Is there something in the water, or what?

Now, I guess I ought to quickly backtrack to add that I'm not being sexist here. Yes, I know boys are doing stupid things, too. I mean, hey, I was a stupid teen boy once myself. But, in a way, I kind of expect guys to be foolish, like jump on each other from a rooftop or set themselves on fire for a YouTube lark. Why do you think Marge isn't the Simpson who yells out "D'oh!" every episode?

But we're talking about girls, here. They're the kinder, gentler, smarter sex, right? They're the ones whose brains are supposed to be firing on all cylinders while the boys are still trying to find the ignition switch. For some reason, however, that doesn't seem to be the rule anymore.

Just a couple of days ago, I heard of a woman who was jogging in a Greeley, Colo., park who came upon a group of teen girls watching a girl fight. The 47-year-old jogger told the youths to cool it. And they turned on her, screaming "f‑‑‑ you b‑‑ch," and punched her to the ground.

And then there are the online tussles. A couple weeks ago, Plugged In's Paul Asay wrote an interesting article about a 11-year-old who got ticked off at some online "haters" and started spouting about "popping a Glock" in their mouths to give them a "brain slushy." Now, again, this was an 11-year-old. Then, of course, her rants inspired other rants and eventually the girl's father started screaming at his daughter's webcam and …. oh, boy.

Then just yesterday I saw a Forbes article about a young woman who decided to dissert her Justin Bieber fandom by ceremonially ripping her Bieber posters off the wall—on camera. Which, as you might imagine, caused all kinds of fervor. Nothing worse for many a tween girl nowadays than Bieber desecration.

The Forbes article focused on one particular 12-year-old who calmly proceeded to threaten the Bieber-hater with an online, f-bomb laced tirade. "If I ever meet you in person," the young girl sneered, "I'm going to hit you in the f‑‑‑ing face with a full wine bottle. Cork and all!" (Now, why she thought the cork would add some extra heft to the threat, I'm not sure. But she sounded serious enough.)

I watched the full video and the thing that got me was that throughout this Bieber-defender's video, along with all the vile bile, she kept plugging her regular YouTube and Twitter offerings—essentially marketing herself. So she was not only loosing all her foul-mouthed 12-year-old madness, she was also inviting other girls to follow her future gripes. (Tomorrow, an f-bomb harangue about Silly Bandz!)

It all seems so incredibly foolish and unbelievably self-promoting at the same time. What's going on? Is our new world somehow creating this breed of spotlight-seeking rabid lass, or is the current age just allowing all the pent up eons-worth of feminine "argghs!" to finally rise to the surface?

It must be one of those, right? What else could you look to? Parents? C'mon.

Doesn't that take you back? Maybe to your grade school years, to a little, slightly underfunded library full of tattered paperbacks and every horse story a girl could read. Best of all, though, there was the Dewey Decimal System. Man, if you spilled one of those card-catalog drawers it was hello wrath of Librarian Lady and goodbye lunch break for six months.

Those were the days, though. Books, old and new, lined shelves higher than you could reach. The smell was great.

A plastic e-reader just doesn't have the same gravitas or character that a hardbound book does. And if you you're lucky, a book's previous readers have lightly scribbled their own thoughts in its margins. Try writing and sharing on a Nook or a Kindle.

Bradbury added that there are: "Too many junky things around. There are too many computers, too many e-mails, and too many devices. They get in our way, and prevent us from reading. If we didn't have the computers and the e-mails, we could spend more time reading and writing."

Sometimes I want the days I spent at the library back—the days before anyone had imagined the Internet and electric "books." Kids today, it seems, are missing out on something. Something more substantial than a computer screen and Google.

Why do you guys cover some movies—particularly in the horror genre—and not others?

That was essentially the question Ethan had for us recently. He wrote into Plugged In and asked:

Ethan, that's a very good question, and the simple answer is this:

Horror movies scare me. And my editor gets sick of me asking for combat pay.

I'd rather avoid horror movies if at all possible, and I'm not alone. Most of my fellow Plugged In-erites would rather sit through a whole season of The Smurfs than review Saw XXXIII. We really believe that watching too much of this stuff isn't great for anyone—even us. And so we're always more tempted to drop a middlin' horror flick from our review roster than, say, a family comedy.

Why review them at all, you ask? Well, because people watch them, of course—even our very discerning readers. Informally, we've found that 80% of our readers go to R-rated films on occasion, and we can't assume that Saw will never be among them.

So it's actually kind of rare for us to skip one. And if we do, we usually have a good reason. Sometimes it's because the horror film in question didn't have a very wide release. House of 1000 Corpses, which started its theatrical run quite small and never got above 1,000 screens, likely fell into this category. Sometimes it's because we're short-staffed or in the midst of a packed movie-review week: The Devil's Rejects, which did have a pretty wide release, was probably a casualty of this.

