Steve Fossett Wins a Darwin Award

I want to inform you, in case you haven't heard, that dimwit multi-millionaire "adventurer" Steve Fossett and his unfortunate plane have disappeared somewhere over Nevada. It's likely that his days of cheating death have come to an end, and even though Richard Branson is personally coming to every single house in America to officially deliver the bad news, I absolutely refuse to give a damn. People die every day, and I'm totally indifferent — and, admit it, you are too. Last month, a teenager accidentally shot and killed his eleven-year-old relative in Pennsylvania, and I bet you didn't mourn. A drunk driver ran over an elderly woman in Florida. Children die from preventable diseases because they don't have health coverage, or people in third world countries starve because the junta controlling the specious government refuses to distribute food to the populace, and none of it gets a fraction of the attention that a missing rich white guy does. I just don't see what makes Fossett so awesome that his (pending) death deserves international news coverage.

If anybody's going to die, I think it's morally appropriate that, for once, it's someone who willingly took ridiculous, gratuitous risks just to satisfy his gluttony for media attention finally had his dumb, dumb decisions catch up to him.

While we're talking about dead people I don't care about, how about we all finally get over the death of Princess Diana? First of all, she and that guy she was screwing got into a car with a drunk driver. I don't know what sorts of public service announcements they have over in Britain, but on this side of the Atlantic, spoiled princesses don't let their drivers drive drunk. Here, spoiled princesses do their own drunk driving, thank you very much. [You know what, I'm not even going to bother looking up the requisite Paris, Lindsay, etc. links that belong in that previous sentence.] I'm glad they crashed into a wall or whatever, instead of say, into a human being actually following the law. And second, they're the paparazzi, not the yakuza, so I don't know who the hell they thought they were racing away from. Ooh, people want to take your picture; that's a huge price to pay for a lifestyle of obscene luxury most of us will only ever see in, well, pictures of you.

So from now on, I'd appreciate it if we could all just save our sorrow for the deaths that aren't preventable, okay?