When I was a boy, my dad took me to one of his favorite childhood spots, Nathans Famous Hot Dog stand in Coney Island.

“What makes them famous, Dad?” I asked with the exacting simplicity and demanding tone of a five year old.

“Because everyone knows about them! And because they’re the best hot dogs in the world.” My father loved him a good Nathan’s frankfurter. It made him feel five years old, perhaps.

I had come to question adult answers to very specific child questions by this point. In the rapidly expanding gray matter tucked away in my bushy skull, it seemed illogical for it to be possible to have more than one answer to a perfectly good question (think of my early Star Trek influence), so I was cautious to accept answers as real truth under these circumstances.

Yet, as so many times it happens, even the passionate yet illogical answers we receive as children have a way of weaving themselves into the way we look at the world as adults. So, the Nathan’s Famous incident had a greater impact on me than perhaps the “Sky is Blue because…” incident or the “rocket fuel doesn’t work in automobiles because…” moment.

The belief that everyone knows something when it is famous and that something famous must be the best has significantly influenced me on my journey, sometimes in a good way, and sometimes in a very confusing way. Since we live in a society mildly obsessed with famous people, places and things, it has been hard not to be impacted by the spin we place upon certain people.

We met Richard Nixon at a Soho restaurant several years after he had resigned from the presidency. My mother got him to autograph a paper napkin and I remember him smiling and jostling his hand at me from across the round table. He seemed nice enough to my pre-political self. I hadn’t seen Frost-Nixon at that point.

That same year, 1976, my mom took me to the Museum of Natural History where we toured the Tutenkhaman exhibit. We stood outside in a long line on a sunny spring afternoon with thousands of other fans gathered to see perhaps the most famous dead person on the planet, with surely the best coffin. I was mesmerized as much by the hysteria surrounding this dead pharaoh  as the exhibit itself. Surely better than a hot dog with god knows what inside of it.

I was pretty much cool-crazed on Bruce Willis in junior high school, especially during the hit show Moonlighting. My friend Chris and I would get on the phone at 9:58pm every Tuesday night as the credits rolled and begin reciting our favorite one liners. “Do bears bear?” “Do butters fly?” “Do pickets fence?” The witty banter between Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd were sublime and we never got enough of Bruce’s flirty, smart-ass grins. They fit perfectly with our hormone riddled, heat-seeking bodies and the trajectory into high school.

You can imagine how hard I squeezed my burgeoning psychic abilities into manifesting a meeting with Mr. Willis the first time I made it to Los Angeles as a 15 year old young man. It was at Catch a Rising Star, the stand up comedy club, that I conjured him. He sat by himself at the bar with a Molson Golden lager (remember those) and stared ahead at the bar, occasionally smiling at a joke from onstage. My friends, already very impressed that I had come through on my predicted star sighting, nudged me out of my seat to go and meet L.A.’s Famous.  I walked up alongside him with a napkin and pen in hand (think Dick Nixon), and with my best charm, fed him his own line back to him. “Mr. Willis, do bears bear?”

“Aw, not now kid, after the show.” And he turned back to his beer.

Nixon was friendlier. I was crushed. Moonlighting went off the air the next year and Demi Moore left him for Ashton Kutcher, eventually. Just saying.

A few years later we were in L.A. again for my cousin’s wedding and as we rode the elevator at the Beverly Hilton, Roseann Barr hopped on, alone and vulnerable to east coast star force newbies. She was even worse than Bruce Willis had been, squeezing out a snarl to our advances. It’s not like we tried to run off with her purse. Famous, yes. Best? Oh, come on.

I went on to meet lots of “famous” folks in my 40 years. Had the pleasure of meeting Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan before a Berkeley Bowl concert, someone who was the best Qawaali Sufi singer in the world, famous most places outside of North America. I saw him exiting an Indian restaurant just hours before I would attend his concert and I screeched my pick-up truck to a halt, jumped out and charged him. His bodyguards promptly stopped me and then the Master waved them to let me through and he gave me a most satisfying bear hug. A pleasing memory.

There have been writers and teachers, spiritual guides, gurus, movie stars and newscasters. Some famous, some the best. Just last summer I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Pollan, Sonia Choquette, Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, Cheryl Richardson, Caroline Myss and a score of others. Granted, many of them were on a Hay House cruise so it was like spearing fish in a barrel but it was all rather pleasant anyhow.

So, what about all these famous people, places, and things? Some call them Proper Nouns. I suppose because most of them require a certain proper behavior when one interacts with them in public. Stand behind this line, don’t move from that spot, pretend not to notice me unless I acknowledge you first, make sure you don’t overstay my kindness as I’ve just listened to your story about why you are so excited to be meeting me… it goes on.

