Nowhere does this happen more than in Hollywood, where actors love to cash in—I mean, use—their fame. They use it to sell books. They use it to sell perfume. Some even lapse and use it for good by raising money for charities. Usually they get over it. Then there are those who use their fame for political purposes, thinking that just because they played a scientist in a movie of the week they should testify before a congressional committee on how wearing an aluminum foil helmet can keep the electromagnetic waves from leaking out of a cell phone and into your brain. (Duh!)

     Lots of actors have done this. Not wear aluminum foil helmets like they should, but rather appear before Congress. And lest you doubt that this is something that should be stopped, please cut out the next sentence and tack it to the wall where you can look at it daily:

     This points up just how little people know about what’s good for them. All along Ajeti thought she needed medical care. It turns out what she really needed was a video copy of The Jackal subtitled in Albanian. She’ll learn.

     Actors aren’t the only ones guilty of using their fame. Anyone who’s anyone is doing it, and these days it doesn’t take much. Paula Jones has a psychic hotline. Cifford Irving is trying to peddle his admittedly made-up Howard Hughes interviews. And Monica Lewinsky turned a few minutes on her knees into a book deal and a slot on Saturday Night Live. Sure the book wound up in the half-price bin after only two and a half months, but so what? Her advance was more than enough to let her dump those stylish berets and fill her hat rack with baseball caps.

     The question isn’t so much whether we do or don’t need to see this—something tells me we will—the question is, does this belong on Oprah, where they’ll reconcile, hug, and cry a lot, or on the Jerry Springer Show under the name "Guys, the Jailbait they Screwed, and Their Forgiving Wives With A Bullet Still Lodged in Their Head" where they’ll fight while the audience chants, "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!"? I vote we give it to Geraldo Rivera. After all, this could be even bigger than when he opened Al Capone’s vault—this time we’ll be able to stare at the TV and see three empty, vacuous, cobweb-filled spaces.

     Trying to keep your name in the public’s mind isn’t easy. It takes a lot of hard work. You have to make sure people not only remember it, but remember it the way you want them to. George Bush (the trying-to-be-president one, not the I-wish-I-did-something-while-I-was-president one) is doing his best to keep his good name clean. To help do that, he’s gone and bought up over 60 domain names so people can’t have web sites with addresses like bushsucks.com and bushbites.com.

     Maybe what they need then is fame insurance. After all, they already insure their body parts—leaving one to wonder whether Pamela Anderson Lee filed a claim against her insurance company for loss of assets or vice versa—so why not their fame itself?

     They could try contacting Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson, an insurance company in England with a name longer than the Magna Carta which specializes in insuring the, uh, unusual. This is the company that’s sold 40,000 Alien All Risk policies covering loses in the event the policyholders are abducted, eaten, or have microchips implanted by aliens. This is the company that’s insured over 15,000 women against having a virgin birth at the millennium (which points out just how misguided some people can be—what better way to bring instant fame, fortune, book deals, and a slot on Saturday Night Live than to mother the new Messiah?). And this is the company that’s issued policies to protect against becoming a werewolf, a house being haunted, and your dying or being injured by ghosts.