My 2 cents

You may find Kevin Federline an unlikely spokesman for the "Save the Penny" campaign. I too experienced feelings of doubt when I heard the news. Couldn't the organization have found a more credible advocate to champion its cause? But when K-Fed justified the penny's continued existence by stating "I feel good about the penny", I knew the campaign had found their guy.


Could it be that K-Fed is the penny incarnate: obnoxiously ubiquitous, nearly valueless, and frustratingly unavoidable?


Perhaps. Kevin Federline joins the growing ranks of celebrities who are famous for being famous. This was made painfully aware to me when I saw him promoting his new rap album on Ellen. Watching him perform gave me the same sense of vicarious embarrassment you sometimes experience in a Fast and Testimony meeting when the member chooses to express her sentiments in song. Unaccompanied. Sadly, those performances are at least as good, if not better, than K-Fed's attempt to break into the music biz.


Paris Hilton leads the growing number of vacuously talentless celebrites. Sure, she's starred in movies, advertisements, and even released an album, but the theatre she most frequently performs in, and is best known for, is real life. I don't care to follow the chronicles of Paris, but their details are almost unavoidable. During the height of her imprisonment debacle, I was relieved to find at least one tabloid promoting itself as "Paris-free", but crestfallen when I found the subject of their headline story to be... Nicole Richie.


I encountered an irritatingly striking example of the 'famous for being famous' phenomenon while living in London. Her name was Chantelle Houghton, a reality t.v. star who had garnered attention because of her uncanny resemblance to Paris Hilton. Looking at her gave me the sense of being in a living room, with a picture on the wall depicting that living room, with a picture on the wall depicting the picture of the picture of the living room, ad infinitum. Or ad nauseum.

This multiplication of identities, this replication of resemblances, was also made manifest in England in another, more pecuniary form: the two pence. If you think the penny is annoying, try two stuck together. It seemed I was always receiving the dreaded coin as change for a transaction, but was never able to reciprocate and actually spend it. Even now they turn up every once in awhile, in the bottom of a book bag or the pocket of a seldom worn jacket, daring me to find any utility in their existence.

If England ever launches a 'Save the Two Pence' campaign, I think Chantelle Houghton would make a great spokeswoman. There's a certain poetry in one irrelevant duplication defending another.