Celebrities exert a curiously powerful force on us. There’s serious street-cred to be gained from knowing someone famous, or even from just spotting a celeb in a shopping mall. It’s as if you can then bask in a certain reflected glory and get immediate validation: “If I can be connected, even fleetingly, to someone that important, then maybe I’m important too (despite all the evidence to the contraryS)”. Your stock, your personal capital, your clout, your juice (as they say in California) shoots way up the day you collide with Nicole Kidman as you step off an escalator at Myer’s, or the day you find yourself standing one urinal down from Shane Warne.