And, to tell the truth, those films came out years ago, and we're simply watching more movies these days—we set a record for films reviewed last year—which makes it all the more likely that even lower profile horror flicks will get covered. We want to give you, the reader, as much information about any film that might be coming to your local multiplex. And, personal preferences aside, we'll do whatever we can to make that happen.

Thanks, Ethan, for the note. Sorry we don't have a review of House of 1000 Corpses for you. But Saw VII? You can count on seeing something from us on that one. Unfortunately.

ABC's landmark show ended months ago, but with the final season now out on DVD, Losties have been able to renew their obsession. But for some folks, plunking down $40 for the season (or about $50 if you're into Blu-ray) just doesn't do it. They want to get closer to the show—and spend more. Lots more.

Some Lost fanatics spent significant time and money this past weekend buying scads of old television props, scripts and assorted flotsam from the Lost auction, conducted by the auction house Profiles in History. More than a thousand bits of memorabilia were sold, including the Dharma van (pictured) for $47,500 (imagine pulling up to soccer practice in that), to Faraday's Journal for $27,500,  to the Lost finale script—signed by show masterminds Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse—for $7,500. The outfit Jack wore during his tortured last moments of life on the island fetched $10,000—not too shabby, considering most bloodstained, tattered T's wouldn't fetch 10 cents at a thrift store.

Some other doo-dads were less expensive … but not by much. Thought Claire's creepy squirrel baby was kinda cute? You could've bought it for your own bundle of joy for a mere $2,750. Want an official Dharma lab coat? One was purchased for $2,500. Lost your copy of Watership Down? Sawyer's fetched a paltry $3,300—quite a bit for a paperback, it's true, but you can't put a price on good literature.

"I couldn't be more thrilled to be the proud owner of Rousseau's original music box from the flashbacks," one Lost buyer, known only as Jenny K., told USA Today. "I know to those who don't watch Lost it may seem a lot to pay $1,800 for a music box, but to me it is worth every penny. When I am old and gray in a nursing home one day, just put in a Lost tape, open my music box and see me smile."

In all this frenzy stirred by Lost memorabilia, one might detect a touch of irony: One of the lessons passengers of Oceanic flight 815 might've taken from the island was that relationships bring happiness—not all the other stuff we tend to surround ourselves with.

But that said, I get it. I'm a "stuff" person, too. I don't have the cash to buy mementos from Lost, but I've got my share of useless gunk I'm strangely happy to have. I own a football signed by a couple of famous Denver Broncos. I have some Colorado Rockies rookie cards. I've got a belt buckle that says "Media Champ"—a holdover from my days covering professional rodeo. And I've got lots of personal things, too—far more "valuable" to me, in many respects: old college papers, friendship bracelets made by some campers when I was a counselor, Hot Wheels cars I used to race with my best friend. They're relics of earlier days. As such, they're important to me—even if they'd not fetch much at auction.

I don't like throwing stuff away. The stuff in itself isn't all that important—but it does help remind me what is.

It was a week where movie studios reached into their bin of leftovers, grabbed a handful, and threw 'em at the wall to see if anything stuck. It didn't. Three new releases—the horrid 3-D pic Piranha, the cute Nanny McPhee Returns and the semi-sweet The Switch—all finished outside the Top 5 and made just $26.5 million combined, about $8 million less than The Expendables collected all by its lonesome last weekend.

All of which just proves … well, what, exactly? That old-school action heroes can beat down a pack of snide vamps and CGI fish? That fortysomething men looking for a nostalgic, blood-soaked trip back to 1980s-era cinema still rule the box office? That Sly was right, and that action films don't get the respect they deserve?

"There has always been an elitist attitude toward action films," Stallone told time.com. "Good action films—not crap, but good action films—are really morality plays."

Stallone has a point. "Good" action films, for all their violence,  try to teach us certain lessons—that crime doesn't pay, good trumps evil and it's wise to stay in peak physical condition in case you're attacked by terrorists or ninjas.

But a handful of dubious lessons does not a good movie make. And for proof, one need only look at The Expendables.

I just read about a guy on a quest that seems almost as daunting as the rich man's challenge to thread a needle with his camel. Chris Juby, a worship director at King's Church in the northern English city of Durham, has determined that he will summarize the Bible in a series of daily tweets—one for each chapter. You read that right: One 140-character string for each of the 1,189 chapters in the Good Book.

The first chapter was boiled down to a simple, "Gen1: God created the heavens, the earth and everything that lives. He made humankind in his image, and gave them charge over the earth." Hey, this guy even did the job with four whole characters to spare. Talk about a gift for succinctness.

(Of course, my wife would say that all men are genetically programmed to keep their statements to the shortest number of words possible—just to torture the females in their lives. But that's another story.)

"It's a really tough process deciding what the key themes of each chapter are and what can be left out," Juby told aolnews.com. "There's so much richness in each chapter of the Bible."

I was thinking that even the less rich chapters could be a real headache. But Juby seems up to the challenge. He whittled down the Genesis begetting chapter (chapter 5) to this: "Adam's line was: Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech and Noah. Noah's sons were Shem, Ham and Japheth."

