Forty-eight people have been reported ill, sixteen dangerously so, as the result of inhaling “fumes of fame,” a phenomenon that physicians readily admit sounds metaphorical but in fact refers to the actual pollution of the air by immoderate thoughts of wealth and privilege. “We should probably have gone with something more technical,” said Dr. Lincoln Allman-Renovo, the lead researcher on the team that discovered FOF, as it is commonly known. “The news was talking about ‘affluenza,’ which is clever but isn’t really medical. Maybe we were in that frame of mind. We assigned it to Patrick, the youngest member of our team, who is also a published poet. He went away for the weekend on a kind of late honeymoon—he had been married a few months earlier but never had time to himself as a result of our work—and he and his husband were up late one night and Edward, his husband, was making light fun of a line in a poem that Patrick had written when he was a college student, something about ‘the loom of time,’ and I’m sure they were drinking—honeymoon, remember?—and the name just floated into Patrick’s head.” Another proposal, submitted by Dr. Karen Youklis, was “renownitis.”
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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