It’s rare indeed to find someone whose fascination with the phenomenon of fame exceeds my own storied obsession, but I have indeed located one such sick and deluded soul, and his name is Toby Young. And here is the smartest thing he has to say on the subject, shamelessly stolen from his book The Sound of No Hands Clapping(oh, but before we get to that: when his book launch was broken up by a lubricated brawl of some degree of violence and spectacularity his pregnant wife tried to break up the fight, but he stopped her, saying, “Are you crazy? This is fabulous publicity!”):

There are so many different varieties of fame these days we need to develop a whole new vocabulary to describe them. At the moment, the best we can do is to rank celebrities according to whether they’re A-list, B-list, etc. But even if we use every letter of the alphabet that still only gives us 26 different types. That’s surely not enough. Eskimos have 47 different words for snow. Shouldn’t we have 47 words for celebrity?

Selah.

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