how Brokeback Mountain was going to divide the country and only be a hit in urban areas? Well it turns out that the only thing that’s being divided is Americans from their $8.50. The movie is not only a critical hit and the Oscar favorite, it’s also a box office smash across the board.

This just in on the topic of intelligent design:

This isn’t how science is done. If the model proposed by Darwin is deemed insufficient, one should look for another, but it’s not correct from a methodological point of view to take oneself away from the scientific field pretending to do science.

[Intelligent design] doesn’t belong to science and the pretext that it be taught as a scientific theory alongside Darwin’s explanation is unjustified.

It only creates confusion between the scientific and philosophical and religious planes.

That was just a little something I read in the Vatican newspaper.