My daughter and I were driving along the strip north of our town, and we noticed an oddity. Two businesses, on either side of us, had the word famous in their names: Famous Dave's BBQ on the left, and Famous Footwear on the right.

It was a Seinfeld moment, and we turned to each other with the same spontaneous thought: that if you have to tell people that you're famous, you're probably not. When you have to reassure bypassers that everyone else knows who you are, even if they can't quite place you, then your fame is a fragile thing.

I am accustomed to restaurants claiming fame. In the old days, you drove through a strange town, and a sign on chophouse, and repeated on its menu, would announce, "Famous for our aged steaks." As if meat attained celebrity. As if a piece of their sirloin could get a good table at a competitor's restaurant. "Right this way, Mr. Delmonico!"

Nowadays, of course, roadside food is famous because there are only six purveyors of it.

As with the meat of the cow, so with its leather. When I hear the phrase "famous footwear," I think of celebrity endorsements -- Michael Jordan of the Bulls endorsing Nike, or my more famous namesake, Michael Finley of the Houston Suns endorsing Converse. The players are famous, enough that they can give up basketball entirely this year, and fall back on their other talents.

But is the footwear itself famous?

Andy Warhol used to say that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. I couldn't tell you how fifteen minutes of fame would work. At the end of your quarter hour of renown, everyone suddenly forgets you?

Anyway, we're in his future now. He's still famous, and the rest of us have, at most, an envelope of dust -- an award or recognition, a court notice in the newspaper, a winning bowling score -- to call our fame. Fast food and shoe franchises seem to emphasize the fact that we're not famous, but that BBQ and crosstrainers are.

In the midst of this meditation, I get a phone call from a radio talk show asking me to do fifteen minutes about computers. They remembered me from another 15 minutes four years earlier. I do not remember them at all. Especially when the anchorman, Ken Van Lith, tells me the station is the Oldies Station CFOS in Owen Sound, Ontario, 560 on the AM dial.

I tell him I will do it, but that I can hardly remember my own famous insights into technology.

The interview is in about an hour. So I get on the internet and ask a search engine about Owen Sound. It has its own web site at http://www.osaic.com/frames/aboutindex.html. When I get there I am bathing in info about the city on Thunder Bay. The site tells who the main employers are, about the schools, and the history, and the local architecture.

Samuel de Champlain was the first European to visit the area. The town was named for a British admiral who was the brother of one of the surveyors. Great Lakes shipping and the railroad made the little town into a regional center.

Because the town never really boomed, it never tore itself down to rebuild, like some successful cities. Thus the "Scenic City" (that is its nickname) is still what it was in its heyday, elegant without being immodest. The town's two amateur hockey teams, the Platers and Greys, are the focus of local pride.

So when the interview begins I lavish praise on the city, telling them everything I learned on the Internet. I am able to describe the ore freighters tied up at the docks, and the beautiful brick and stone houses, some of them 150 years old, that dot the town, even the blackfaced swans gliding in the city pond.

Be proud of your history, I say, and your lonely beauty on the lake.

"Wow," Van Lith says to me on the air. "You've done your homework."

I tell him it is my gift to Owen Sound. If they could remember me from four years earlier, I can tell the world about them now -- on the air, in my e-mail column, and in my own little pocket of fame, my web site (http://mfinley.com).

So this little flurry is my gift to the city of Owen Sound, a wonderful town where people still know you when you walk into a store, or a church, or a home.

And isn't that what true fame is -- the glory of being known by others, not for one's celebrity, which must be an empty thing, before, during, or immediately following your fifteen minutes, but for what you are.

Remember this, and you'll never need the cheap stuff.

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