It was almost cute the first day. Maybe you saw it. All day a skywriter wrote "Welcome Home Tori & Dean." Right in the sky over Echo Park, and later the zoo. My three-year-old daughter and I had fun making a game of trying to guess the letters as they formed. I thought, well, Tori and Dean, I guess you're home (whoever you are). It looked like an ostentatious gesture, a big expensive greeting to newlyweds from whom? A best friend? A parent? The company? The pilot?

And then the plane was out there again today, writing the same thing, "Welcome Home Tori & Dean," and it started to seem not just compulsive but it looked like graffiti. And not the good kind. Like someone junking a perfectly good blank wall with messages that are not really meant to be shared with strangers, messages that are meant to dominate or wheedle, not entertain or please. And so this was -- junk writing on the great big blue wall above us, the sky. And the paint-out crew? Well, this one was easy. The wind took care of it. But the plane came back.

I didn't know it at the time -- how? how? -- but it turns out it was the Tori & Dean reality show. I guess they thought billboards simply weren't big enough. Because you could always roll your eyes straight to Heaven. We'll fix that, they said. And they did.