Mr. Tastee, Tiger Woods, and A Culture of Voyeurs.

In the last decade, there was a brilliant (and all too short-lived) television show that aired on Nickelodeon called The Adventures of Pete & Pete. It was a live-action show, and concerned the lives of two brothers named Pete, their friends, their own personal superhero, and a rotating cast of bizarre characters that moved through their neighborhood.

The second-to-last episode of the first season of Pete & Pete was titled "What We Did on Our Summer Vacation." Central to this episode was the ice cream truck man, Mr. Tastee, who appeared every year at the beginning of summer, and of course disappeared as summer ended. Mr. Tastee wore a giant plastic ice cream cone head, so no one knew what he looked like. Indeed, no one knew who he was, where he came from, or where he went when the summer was over.

But children are children, and perpetually curious. They began asking questions, in an effort to get closer - to know Mr. Tastee. To their credit, they did so out of concern - they were worried that Mr. Tastee was lonely. Mr. Tastee evaded their questioning as best he could, but it ultimately became too much, and he did the only thing he could: he hit the road.

Later in the episode, it was left to another ice cream man, the decidedly lower-budget Captain Scrummy (fittingly if somewhat ineptly portrayed by R.E.M. lead singer Michael Stipe, a celebrity known to carefully preserve his privacy) to explain to the elder Pete that Mr. Tastee was just a private person. Captain Scrummy said, essentially, that Mr. Tastee just sold the ice cream - the kids don't need to know him.

It was a great episode. Seems that maybe there's a lesson there somewhere.

But it was just a television show, and real-life is something wholly different. Just as the kids wanted to know more about their resident celebrity, we demand to know as much as possible about our celebrities. And the higher the profile of the celebrity in question, the more we want to know. This is nothing new - we Americans seem always to have been this way. It may be a trait we inherited from our British forbears, whose tabloids and gossip rags make ours seem staid and tame by comparison.

No one is more aware of this than Tiger Woods. And for virtually his entire public life - which began, for all intents and purposes, when he was a toddler - he has masterfully controlled what is known about his life when he's not on a golf course.

And this, perhaps, is why the events of this past weekend are inspiring as much interest as they are. Weird things just don't happen in Tiger Woods' world, or, if weird things do happen, no one outside of Tiger's world hears about them. And why should we? It's really none of our business.

But now Tiger sits, with his wife and children (and, perhaps, lawyers and publicists), in his multimillion dollar home in a gated community, under something of a media siege. And it'd be easy to blame the media for all of this. There's something obviously askew when the self-proclaimed "worldwide leader in sports" seems to be relying on a gossip website for a significant amount of their reportage. But the fact of the matter is that the media wouldn't report it if folks didn't want to see it. 

And thus we have the rampant speculation. Sex! Another woman! Violence! Hell - this story has it all! Or, even if it doesn't have it all, there's nothing in the world to stop us from believing it has it all. To our insatiable voyeuristic eyes, this beats a baby down a well or a boy in a balloon by a country mile! There's no stopping it now!

Unfortunate, to be sure. But as Tiger might say, it is what it is.

I have no more idea than anyone else as to what happened at Isleworth Friday morning. I'd love to be able to say that I don't care, because I realize it's none of my business. But clearly, something bad has happened in Tiger Woods' world, even if that bad something was nothing more than a minor car accident. And while I'd never go so far as to say that Tiger owes me an explanation, I will admit, however hesitatingly, that I'm curious.

It's not something of which I'm proud. But it is what it is.