fanfare for the common man

This country of ours is fame crazy. That's not news but I got an up-close-and-personal introduction to one fame-obsessed man who really should know better. Barry Welsh is an astrophysicist, ferchrisakes, who became driven to grab his piece of the limelight. His notion of success? He nabbed a slot for himself and his family on the Fox Network's reality-TV program "Trading Spouses."

I interviewed Welsh, who works at UC Berkeley's Space and Sciences Lab, by phone. He was a bit over the top (or OTT, as they say in England, from whence Welsh hails) but I initially found him charming. Well, not so, after I viewed the first of his two episodes last Friday. Obnoxious and narcissistic were the two words that kept popping into my head. If you want, you can read a bit about Welsh and find out how "Trading Spouses" works.

This also seems like an opportune moment to cop to the fact that I've succumbed to watching "American Idol." While some of the singers may be talented in a generic way ("Hey, you've got a great voice! Wow!), none of the participants that I've heard this season have voices that seem noteworthy, exciting, or uniquely interesting. Maybe I'm drawn to "AI" (like artificial intelligence, a coincidence?) because it's one big popularity contest. Like one that a good portion of the country has bought into (Note: I haven't started to vote for contestants. Yet.)

Not to get all insider baseball here, but last week when Mandisa (a large black woman with a soulful voice who had been told by the judges that she could sing the phone book and people would listen) was eliminated, I was stunned. I actually shed a handful of tears, no common occurence for me. Judge (and oftentimes scathing critic) Simon Cowell, when questioned by puppy dog MC Ryan Seacrest about Mandisa's dismissal, chalked it up to Mandiva's poor choice of country song. That rationale didn't quite work for me. Plenty of the other contestants had chosen dopey country songs (Taylor sang John Denver's cloying "Country Roads" -- it doesn't get much worse than that). Is Mandisa just too unapologetically fat to be an AI? Maybe. We'll never know.