THE LIST

Nobody's perfect and no one knows this better than celebrities. Every move, every word is aggrandized by pop machine. You'll either be a saint or Satan depending upon what the media picks up on and how they view it according to their particular form of publicized morality. It's not fair, but hey, that's the game and if you want the boon you've got to pay the piper. But there are always exceptional cases where the media had to do very little to implode a famous deity. This month, we look at...

5 People Who Really Dropped The Ball

1. Tiger Woods

So, you're a media messiah and a god to the world of golf, who plucked it out of a its stuffy country clubs and saved it from extinction in the minds of many outside its small circle. God complexes are hard to resist in this sense and Woods is no exception. He defaulted many times on the wedding day words said so many years ago and now not only he but golf teeters on his (and his publicists') ability to re-market him. Saying mea culpa will only get him so far, Tiger is going to have to reinvent himself as he reinvented the game he has mastered. How can you reinvent a fallen star who was promoted as a saint? How about encouraging him to live up to much of the advertising lionization that put him in this position? Woods has owned up to his own infedility, now he should look back and reconnected much of the misconnect between his actual life and the public image in which he was cast.

2. John Edwards

What a waste. The perfect image, nearly flawless. He was the quinessential everydayman with dirt under his fingernails and a vision for all of America regardless of caste or color. To his advantage was also his sweet southern drawl and his devotion to his wife even when she suffered from cancer. What a chance, right? Unfortunately, Edwards displayed his weakness in full public view cheating on his dear Elizabeth, which is bad enough in itself...but when she had cancer. Edwards is perhaps through on the political circuit, but perhaps there's still hope for him. Ironically on the coattails of his wife. Imagine the Edwards clan taking to church circuit, showing how infidelity can be overcome through Biblical priniciples, regular church attendance and...well, it's an idea. He could also check out The Surreal Life.

3. Mark McGwire

Just when we thought we could focus all our anger on Barry Bonds and his blatant disregard of the traditions of baseball. Traditions being that it's actually you who plays the game and not beefy arms curtesy of hefty doses of steriods. McGwire has demonstrated that one of the essential of baseball's rejuvenation in the late 90s, early 00s - the homerun race - was as much a farce as Bonds record-breaking lifetime homerun record. Is there any way McGwire can make for this aside from publically asking the his homerun record be stripped from the hall of fame? Nope.

4. Steven Page

Many don't remember Barenaked Ladies aside from "One Week" and maybe "Pinch Me", but they've amassed quite a following among those who favor the quirkiness of almost-popular music from the 90s. He was the other half of the perfectly harmonized duo alongside Ed Robertson. Is it right to say he dropped the ball? Isn't 20 years enough for a group? One wonders if Barenaked Ladies are really Barenaked Ladies without the duo. Their new album is most definitely a shift in energy and Page is pursuing his own solo album. Of course, one could compare it to the Blink 182 split-up. Interesting stuff came out of it, but the magic of the group was in its unity. Has Page ruined this by absconding? Is there greener grass to come? Most definitely and no.

5. Rod Blagojevich

Who the hell doesn't think this guy deserves to be voted off the face of the earth after his unrelenting ability to acknowledge his own guilt and mock the very process of law is supposed to uphold? To have bowed to the mistress of media is the proper way to announce one's defeat, but when one attempts to subvert...that's when you become an asshole. Rod Blagojevich will be forgotten by the ADHD fueled engines of the pop radar but his name will, for some time, be a buzz word for 'incompetence' and 'government infedelity.'