I feel sorry for celebrities, don't you?

The whole celebrity concept is a weird one for me to grasp. The more I think about celebrities and their problems, the more I wonder if we should admire them, or pity them. The moment a person attains any level of celebrity, they are drawn into a relationship with their fans, whether they want it, or not.

When you can't even carry on a conversation with someone because the other individual doesn't see you as just another guy, but rather some great subjective 'thing' - you really can't do much but nod, and hope they go away. It's no wonder so many celebrities can't relate to their fans and end up only being able to socialize, date, and marry within their own circles. Some people think it is because of elitism on their part, but I would offer that it is because of a lack of options.

This relationship has its good sides, and its bad. It's all a matter of scale really, the bigger the celebrity, the more fans they have, the more good fans, the more bad fans. So it reasons that the larger a celebrity is, the more stark raving mad fans there are that go around causing trouble.

Why bring up such an obvious observation? ... Glad you asked.

Recently I began to apply his odd bit of logic to everything else, besides the obvious actor/fan model. Take politics for example, on each side you have people supporting their celebrity, their politician. Yet, on each side you have a good number of these bad fans as well. Since millions of people get involved in politics each year, it reasons that if you look hard enough at the political fans, you'll find a plethora of fruit cakes who ought to be living in a padded room with no doors rather then spending time in a voting booth.

I've always admired the work of Tatsuya Ishida of the infamous Sinfest. His strips can be so straight forward and honest that it sometimes reminds me of days long ago, when Bill Watterson still inked his magic for us.

Well, the days of Watterson may be gone, but not forgotten. I think Sinfest captures some of the light that Watterson tried to shine on us. One of Ishida's characters that I always love to see is named Seymour. See, Seymour's deal is he is a fan, a fan of god. Perhaps 'fanboy' would be the better term for him, a character so rap'd up in his zealot idealogy that he lacks even a sense of humor about it.

I think it's safe to suggest that there is no greater a celebrity then god, so I'm pretty sure he has the most fans. If you look at it this way, we ought to pity god, because he has to deal with more lunatic fanboys then anyone else in the known universe.

It's no wonder he stopped answering his mail and just flooded the place.

Speaking of email...

I been getting mail being forwarded back and forth from myself and other website owners regarding the problems surrounding a certain adbanner provider, and the entire web adbanner network fall out of the last year.

I think Lowtax of somethingawful said it best in a article he wrote found here. The entire system seems to be falling apart when there is no reason for it to be dying. The model is sound, advertising works, it works for radio, for television, and for the internet. So where is the problem? Who is to blame?

As an American, I'm always looking for someone to blame for my problems, It's just part of culture of passing the buck. So in this instance, I blame the adbanner networks for not accurately figuring out who a website's audience really is via demographics. It doesn't do the advertisee' much good if their product, lets say for example's sake; adult toys and sexual aid devices, are advertised on a religious website. Unless that website's religion involves some pretty kinky stuff...

I also blame the advertisee's for placing blind faith in adbanner networks to properly help market their product and for not checking into where they are being advertised.

I think the model of making money on the net is sound, but right now there are too many crooks and frauds who have been milking the system and bamboozling their clients that a panic has errupted which is hurting even legitamate adbanner networks.

Eventually the snake oil salesmen will find a new marketplace to push their poisons, and then the advertisors will return, and this time maybe they will be a little wiser.