The Celebrity on Your Back

Fun, breezy nose-thumbing here of "Celebrity Worship Syndrome," detailed recently by Dr. John Maltby in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Brief aside of little importance: The author mentions that director David Lynch doesn't like cooking smells; no food is ever cooked in his home. This may sound like a strange neurosis, but I sometimes wonder whether such ideosyncracies flower inevitably when you can afford to indulge them.

Comments

[SM]

"Brief aside of little importance"

A similar theme was discussed in Bellow's "More die of heartbreak" vis-a-vis the various mental disorders prevalent the first world vs. their absence in poorer nations.

[Jim]

I do believe Sara's observation is essentially correct. My wife is not particularly fond of the lingering smell of cooked food in our house, but we just turn on the vent fan....

[Jim]

A fun little rant (the first link, anyway). It seems to be making two good points, one explicit and one implicit. The explicit one is that escapism is a natural, maybe instinctive, human trait. The implicit one is that all human behavior is on a continuum, which often gives health professionals the ability to expand the range of behaviors (and the number of potential customers) in need of 'treatment'. Caveat emptor...

[joe]

There are psychiatric disorders that are more common in the third world than in Western society. There's amok, and the one where you think your penis is going to withdraw into your body and strangle you. People have actually died of the second one.

[Todd Fletcher]

"...and the one where you think your penis is going to withdraw into your body and strangle you."

Yeah, I hate that!

[joe]

I was unaware "Fletcher" was a Phillipino name.

Hold on tight, buddy!

[Anonymous]

George Washington didn't like the smell of cabbage cooking. The kitchen of his Mount Vernon estate is a separate stand-alone building, away from the main house.

[Anonymous]

If you visit to Park Sansoucci in Potsdam, Germany, and take guided tour, there's a pair of "small" palaces across a plaza from the really big palace. One of them was "the kitchen" for precisely the same reason: Fredrich didn't like the smell of cooking in the house.

I forget what the other small palace was for.

[Tim]

Uh, I think the kitchens were generally built apart from the main house in warmer climates in the past because of the heat generated, the poor ventilation, and the lack of HVAC systems.

[Kevin Carson]

Joe:

Exactly HOW does such a belief kill someone? I mean, I could understand if the penis actually DID strangle its (his?) victim--but a psychiatric disorder?? Does the victim kill himself in an attempt to "remedy" the problem (maybe strangling the penis back), or what? I saw a movie a couple of years ago where a guy's hand took on a will of its own, but this is just going too far.

[Tuning Spork]

I just wanna say that I can't stand the lingering smell of...is that bacon frying? Oooo, gotta go!

[geophile]

In Ethiopia, Anorexia is just called starving to death.

As to kitchens being separate from the main house in the 18th and 19th century, it was so that the kitchen could catch fire without destroying the entire (usually large and expensive) residence.

[Frenk]

Does ANYONE like the smell of cabbage cooking?

[Frenk]

Does ANYONE like the smell of cabbage cooking?

[joe]

Kevin,

I understand that they "die of fright," which probably means heart attacks, strokes, or some other condition brought on by hyper-stress.

You've gotta admit: it's a pretty stress-inducing fear.

What's interesting is that this is not just an isolated delusion, but one that crops up from time to time in certain cultures, but not others. Why would this be?

[Jim]

Joe,

That is an interesting question. I'd like to know the answer to that. But it shouldn't be surprising that different cultures have different fears - I doubt many people die of anorexia nervosa in Ethiopia, for example....

[Lonewacko]

If David Lynch were in a third-world country, he'd probably have died or been killed by now. It's money and modern first-world conditions that allow people to get away with things like that. And, that's not a value judgment, just a statement of fact.

Say, is Reason going to cover the William Morris Agency shutting down boycott-hollywood.us?

[Lowther Tori]

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