Another year gone, another year older, but I have realized I am not another year wiser. I had this epiphany the other night when I was struggling to fall asleep. It was close to midnight and Jay Leno was a rerun again. My options to carry myself to slumber were counting sheep, chasing NyQuil liquid gels with a glass of pinot noir left over from Christmas dinner or delving into one of the stacks of magazines, tabloid rags and newspaper entertainment sections that had accumulated on my night stand. Surprisingly I choose to read, but only after the first two tactics failed.

With the hectic holidays now a fond memory like a pre-K-Fed Britney Spears, I was now able to catch up on some of my normal nightly reading. Every piece I laid my eyes on was yet another inane list of bests and worsts, ins and outs, goods and bads. No magazine had an independent take on the year that was.

We get it. Those of us who didn’t see "No Country For Old Men" yet are committing a mortal sin. Or the masses who did not take advantage of Radiohead’s pay-what-you-will marketing tool for their latest masterpiece, "In Rainbows" should just stop listening to music altogether as a way to repent. And what do you mean you never thought of DVRing (a new word they will be adding to Webster’s by the end of 2008) "30 Rock"? Even after seeing Tina Fey in those witty American Express ads. The audacity!

These regurgitated rosters were torn directly from the pages of my pop culture bible Entertainment Weekly. And like the Bible it was filled with the obvious. We are aware that "Juno" is going to be 2008’s "Little Miss Sunshine", that Perez Hilton will replace Oprah someday, Emile Hirsch is the next Johnny Depp and Britney Spears ... well, you know.

The staff-penned columns reflecting on the past 365 days were a fresh feature in the last edition of 2007. Each one started with “This was the year ...” and went to ramble on about geeks reigning supreme, DVR taking the pleasure out of television, the pitfalls of being famous and renewing their passion for Journey after that "Sopranos" series finale. Yes that was one.

It got me thinking while lying in my bed what last year meant to me. It could have been my NyQuil-induced stupor, but all I could come up with was that this was the year of my realization that pop culture has the same effects as marijuana. The more you inhale it, the more brain cells you lose. And if you are mixing the two, well there may be no hope left for you.

I recalled a conversation I had during dinner a few weeks before with a few regular patrons and friends at a local restaurant. We were talking about some of our favorite musicians and I said that I wore out Amy Winehouse’s "Back to Black" album this past summer. One of the gentlemen asked who she was because he had never heard of her. I gasped, he had to be kidding — she is on Perez Hilton almost everyday! He did not know who that was either. I truly thought he was joking but he was clearly not. He was not embarrassed for not knowing who they were, but I felt a tad sheepish that I did.

I know Winehouse never leaves home without her gold ballerina flats that have blood stains. I know her husband Blake, even though he has not done anything in his life but been photographed with gashes on his face allegedly from her, is now in jail. I know her mother wrote her a plea to get clean. I know that her father asked fans to boycott her CD to limit her royalties and cut into her drug habit. I know that she has canceled appearance after appearance because she can not go on while her husband is behind bars. I know she threw a fit at 4 a.m. while walking the streets of London barefoot and shirtless.

To sum it up, I know a lot about nothing. I hope this year that I will know just a little bit less.

E-mail lowellita@lowellsun.com and for more celeb news and local gossip log onto www.thesunblog.com/frosting.