Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Brushes with celebrity

Who says you need to go down the coast to LA to spot celebrities? While walking up University Avenue in Berkeley just now I passed a vaguely familiar face lurking in a street corner looking bemused. I identified him as someone I'd seen in a news story last night, someone who's having a 15-minutes-of-fame experience at the moment courtesy of a truly appalling audition performance on the American version of Pop Idol (which has inexplicably been renamed American Idol round here) by the name of William Hung. Google tells me that he's a student at UC Berkeley, so I guess seeing him around there isn't at all surprising.

I have to say I feel kind of sorry for him, having seen how he's being chewed up by a hungry media looking for comic-relief stories - it seems to me that news stories on American TV networks aren't considered broadcastable unless the two anchors can do a fake laugh at the end of the report and make some witty comments at each other. Still, I hope he makes a goodly wad of cash out of this while it lasts and then gets back to focusing on his studies when, as is crushingly inevitable, the media gets tired of him and the fame thing all ends.