WHY IS IT THAT MOST celebrities in the culture today are people I've never heard of? I always thought fame had to do with being well known to the public, with being easily recognized on the street, with being, you know … famous.

But these are also people who'd never go to the supermarket. The reason is that celebrities, at least according to my definition, don't buy their own groceries. They have their assistants do it, or they order special deliveries from organic farms or, more likely, they don't eat at all.

That's because they're not quite real people, which is exactly why we love them. Or at least we used to. These days it seems that only crotchety dinosaur types like me still harbor such provincial notions of what it means to be famous.

I know what you're thinking right about now: Here's another column about the vulgarity of contemporary celebrity culture, with sentences that start with phrases like "these days." Believe me, I feel your nausea.

But I've also been feeling something else lately that goes beyond my cluelessness about who's on the cover of In Touch Weekly. Call it reverse indifference. You know how you can walk into a room that smells like garbage, initially be bowled over with disgust but eventually grow immune to the odor? That's the opposite of what's happened to my celebrity radar. Whereas I used to merely ignore news about the faux famous and their tabloid-targeted exploits, I now notice it and feel repulsed. And I'm pretty sure that's the whole idea.

Obviously, celebrity repulsion has been in the air in recent weeks. I don't need to name names, but suffice it to say that popular culture's approval rating (and, in turn, that of the media that can't get enough of it) is at an all-time low. Whether we're talking about a deceased gold-digger or an apparently deranged astronaut (and, be honest, we're still talking about both of them — all the time) it's pretty clear that it's never been a worse time to be famous. For one thing, the competition is stiff. (The Dixie Chicks, celebs with some old-school fame value, swept the Grammys, but we're still more interested in paternity claims and NASA-issue diapers.) For another thing, celebrity is just not as valuable as it used to be. By the look of things, just about anyone can get it — or at least something closely approximating it.