Apples of Our Eyes

Steve Jobs is dead, Sarah Palin is not running for president (and sorry to disappoint those whom were counting on her -- ugh), and Amanda Knox is back home in Seattle hoping her fellow ex-con Italian boyfriend will fly over for a visit. But, alas, it seems he's just not that into her. Go figure.

It's interesting that these three folks landed on front pages (and home screens) on the same day; it reminds us there are lots of ways to achieve notoriety. If this were a statistically relevant sample, one could conclude that two thirds of the time, it isn't really all that clear to anyone what a person has done to warrant that fifteen minutes -- or fifteen lifetimes -- of fame.

Take Sarah, for example. She went from borrowing cups of sugar at gunpoint from her Russian neighbors to traversing the lower forty-eight in a bus formerly owned by the Partridge family. Speaking in some sort of polar dialect, she gets folks all excited about some weird tea party and becomes the toast of any town she visits. Whether it's a pizza joint in New York City or the Iowa State Fair, everyone knows her name, everyone overlooks her appalling grammar. So much for impeccable sentence structure; I've been to New York many times and have yet to get an audience with Donald Trump.

Then there's Amanda. Poor little Amanda. At best, she's a flaky and somewhat reckless college kid who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. At worst, she's a diabolical killer. Or maybe she's just a not-so-innocent bystander. Nobody knows (except Amanda, of course, and her boyfriend, and, I suppose, the black guy who's still in jail), but almost everybody on the planet seems to care. A lot. It took me almost an hour to read through the reader comments following an internet piece about her homecoming. I couldn't help myself. It was addictive. Folks -- most of whom seem to speak the Sarah Palin dialect -- were literally getting into verbal fist fights with each other, so sure was each writer of his opinion. I had to stop; the intensity was getting me all worked up.

Finally, Steve Jobs. College drop-out, pot smoking Buddhist, occasional business failure. Creative genius, tireless worker, inspirational speaker, world changer. There was no doubt in my mind, when I logged onto my Mac and his eyes stared back at me, why he was so famous. It's abundantly clear -- what he's done, what he hasn't done -- why we all know his name and his face, and why we should. His life is instructive in both its successes and its failures, and he leaves a world in which almost everyone owns a gadget inspired by him. Cool. Way cool. We should all be able to leave such a legacy.

But still, after the eulogies have been delivered and the issue of Time Magazine devoted to his life flies off the stands, images of Steve will fade and we will continue to be inundated with tales of Sarah and Amanda, the gals who inexplicably arrived in our collective consciousness and stir up a kind of passion in people you usually don't see outside the bedroom. Or, come to think of it, in it.

Crazy world: ipods, iphones, ipads, and, often, idon'tgetit.