A plea for new celebrities

One thing about America is this: if you're famous, you're never out of work. An actor who was as best a has-been and at worst a never-was, Joey Lawrence, for example, whose entire emotional range is varying eyebrow maneuvers whilst "whoa"ing, can now, in late 2006, not only get onto a reality show where he learns to dance, but can also go on a multi-city tour, selling out arenas with other paragons of thespian virtue (Mario Lopez), and foxtrot his way to the further outskirts of "that guy" fame and glory.

Of course, if you aren't attractive or spry enough to land yourself on a didactic reality show, you can always host a second-tier game show. Since you're a bottom-rung also-ran, the producers will feel it necessary to make the contestants a parade of spastically energetic mongoloids who would rather going into fits of epileptic yelping than actually try to figure out the game.

Of course, if you aren't bald enough or poor enough to be given Emcee duties on "Deal or No Deal" or "Identity," you can always be the sibling of another famous person. Or you can marry another famous person, impregnate them with your magical famous mansperm (as opposed to the highly underrated womensperm, of course), and sell the pictures to US Weekly. Or you can have a reality show about your family that exposes your hitherto imagined lunacy. Or you can box other once-famous sit-com bit players.

Or you can do something. Maybe the problem with pop culture right now is that we reward ex-stars for being has-beens. Maybe we don't have enough room for the future Dustin Diamonds of the world, the future that-guy-who-was-Urkels. We're saturating the airwaves with people whose fifteen minutes are now well into the hour-and-a-half range. It's getting out of hand. After all, who will be our children's Danny Bonaduce?

You see: we need new stars today so that they can be has-been stars tomorrow. I don't know exactly how to make this happen though. I know it involves shutting VH1 down between the hours of...well, really all day, I think. They can still play videos though, which they actually do, unlike MTV who pioneered the wildly experimental recycling of reality TV stars, so that you get to see the same emotionally imbalanced frat boy every third season of Road Rules. We also need a moratorium on hiring of anyone you recognize from a show you watched while in short pants whose name you can't remember. They're out. They now need real jobs. I hear they're hiring at Quizno's.

But I'm not a heartless man. No. We can grandfather in all our current celebritisn'ts. They get a free pass for two seasons. This will give them time to make future plans before they too will be toasting my lunches and asking me what size cola I want.

Oh, and this weekend, we're playing Bottom of the Hill on New Year's Eve. You know this. I know this. But reminders are fun, right? Everyone loves a nag. Hope to see you there. Unless you live in some other country, in which case, you can be late.

Be back in aught seven.