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Sometimes I wonder about the media and what they do. When actor Heath Ledger died, they milked everything they could out of it. I liked Heath Ledger, and only saw him in one movie, Brokeback Mountain, but he nailed that character perfectly and really impessed me.

The day he died the media was in a frenzy, camped out at his apartment, even reporting inaccuracies in their rush to be the first to report something. The cameras trained on people as they walked by, gauging their grief, was nuts.

I thought it was horrible for everyone to be speculating on what happened, the hows and whys and whos about it.

They then followed his ex-fiance and mother of his child, Michelle Williams, to train the camera on her face and gauge her facial expressions as she walked. Sheesh, let her grieve in peace.

His parents found out he died when they heard it on the radio. I don’t blame the media for that, I blame the police department for not notifying the family immediately.

I felt bad for people who had a microphone shoved into their face while a reporter asked how they felt that he died.

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JACKSON, Miss. - A state lawmaker wants to ban restaurants from serving food to obese customers — but please, don’t be offended. He says he never even expected his plan to become law.

“I was trying to shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi,” said Republican Rep. John Read of Gautier, who acknowledges that at 5-foot-11 and 230 pounds, he’d probably have a tough time under his own bill.

More than 30 percent of adults in Mississippi are considered it obese, according to a 2007 study by the Trust for America’s Health, a research group that focuses on disease prevention.

The state House Public Health Committee chairman, Democrat Steve Holland of Plantersville, said he is going to “shred” the bill.

“It is too oppressive for government to require a restaurant owner to police another human being from their own indiscretions,” Holland said Monday.

The bill had no specifics about how obesity would be defined, or how restaurants were supposed to determine if a customer was obese.

Al Stamps, who owns a restaurant in Jackson, said it is “absurd” for the state to consider telling him which customers he can’t serve. He and his wife, Kim, do a bustling lunch business at Cool Al’s, which serves big burgers — beef or veggie — and specialty foods like “Sassy Momma Sweet Potato Fries.”

“There is a better way to deal with health issues than to impose those kind of regulations,” Al Stamps said. “I’m sorry — you can’t do it by treating adults like children and telling them what they can and cannot eat.”

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