To be truthful, there are lots of very real famous people who act as normal as the next person. There are also a fair amount of wing-nuts who might have traumatized some of the more well known folks roaming the planet with unusually poor boundaries and creepy vibes. Still, I continue to wonder what really makes a person famous. In this day and age, a person can become famous for shouting at the president during a speech or throwing a shoe at another one. Fame can come from waving a light saber around and posting it to YouTube or just telling a reporter that this group of people or that is bad. Instant Fame.

Hardly the best, though. It takes something more to be the best. Being the best is like being Superman. The best is like writing poetry like Hafiz or Rumi. Singing like Ella or Louis. The best is a Gandhi or a Jesus. Top-of-your-game kind of best. I suppose what made Nathan’s hot dogs the best for my dad had little to do with ingredients, proper cooking or even toppings. It was about that epiphany experience when he first realized the greatness for himself. What makes something or someone the best is our relationship to that thing or that person. What if I was in a bad mood when I bit my first Nathan’s hot dog? Would it’s greatness shatter my melancholy and its truth change me for life?

When I was a senior in high school, almost a quarter century ago, my father and I visited some of the best east coast universities this country has to offer as I narrowed down my pool of targets. As my dad surveyed the ivy buildings, manicured lawns and glossy marketing materials, I read the social vibe of each school, studied frat boys’ party week-end T-shirts, noted which student unions hosted fast food chains, and having just recently been deflowered, compiled a list of which schools had the prettiest girls.

I was almost seventeen and while I found the requisite student volunteer led campus tour to be a necessary part of the decision making process, my father saw these tours as real data collection opportunities. “How many first year students receive financial aid?” “What’s the percentage of matriculating students who are in-state applicants?” “How many professors have tenure?” All perfectly intelligent things to ask for a man about to pay for a private college education for his first born son.

Yet, it was always the same question he posed on every tour that made me feel uneasy, even a bit embarrassed. “How many books are in the library?” he would ask with all seriousness.

This school had a million; this one half a mil but boasted a huge archive. Another focused more on their inter-library network that allowed for a “staggering” five million books at my beck and call. I cringed each time because never in a million years could I imagine needing a million books. It had been only a year before when the two of us visited used car lots to find the right ‘first clunker’ and my dad was visibly irritated as he checked under the hood, studied gas mileage claims and accident reports while I sat in the driver seat testing the sub-woofers.

I wanted four wheels because I wanted freedom and a place to listen to really loud music. I wanted to go to college because I wanted freedom and a place to listen to really loud music while kissing girls.

This was before the age of the Internet that so many of us take for granted today. I remember the university bookstore salesman pitching the $3300 Apple Macintosh SE personal computer to my parents as the only way the modern student can keep up with the challenges of campus life. “There’s even an ivy league school up north where they require each incoming student to have a computer and they all digitally transfer their term papers to professors!” That first computer was an expensive word processor and fancy game console; my first Mac had 94% less capability than my IPhone 3GS.

Things change quickly. Within a few months at college I realized I wasn’t the fraternity type, didn’t want to be an investment banker and I actually cared about things besides girls and music.

Last month I attended a presentation given by the Vice President of Google on the future of the Internet. Aside from her astounding extrapolations she discussed one of the most crucial issues facing civilization today. Who owns the Internet? The question of who owns information, whether data can be proprietary, and whether the wealthy of the world can pay for faster, more complete information is something that has been troubling me for some time.

My father understood something about information that I am only just beginning to comprehend. In the past, the number of books in a library meant something because it was somehow connected to class, privilege, and on some level, knowledge.

Since the proliferation of the Internet, however, everyone has had access to books, magazines, photos, films, and just about everything really. Kids at a dusty desktop in Botswana have gobbled up the same level of access as kids in suburban Copenhagen. Relatively free, relatively accessible, relatively connected. The number of books in that Botswana library didn’t matter nearly as much as it did only a decade before.

What we did with that information, all of us, around the world, was fair game. In fact, each one of us had the raw material, INFORMATION, to convert into knowledge, POWER.

The fact that our little planet has been speeding so quickly into the future has had much to do with this democratization of information. The fact that universities care more about their mainframes today than their library circulations has leveled the playing field considerably, and we have all gained as a result.

The notion that access to high speed Internet is a luxury rather than a human right is the type of thinking that steered Europe into the Dark Ages a millenium ago. The belief that some people are more entitled to information than others is a dangerous slope that we must be sensitive to today, not tomorrow or somewhere down the road.

The day the Bible was mass produced was the beginning of the end to the “type” of control organized religion had over the masses. Limiting freedom of information and in turn, the doorway to knowledge, is a manipulation of technology that must be quickly exposed for what it is. Freedom means a lot more to me today than it did when I got my first set of wheels.