Count it up and you'll see that Juby had enough space to say "Adam's family line" if he had wanted to. But he obviously figured, "Hey, they've got it, why blather on?"

Personally, I think this is an interesting exercise. And if folks are curious enough to see what the unabridged version reads like after catching a snappy tweet of a chapter or two, well, all the better. Besides, if the finished Twitter Bible finds its way to the right person's inbox … it could do wonders for the sermon times.

She'd be a fitting icon for today's celebrity-obsessed culture—if her celebrity heyday hadn't been in the 1960s and '70s, that is.

Zsa Zsa Gabor is dying, we're told: The Hungarian-born actress checked out of a Los Angeles-area hospital yesterday to spend, according to Reuters, her "final days at her Bel Air home." If true, that means that we might be watching the last Gabor media blitz ever—a tradition that's been ensconced in Americana since the time of Eisenhower. So it seems fitting that we pay tribute to the woman who, with her thick Hungarian accent and fine fur coats, showed the world how celebrity is done. Jon Gosselin and Levi Johnston, take notes.

We tend to think that folks like Paris Hilton and Jersey Shore's Snooki are products of our celebrity-soaked culture—stars made possible through the strange alchemy of reality TV, the Internet and their own outrageous personalities. But really, the template for such fame was set decades ago by Gabor.

She was an actress, appearing in several movies and on television in the 1950s and '60s (and her sister, Eva, appeared in the much-beloved 1965-71 sitcom Green Acres).  But it didn't make her famous: Rather, Zsa Zsa parlayed her exotic accent, knack for glamour and penchant for getting divorced into a Hollywood career.

"I never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back," she told The Observer in 1957, when she was between husbands No.'s 3 and 4. She married eight times, all told (nine, if you count the time she got married while she was technically still wed to someone else)—all rich, all colorful, all wonderfully suited to helping keep Gabor in the public spotlight. (Her current husband, Prince Frederic von Anhalt, has been married six times himself and once suggested he might be the father of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter, Dannielynn, born in 2006.)

Her notoriety cemented and her quotability assured, Gabor became a favorite fixture on game and talk shows and landed a shower of guest parts on everything from Bonanza to Batman, from Gilligan's Island to The Love Boat. She rarely played anything but a version of herself—but when you're Zsa Zsa Gabor, it's enough.

Because, of course, the person who we knew as Zsa Zsa was likely as much fabricated as any fictional character written for the screen. Gabor fulfilled the public's expectations of her, just as everyone from Dolly Parton to Lady Gaga have done since. And she played her part well, weaving a dash of humor and self-depreciation into her long lashes and white fur coats. When she was tossed in jail for three days for slapping a police officer in 1990, "Other actresses might have crawled away from Hollywood, tail between their tanned toned legs," wrote ABC News' Sheila Marikar. "Not Zsa Zsa. She made good of the incident by mocking it in a variety of movie and TV cameos, including The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear, The Beverly Hillbillies and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Gabor showed us all that you didn't need extraordinary talent to become a celebrity. All you need is a shtick, a sense of humor and a stage on which to play.

Our culture, for better or worse—perhaps both—is covered in Zsa Zsa's glove-covered fingerprints. She's a celebrity's celebrity, dahling, and should she leave us, celebrity tabloids can rest easy knowing she's helped create many, many more to fill her high-heeled shoes.

Let me make a confession: I kinda like media and technology. I work with it, I play with it, I write about it for a living. We live in an amazing time, filled with gadgets and entertainment options inconceivable when I was a little boy. A decade ago, the Internet was a relatively new plaything. Facebook and Twitter were unheard of and the iPhone wasn't even a gleam in Steve Jobs' eye. Yes, our world has problems. But when you look at our age and squint just right, our days look like something out of a utopian science fiction novel, filled with possibility and promise. And while we caution y'all about the perils of technology, we should never lose sight that ours is a time filled with wonder.

But sometimes, it gets to be too much.

When the world changes as fast as it does, it can be hard to keep up. All these gadgets require attention and energy, and it can begin to feel that we're no longer using our machines, but rather, they're using us: We type and text and update our Facebook pages, we "surf" and "tweet" and "stream" and run 24/7 and, before you know it, it's August 13, and summer's over before we fully knew it was here. And we think to ourselves ... how long as it been since I went hiking? Drank iced tea on the porch? Spent a day doing ... nothing?

Maybe you are better than I am about keeping our modern distractions at bay. Sometimes, I need a reminder that I don't need to check e-mail hourly or tote my cell phone around constantly. So sometime very soon, I think this Plugged In writer is going to unplug himself -- go where the televisions are snowy and the cell reception's spotty, a place where my family can put down their iPods and stow their laptops and walk and talk and laugh.

Technology, like I said, can be pretty cool. But sometimes we need a reminder that there's an even cooler world out there, full of things that don't need electrical sockets or Wi-Fi to work. Sometimes we need to unplug, if only for a time.