Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Chasing 15 Minutes of Fame
Well I see the ol' webpage odometer has clicked over past 10,000. If this blog were a car it would no longer have that brand-new car feel or smell. My blog's smell has probably not altered much over the last 2 years, but what that smell is I leave for my readers judge.
I'm not sure why we care about round numbers like 10,000. McDonalds use to keep track of the very round number of Billions-Sold. It seems odd, but I actually use to notice whenever the local McDonalds would click over from say 15 Billion Sold to 16 Billion sold. I remember seeing "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1977 and in a blatant case of product placement it showed the exterior of a Macdonald with its sign declaring 24 Billion Sold, which, not too coincidentally I'm sure, coincided with the tally at our own local McDonalds. Somewhere close to 25 years ago, somewhere past the 40 Billion sold mark, McDonalds just went to "Billions Sold."
My Wife and I have eaten more than once at McDonalds in China, the chain is hugely popular there, so these days the Billion ticker would probably go up weekly. I'll take a rough guess that by now McDonalds is at about 500 billion burgers sold. If so, then in maybe 15-30 more years they should hit the Trillion mark. Numbers like a Trillion almost make numbers like 24 Billion seem quaint and understandable, some small multiple of the number of people on the Earth, about 4-5 burgers per person. But When McDonalds gets to the Trillion mark that will mean literally HUNDREDS of burgers sold for every man women and child on the face of the Planet, a stack of burgers that would reach 10 times farther than the moon. At this milestone (or even the current 1/2 trillion one) the number becomes so unimaginably large as to stupefy with its enormity and implied excess. I'm sure this is the main reason McDonalds dropped the Billions-Sold marketing gimmick -- the numbers have become so large as to remind us we eat WAY TOO MANY damn hamburgers.
I've often wondered if anyone from McDonalds ever approached Carl Sagan about saying his trade mark "Biiiilyuhns and Biiiiilyuhns of Stars" (with burgers-sold substituted for stars of course) in a commercial, back when McDonalds still played the billions sold game.
Now to segue from numbers to fame, which are not wholly unrelated, specifically my own fame, which admittedly comes nowhere near McDonalds' or Carl Sagan's of course. In this matter I ponder what would it mean to literally meet Andy Warhol's famous "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," dictum. With the advent of the internet this is still not literally true, but is probably closer to being true than at any other previous point in time.
Getting back to me and my 10,000 page views, lets assume the average person who clicks on BNL remembers "Bare Naked Larry" or "DumbSwede" for one day. A very small number of regulars may remember longer, but they are most likely offset by those who click through BNL and forget it as soon as they leave. Making these assumptions I have accumulated about 10,000 person/days of fame. With 300 million people in America, 150 million people would have to have been aware of me for true fame. Thus far on the Fame-O-Meter I have acquired 10000/150,000,000 days of fame, which equates to, drum roll please, 5.76 seconds of fame! If you demand my fame only accumulate while my pages are actively being read, and here lets assume a generous 5 minutes of reading per view, then my fame plummets to a mere .0192 seconds of fame, about 1/5 the time it takes to blink your eyes. At this rate (assuming the more stringent fame requirement) it should only take 8 more years for my Fame to last more than the blink of an eye. Ah well, at least until then I get to reuse my Eye-Blink GIF image.
