I'M A CELEBRITY, GET ME OUTTA HERE

Dear Readers,

Fame, ain't it a b**ch.

In a week where a very weird couple apparently gate-crashed an official state dinner at the White House, another crash was taking place about 1,000 miles away. Inadvertently, golf great Tiger Woods has turned a humble fire hydrant near his Floridian gated community estate into a cultural icon merely by crashing into it at 2:30 in the morning. Woods, who may be the most world-famous sports celebrity since Muhammad Ali, is now signalling to the rest of the planet that he would like to be left alone (and probably crawl beneath that hydrant) and have everybody just forget about the whole thing. But that's not possible when you are as well-known as he is, and for those who are just dying to be celebrities, it ought to be a morality tale-like warning, easily on a par with Aesop.

The wealthy goofballs who circulated at the White House state dinner apparently had it all - money, social status (of a sort), fairly good looks, good health and the savoir faire sufficient to blend in with the invited guests. Even with all that, they were suffering from a 'disease' that more and more Americans seem to be coming down with -they weren't famous. Forget the 'swine flu', 'Fame Flu' is a condition there seems to be no vaccine for, and it's spreading.

If your stomach is still strong enough to watch TV, you must have a number of 'reality shows' on your favorites list, and they are invariably populated by completely talent-free, utterly banal human beings who somehow grabbed the public's (and the TV producers) attention and attained the ultimate accolade - a hit TV show featuring themselves. The list is too great and nauseating to review, but when nobodies like Jon & Kate (plus 8) become cable-ratings kings and wind up on the cover of every publication from People to Popular Mechanics (having watched it once, one can only imagine what the lower-rated shows must be like), then you know that the 'fame coin' is seriously debased. Yet reality-show stars are actually only useful to the media until a real star like Tiger goes and screws up and blows them off the headlines.

So Mr. Woods hides out while speculation and unsourced gossip about what caused the wee-hours accident (and why he's reluctant to explain the circumstances around it) swirl around all media from TV to Twitter. The complete ordinariness of Woods's situation stands in stark contrast to the astonishing lack of security revealed by the White House gatecrashers, and yet his story won't die. Being famous for being famous is one thing, but real celeb-juice (based on talent, mostly) is still a rare commodity. Despite this truism, I can hear it even now, in some midwestern livingroom - "Ma, call the press, I think junior's trapped in an out-of-control hot-air balloon. And don't forget to call Hollywood, too". Andy Warhol didn't know the half of it.