That fame meme
There's a meme doing the rounds where one is supposed to list 'famous' people one has met. I thought about this for a while (actually while walking up 45 floors worth of stairs). I came to the conclusion that I really don't have a good working definition for 'famous'. At one end it's obvious. Barack Obama is famous. We could all agree on that. We could probably all agree that someone like Omar Sharif or Pele counts as famous. But then there is a huge grey area. Shane Warne is famous but probably only in the eyes of those who follow cricket. Is an Archbishop of Canterbury famous by definition or only if they do something memorable like get murdered? How about Cabinet Ministers? Belgian Cabinet Ministers? Persons in art and entertainment? I could real off a score of 'famous' opera singers and half of you wouldn't recognise more than one or two. I'm sure you could do the same to me with pop singers or SFF writers, let alone that guy who played the 27th Doctor or who was Buffy's sidekick in Season 17.
I was going to do a poll but I couldn't even frame the questions.
The meme also has a 'two degrees of separation' component. To me that's just plain silly as the list would be endless. After all, one only has to know one person who has sat in the Commons for 20 years to pretty much claim every MP for that period plus who knows what else. (Assuming MPs are famous!). My "two degrees" list would include every professional rugby player in the British Isles and New Zealand plus Robert Mugabe, the Pope, Nelson Mandela and the entire World Cup winning Brazilian football squads of 1958 and 1962.
I was going to do a poll but I couldn't even frame the questions.
The meme also has a 'two degrees of separation' component. To me that's just plain silly as the list would be endless. After all, one only has to know one person who has sat in the Commons for 20 years to pretty much claim every MP for that period plus who knows what else. (Assuming MPs are famous!). My "two degrees" list would include every professional rugby player in the British Isles and New Zealand plus Robert Mugabe, the Pope, Nelson Mandela and the entire World Cup winning Brazilian football squads of 1958 and 1962.