How To Tell If You Are Famous
ON the Washignton Post: “A person is truly famous if and only if his or her name, when entered in quotes into the Google search engine, returns more hits than does the phrase ‘she moaned.'”
At more than 2 million Google hits, “she moaned” is a stern mistress. Stern, but fair. For example, we learn (as we would expect) that Hillary Clinton is, indeed, quite famous. Barack Obama, the erstwhile state senator from Illinois and presidential wannabe, remained under the she-moaned line despite all the steamrolling hype until he actually did something: As soon as he won Iowa, he broke through.
The she-moaned line is unsentimental; it measures true fame, not an idealized version of fame, and not some PC notion of who should be famous. Paris Hilton is waaay over the line, but Mother Teresa only flirts with it. When she becomes a saint, she will ascend past it.
The she-moaned criterion can also produce some poetic juxtapositions. Bill Watterson, the reclusive cartoonist, does not hit the line, and he likely never will. But his brilliant
creation that will long outlive him — “Calvin and Hobbes” — is way above it.
(A search for Internet fame, when it hits the stratospheric levels, yields one rather exciting result. You may recall that,
in the mid-1960s, John Lennon infuriated devout Christians by saying that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus Christ. At the time, this was preposterous. Soon, it won’t be. On the day I write this, “the Beatles” and “Jesus Christ” get an identical number of hits.)
I am less famous than Anorak
Posted: 5th, February 2008 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
