A friend posed to me the following question: "If you could eliminate (not necessarily kill, just eliminate) one person from the face of the planet, who would it be?" Without hesitation, my answer was Mariah Carey. Now, I will admit that she has a very nice singing voice, and I, too, shook my bon bon to Sweet Emotion when I was a pre-teen, but her era is over and for some reason she doesn't know it.

I'm not sure exactly what it is that I don't like about her, but whatever it is, it really brings up the bile from the back of my neck. It's not just a minor annoyance, it burns like the fire of a red dwarf star. I think part of it is her unflagging arrogance, such as her appearance on MTV Cribs, where we got the opportunity to look at presents from her fans, gawk at her walk-in closet (which is about the size of my bedroom), and although we were not allowed into her boudoir, she did strip naked and get in her bathtub for us. A desperate cry for help, I believe, because it was shortly after this that she began a metoric fall from fame and landed in a facility to combat her "fatigue". Sure, Mariah. Fatigue. We all know that after the atrocity you committed against your twenty or so fans and the rest of us, you knew you sucked and had to go elsewhere to cope with it. As a brief aside, the atrocity grossed a mere $4 million in total, which means that, at an average of $10 per ticket, only 400,000 people went to see her film. As a comparison, Gigli grossed $6 million. Sad, Mariah, sad.

Then she has the chutzpah to come out with this little gem: "If you see me as just the princess then you misunderstand who I am and what I have been through." Here's a brief history for you. She was born in Huntington, NY, where the median income is just over $82,000 per year, the child of an opera singer and an engineer. She moved to the city after her parents' divorce and became a backup singer for a popular artist during high school, which is why she never finished. Her first individual success came at the age of 20, and she has been filthy rich ever since then, even despite the horror at the box office. Her only real setback in her life was a divorce, and considering the incredibly alimony she's raking in from Tommy Mottola, I'm sure she dries her eyes on all those fat checks she rakes in. Take that, artists who struggled to make it all of their lives. Of course, adding to my ire is the fact that she constantly appears in her press kits in her underwear and shows up at events overdressed by about $1000, that might add to it. She's driving me crazy, but the worst part is that she just won't go away.

I don't know how or why, but she continues to chart and she continues to dupe diva teenage girls into buying her albums. I would have appreciated her efforts much more if she was, oh, modest, or even appropriate, but she's always on TRL with her breathy voice and her skimpy outfits. I'm sick of people who don't even write their own songs, or who are still trying to capitalize on so-called hardships that happened ten years ago. I miss the singer pictured at left, whose music I could enjoy. Now I'm stuck with the one at right. Skantified. No one likes women like that, except for bad men. Mariah, leave me alone!