Fame Isn't So Fickle, After All

I don't get celebrity. I mean, I understand why some people get to be famous: they could be really talented or beautiful or, in the case of 90% of reality show contestants, devoid of any talent, but are such attention whores they're willing to let the world laugh at them. That isn't what confuses me. No, what I don't get is why some people are still famous. I thought the whole point of fame was that it was supposed to be fleeting: you know, we all get our 15 minutes and then society moves on to the next person. I've always thought that for a person to make the news they should at least be newsworthy. Who we choose to give fame-extensions to are the ones that I wonder about.

That's why I don't understand why someone like Leif Garrett getting busted for drug possession is big news. Seriously, yesterday it was the third headline in the Google Entertainment News section. Without going to Wikipedia, could you honestly tell me what made Leif Garrett famous in the first place? Was he an actor or a singer? And was he famous in the 70s or the 80s? Beats the hell out of me. The only thing I know him for is being a drug addict and having a really sad Behind the Music special, where I bet going into it even the producers of that show thought they were scraping the bottom of the celebrity barrel. Basically, the guy is a drug addict; so is it really news that he was caught with drugs? At what point do we stop getting updates on one-hit wonders of the 70s?

Fortunately, I have an idea for a system (don't I always?). If it has been five years since your last hit song/movie came out, then you can get a thirty second blurb at the end of the first news block. If we haven't heard from you in ten-to-fifteen years then it's twenty seconds at the end of the second segment and if you haven't put out a good album or movie in over twenty years then we don't have to hear about you anymore. Also, just for clarification, showing up on a VH1 'celebrity' show does not count as re-emerging and actually in some cases that should count as all the updates we are ever going to get on certain entertainers. I think this would really clean up news telecasts and allow us to stop hearing things like, "Bobby Brown in the news today..." (Really, I loved "My Prerogative" as much as the next person, but that song came out in 1988. Enough is enough.)