Last week I took a brisk walk in my neighborhood park – a delightful park here in Petaluma, called Helen Putnam, with rolling, golden hills and panoramic views – with a friend of mine. As we panted and talked rapidly between sharply inhaled breaths, the sun licking the beaded sweat from our foreheads, my friend mentioned a position she recently applied for.

“The position calls for someone with ‘a passion for pop culture.’ I don’t know if I have a passion for pop culture – I’m not even sure you can have passion for it, but then again I’m not even sure I know anything about pop culture.”

“Yea, this coming from someone who buys US Weekly and pours through it with the voracious hunger of someone plunging a knife through a rib eye steak. That’s about as passionate as you can get.”

It’s true, pop culture once had a definition somewhere in the blurred lines between trivial pursuit and comtemporary culture. It encompasses a knowledge of current events in a wide range of thoroughfares, from art to literature and theater, from new and notable figures to the idolized occurrences on popular shows like One Tree Hill and Fringe. It is all at once trivial and frivolous information, snubbed nosed by the ranks of high-brow society, but trickles through our lives everywhere in the form of vernacular, attitudes, and conversational interludes. Lately, however – and this is my own empirical observation – within the past several years pop culture has winnowed down into, funnily enough, a more trashy version of itself. With Gossip columns, celebrity rags, US Weekly rumor mills, and more, the word “paparazzi” has been so embedded in our colloquial usage that even a popular pop star named Lady Gaga wrote a song after it. Pop culture’s definition has mutated more into the latest celebrity rumors, who is sleeping with whom, spotted sightings – there’s even a “They’re Just Like Us!” section in the US Weekly magazine, with photos of celebrities in their sweatpants and eating. Type in any celebrity’s name in google and you’re sure to be inundated with pop culture websites of all kinds, the queen of which, in my eyes, is PopSugar.com.

PopSugar.com is one of the more popular and visited gossip sites, reaching 8.5 million users per month as of September 2008, and they now have their own iPhone app, PopSugar Mobile. Every day, postings cover the latest celebrity and entertainment news, from Kristen Stewart sightings around town while filming New Moon, to pared down interviews of the latest celebrity to be featured on the cover of Vanity Fair. Touted as “insanely addictive,” PopSugar strikes a clever medium between entertainment news spot and celebrity rag; it manages to be classy and fair without poking around in the mud. No, PopSugar is far too fashionable and savvy to mar her red-laquered Christian Louboutins, kthanks.

Just posted at 11:30 am on PopSugar, today, was a short blurb on Gisele Bundchen and Tom Brady dining in Miami, with some clever sentences linking back to other related gossip news on the site. The post, itself, is short and insignificant, barely an afterthought to write, but it holds trivial news on the pregnant Gisele that so many people, particularly women, find utterly fascinating and gripping – addicting, you could say.  People clamor for this stuff, and PopSugar knows how to deliver its goods, with juicy posts and polls and plenty of pictures for pizzazz.

But, in all fairness, Sugar Inc. covers a wide spectrum of information – PopSugar is simply their biggest avenue. The company, and PopSugar Mobile, is also comprised of FabSugar, BellaSugar, TresSugar, BuzzSugar, CasaSugar, FitSugar, LilSugar, YumSugar, GeekSugar, SavvySugar, and PetSugar. Are you in a diabetic coma yet? These other sites are nowhere near as popular as PopSugar, but they always manage to include a dash of celebrity tidbit, and you may access all of them on the mobile app.

The mobile app is incredibly clean and easy to use – so easy, in fact, there’s hardly anything worth noting aside from it’s pretty and effective. All the latest stories for each of the sub sites are accessed through the main page, FabSugar and BellaSugar and all the others taking up residence as miniaturized, tab versions of themselves, with a simple tap taking you to an in-app listing of all the latest postings. Another tap will take you to the post, also in-app, with the option to mail the site link to someone if you find that article,“Are Brazilian Waxes Necessary” to the liking of your girlfriends (just FYI, I think women already abide by way too many cultural beauty expectations, and the last thing we need to add to feel pretty for a guy is to painstakingly rip out all our pubic hairs on our very tender labia. I don’t think many women like hairy ***holes. Guess men need to rip away!). When you want more stores, just tap Load More Stories at the bottom of the page. It’s actually very refreshing to read about A-Listers and the latest recipe on FitSugar on the go.

I’m actually a fan of YumSugar, GeekSugar and FitSugar, as they cover small postings and blurbs on areas of life interesting to me – the rest I could really do without. But, for comparison’s sake, against other gossip avenues, and other beauty sites, PopSugar is incredibly versatile and is pretty without the fuss – a natural, cool wave of hair middling between US Weekly’s bed hed and Vanity Fair’s heavily sprayed and manicured coif. Free for the taking, the PopSugar Mobile app is one I, and many other girls, will probably be toting around in their slinky iPhone cases.