Just when you think you’ve got a handle on what’s hot on the pop culture scene, along comes a brand-new phenomenon to make you realize you’re just another parent without a clue.

Take this Carson Daley guy for instance. I’ve recently learned that he is, in fact, the reigning heartthrob of the MTV generation, the hunky, on-air crown prince of the teeny-bopper world. From what I’ve read, he is being touted in some entertainment circles as the next Dick Clark, which would be quite an honor indeed if he had even the remotest chance of outliving the present Dick Clark and assuming the ageless emcee’s throne, which doesn’t seem likely for at least another millennium.

That is about all I know of Carson Daley, and all I really care to know. It isn’t much, I’ll admit, but it’s a whole lot more than I knew about him while wandering around New York City with my family over the holidays. Had I known then that Carson Daley was actually a blazing superstar in the teen firmament, a dynamic new force in the rock-video industry, I might have been better able to understand how I managed to find myself trapped in a screaming mob of adoring fans whose sole mission in life at that moment was to be seen by the MTV hottie host as he peered down on the masses through a second-story glass wall.

Like most bizarre New York moments, this one caught us by surprise. We were snaking our way through Times Square, heading uptown to see the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and the horse-drawn carriages around Central Park, when our kids spotted the crowd forming outside the MTV studios across the street.

“They’re waiting for Carson Daley to show up,” my daughter informed me as we all began moving toward the 100 or so fans gathered in front of the shrine.

On the way, my daughter explained that Daley was this extremely popular MTV veejay who appears in the studio window every afternoon to pick people from the crowd below to go on his video music show, which is called “Total Request Live.” I asked her what Daley looked like, considering that I couldn’t have recognized the guy if he had suddenly floated up from a midtown manhole on a cloud of steam, with Britney Spears warbling on his arm.

“I’ll point him out,” she said, as we nudged our way into the expectant throng.

Most of the fans were young girls. They cheered and waved signs that read, “I Love You Carson!” and “Pick Me, Carson! Please! You’re so hot!” Wedged against me was a middle-aged man who wore antennae made of aluminum foil on his head and held up a sign that read, “We’ve come all the way from Mars to see you, Carson!” He whooped way too much for a man of his age, so I figured he’d been into the eggnog.

After about 10 minutes, the crowd was uncomfortably large and growing bigger all the time. Six cops showed up in a van and started rudely shoving us back onto the sidewalk with a row of wooden barricades. Soon there were more than a couple of hundred of us jammed together out there in the cold, trapped like cattle in a pen. I felt as if I had wandered into a Bolivian soccer stadium and began to wonder if this was really such a fun holiday thing to do, after all.

“Who exactly are we waiting to see?” asked a prim, older woman in a mink coat who clutched her handbag protectively to her chest as the sign-wavers roared around her.

“What are you doing out here with us crazies if you don’t even know who Carson Daley is?” asked the middle-aged Martian, whose mangled right antenna now hung comically off his head.

“I got trapped when I was walking by,” said the woman, who looked worried as the crowd

pressed her against the barricade. “Now I can’t get out.”

“Carson!….Carson!” the giddy girls shouted hopefully at the upper window. Twenty minutes passed, and still no sign of the MTV star. The police pushed the wooden barricades against us even harder, yelling for us to get back up on the sidewalk where we belonged. Two young men managed to escape by crawling through our legs and under the barricades.

“This ain’t worth it, man,” one of them said, waving good riddance to the empty studio window as he walked away from the crowd. Eventually, even my own kids had to agree with him. I imagined the pitiful headline: “Maine family trampled to death on Carson Daley watch.” So we wriggled our way through a few squirming bodies and slipped under the police barricades to freedom.

Now I may never find out who this Carson Daley guy really is, or how he became so popular that hundreds, sometimes thousands of people a day are more than happy to wrestle with the crowds just to glimpse his face. And that’s just fine with me.The way I see it, there are some generation gaps that are better left unbridged.

Tom Weber’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.