every time you read Life & Style, God kills a kitten

Word on the street (the "street" being the "internet") is that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are breaking up, which is always very classy when the female half of the pair is some-odd eight months preggers. Thanks to Gawker for the even classier headline "TomKat to Kill Their Kittens?"

Of course, Gawker is just quoting Life & Style, which reports:

TomKat will keep up the charade through spring, living at Cruise’s Beverly Hills compound until the baby is born, at which point they’ll split. Cruise, always the gentleman, will buy Holmes a house nearby so that he can spend plenty of time with his little spawn....

Baby aside, I think it might be salubrious if normal people -- not just those excessively concerned with bad press -- developed complex, multi-phased breakup plans. I was once in a long, drawn-out breakup (we lived together, broke up at the beginning of the month, and continued living together til the end of the month when one of us moved, after which help was provided in the move itself, followed by a tapering off of contact to the eventual frequency and depth of one-line-emails-on-birthdays-only), and thought how odd it would have been to have done it some drastically more abrupt way. Once I read some kind of Wiccan website (I like to think I've seen everything on the internet) that contained a tale of people holding a sort of solmen breakup ceremony, in which they honored the good things about their relationship and did a lot of stuff with candles, because you know Wiccans love their candles.