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Like many other Floridians, Tiger Woods recently bought a boat. Yeah, it cost $20 million. For us landlubbers, be it a kayak or the Queen Mary II, a boat is a boat is a boat.

Woods has been back home since missing the cut in the US Open on Friday, but for the week, he anchored his 103-foot mini-luxury liner in Long Island Sound and used it as his living quarters. As S.J. Perelman's old line went, it shows what God could do if he had money.

Woods parked his tub not at some hoity-toity yacht club, of which Mamaronek, N.Y. has its share, but in a commercial boat yard highly visible to the general public from the Boston Post Road, the main drag of Westchester and Fairfield counties' toniest suburbs.

This would be an unremarkable fact were it not for one tiny detail about Woods' yacht. Its christened name is "Privacy."

Ladies and gentlemen, there is the essential, implacable insanity of American celebrity in a nutshell. First, buy a boat visible from outer space then name it "Privacy." Top off that contradiction by sailing said boat into the largest metropolitan area in the USA and parking it where the highest possible number of people could look at it.

Don't tell me this was not a deliberate act. Woods doesn't commit any other kind. If Tiger wanted seclusion from the public eye for the Open, he could've made a couple of phone calls and the Navy would've happy let Woods anchor at the New London sub base and helicoptered him to and from Winged Foot.

And lest we forget, Tiger Woods is not just a man of superior intelligence, he's also icily logical and rational, with a physicist's soul inside Nike clothing. If fame and fortune caused Woods to do something so self-contradictory as living on the "Privacy" just off the highway, what effect must they have on less well-grounded, dopier celebrities?

As attornies for Tom Cruise and Britney Spears will tell you, there's an entire subset of American journalism devoted to covering celebrities who jump the tracks. The evidence suggests the real news is when a celebrity doesn't.

posted by Michael Gee @ 9:20 AM