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Good news: Tiger Woods return to advertising. Bad news: Involuntarily and for PETA. 
Moments after his sex scandal was revealed, companies pulled their Tiger Woods ads and the golfer went from ubiquitous to pretty much invisible. Is Tiger’s days as product endorsement champ over? Not to PETA!
The animal-rights group came up with the "cheeky spay-and-neuter" billboard above (without the golfer’s approval) that will surely bring a resurgence to all those bad Tiger Woods jokes:
It will be a challenge to find an advertiser to put up the sign, acknowledged Virginia Fort, a campaigner with PETA who is working on the project.
"It’s a fun, tongue-in-cheek approach. We hope these billboard companies will understand," Fort said.
She said the billboard isn’t meant to offend the golfer, his family or fans, but to prevent millions of cats and dogs from being euthanized at shelters each year. [...]
"We’re sure Tiger will appreciate our attempt — from a story that’s distracted the world and followed Tiger — to turn it into something positive for little tigers," she said.
I guess that in scientific publishing, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The textbook Get a Grip on Physics by John Gribbin, featured in Tiger Woods’ recent SUV crash, has shot up the bestseller list. Its Amazon ranking has moved from 396,224 to 2,268:
Speaking in a break between lectures this morning, the author, John Gribbin, said he was “delighted that anyboy’s reading my books. I just wish it was one that’s still in print.”
Part of a planned series on subject areas which was cancelled after poor sales, Get a Grip on Physics is an illustrated introduction to modern physics first published in 1999 which tells the story of developments in physics since the 1950s, charting the discovery of the four forces of nature, the search for grand unified theories and the beginnings of string theory.
“It’s not a book you sit down and read from cover to cover,” said Gribbin, “you can dip in and out of it. Tiger Woods is absolutely my target audience. He’s busy, hasn’t got a lot of time, but wants to catch up on what’s happening in physics.”
We need to arrange for a celebrity to become embroiled in a major scandal while reading Neatorama.
Link via Radley Balko | Photo: Handout/Getty Images
So. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know by now that Tiger Woods got into a car accident on Friday morning. A media frenzy followed, fueled by a rumor of Tiger’s infidelity and his silence over the whole thing. Today, he announced that he wouldn’t play in his own golf tournament.
Talking heads proclaim that the public is due an explanation, and that the story simply isn’t going to go away without a public accounting of who (Tiger) had done what (or whom, as it were implied).
No, this post isn’t about Tiger, his accident, alleged affair, or whatnot. I don’t care about that – but what is interesting to me is why people care about such matters. If you follow this kind of news, let me ask you: what is it about celebrities that capture your fancy? What is so interesting about Jon and Kate, or Brad and Angelina or whomever.
Jaye L. Derrick and Shira Gabriel of the Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, SUNY, published a study that "connections" to celebrities or parasocial relationships, allow people with low self-esteem to view themselves more positively:
The current research demonstrates that parasocial relationships can have self-enhancing benefits for low self-esteem people that they do not receive in real relationships. These parasocial relationships, which have very low risk of rejection, offer low self-esteem people an opportunity to reduce their self-discrepancies and feel closer to their ideal selves.
“Even ‘fake’ relationships with celebrities, relationships without any actual contact, can have benefits for the self,” the authors conclude. “We found that parasocial relationships can sometimes have benefits for people with low-self esteem that ‘real’ relationships do not.”
Or is it genetics? Duke University Medical Center neurobiologist Michael Platt found that adult rhesus macaque monkeys would pay (by giving up their favorite drink, Juicy Juice cheery juice) to look at images of dominant "celebrity" monkey of their pack.
So here’s my question to you again: What’s so captivating about celebrities?
(Photo: Jim Epler [Flickr])
