Watching 60 Minutes with my wife tonight, we were "amused" at the story of how Jessica Lynch became famous by getting knocked cold in a car wreck and then getting rescued, while the soldier who saved the lives of the group that was captured that day by singlehandledly picking off 7 people, one by one, as they tried to fire a mortar at the vehicle the group was in (and this guy had failed his marksmanship test) remained unknown till about a month ago. She got a million dollar book deal because of errors in the reports of what happened that day.

My wife also mentioned how ridiculous it is when People or some such magazine picks a mother of the year or something and that person is some rich and famous person who can afford a lot of help rather than, for example, some person who's doing a heroic mothering job on a limited income. I don't mean to decry the accomplishments of famous people who are doing good--I just don't think that being a beautiful person has ANYTHING to do with the criteria for deciding whether a person is worthy of some kinds of honors. The press and media choose their stories based on profit projections, so naturally, part of their assessment of a person's greatness is their saleability.

So I got a mental arc--why don't the bloggers of the world work together to choose a regular person who's worthy of fame, and make them famous! I haven't worked out details of how this might be done, but I'm sure we could come up with a way to have people nominate people for fame, and then through a series of votes to narrow down the candidates, come up with someone to hilight. Maybe we could pick a person every week or month of something. Get enough bloggers together on this, and the story will be saleable enough for the press and media to cover it.

One request--if you run with this idea, please credit me with starting it--or to be more precise: please credit my blog, which I'm running anonymously--I'm not quite ready for fame yet!