So I was leafing through the various news outlets, trying to find something new and interesting to talk about when I came across this–it’s called Hollywood is Calling, and it’s a service by which you can have celebrities (if you can call them that, sadly, this is pretty much D-lister territory online) call your number of choice for twenty bucks, or send a video greeting card for five.  “Telephonic appearances” are also available for three hundred bucks, and I’m not even sure what those are.

Yeah, I know, it makes ME sad too.  Then I started perusing the lists of available celebrities, and it made me EVEN SADDER.

See, most of who you’d expect is on here–names you barely recognize from television shows you know more than they do.  Lou Ferrigno’s in here, as is former Mr. Belding Dennis Haskins, Otho from Beetlejuice and a few others.  And the list goes on for a while, through a series of “who the hell is that” reactions, until I get to one name.

And then my level of sad just falls through the FLOOR.

John De Lancie’s on here.

As in Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager.

I died a little.  I think you did too.

And I would’ve stayed that way had it not been a suggestion from one of my fellow coffeehousers, that these are merely prerecorded tracks for which celebrities are being paid for each accessing, a small bit of investment property, if you will, that makes them a dividend on every use.

And I brightened up considerably.