I grew up thinking Elizabeth Taylor was my cousin.

“Poor Liz,” my mom would say with a sigh. “She’s back in the hospital. Her back’s acting up again. And she’s divorced another husband.”

Elizabeth Taylor was my mother’s favorite actress. From the time mom was a teenager, she’d hurry to the drugstore after school to pick up the latest fan magazine and read every word about the movie stars.

She wanted to know all the details about her favorite stars – Jimmy Stewart, Susan Hayward, Spencer Tracy and, most importantly, the queen herself, Elizabeth Taylor.

Mom talked about Liz so much and with such familiarity, I thought she was related to our family, and we should light a candle at church to atone for Liz’s wayward lifestyle.

These days, we don’t have to wait for the latest magazine to show up in the grocery store check-out line to find out about the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

All we have to do is click around on the internet, and we can find out every secret about every star in every country.

Besides the fact that most of that information’s untrue – just as it was in the 1950s – the juiciest tidbits on the Internet come with the headache of clickbait.

According to the Urban Dictionary, the bait is a link that makes readers want to click on it.

“You won’t believe what this guy does after he works out…”

“Big companies hate her…”

“Four thousand ways to reuse a plastic bag…”

Just like the fan magazines, we want to know the answers to these questions. Could a shark really eat a Navy helicopter? What truths did Pam and Jim from “The Office” teach us about love? And how could we pass up an article telling us all the ugly truths about “Gilligan’s Island?”

That’s the trick – they know people want to look behind the curtain and find out the real reason Ethel was always a few pounds heavier than Lucy.

Clickbait does everything it can to reel readers in, and some of the articles are practically impossible to resist, especially if it’s midnight, you’ve got insomnia and the fridge is empty.

I’ll admit it – I click on those ads, even though I know I shouldn’t. The last one I clicked on was the before and after photos of a North Carolina town that showed the impact of Hurricane Florence’s flooding.

I had to click through four articles and four photos to get to the flood pictures. They looked familiar to those of us who experienced Harvey – flooded streets, houses with water up to the roofline and elderly people in boats carrying their cat or dog.

There wasn’t any news, however, about the condition of the people in those towns, their homes, the repair effort nor up-to-date information on water and rain levels.

There were a lot of ads about making scrumptious mac and cheese dishes and 13 legit ways to scramble eggs.

And here I thought there was one way to scramble an egg – melt butter in a frying pan, crack an egg in a bowl, stir it with a fork, pour it in the hot pan and stir until the eggs are the consistency you like.

So I didn’t click on that ad because I don’t care if there are 12 other ways to scramble an egg. One is just fine with me.

Sorry, Madison Avenue – or wherever your clickbait offices are now located – this consumer has learned her lesson and won’t be clicking on anything that looks suspicious.

Unless the article’s about Elizabeth Taylor.

That I gotta check out.

Liz is, after all, family.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.