And somewhere, the Unicorn Lady cries

I was feeling a little bored with my own ideas (hey, admitting it is the first step), so I pulled a book off the shelf by my desk and borrowed it to flip through this weekend. It's a book that anyone who's worked with page design has seen: the Society for News Design's annual book of design winners.

It usually makes you feel like you should bow out gracefully and start looking into a field more on your level of design expertise, like being a sandwich artist at Subway. Though, to be fair, I had the most beautiful chicken sandwich there the other day. And, to be fair to myself, I was inspired, too, not by the sub, but by the book. That's the point, I think. Not to quit your job, but to learn from it. OK. I can do that.

Anyhow, the book was the 19th edition, from 1997 (or, the papers are from 1997), the year Princess Diana died. Now, if a member of the U.S. Congress got killed (the FBI is now monitoring this blog, because of that phrase), I'm sure we wouldn't go all out like we did for Princess Di. Elton John would not rewrite a song for him. There would be no mention of it in the Celebrity Insider column of the Oshkosh Northwestern almost 10 years later. The Unicorn Lady wouldn't do a tribute page on him.

But, alas. It was a big deal. Strangers were crying. The Unicorn Lady is still crying. It's funny how these "huge" events seem so ... small. Would Seattle do a full-page portrait of Princess Diana if she had died in 2006 instead of 1997? I don't know.

I wasn't alive for the Kennedy assassination. I wasn't of age to remember anything when the Challenger catastrophe happened. Heck, I don't even remember the the Baby Jessica incident (though I do remember watching that made-for-TV movie about it a few years later with my grandma).

So this Princess Diana thing, and a little later, the Mother Teresa thing, are probably the first two events in my life chronologically speaking where someone will ask me "Where were you when ..." (For the record, I was with my mom at the Glandorf Park Festival; someone told us and we thought they were joking, but I got goosebumps. Not bad enough to stop eating my fries. Later, we watched CNN and Mom cried.)

But now, it doesn't seem to have shaped any nation or shattered any feeling of unity, as some had feared in 1997. Whose death would we do all that 400-point headlining for today? (OK, Wisconsin, besides Brett Favre. GOSH.) I'm thinking Britney. If she dies, who will we have to talk about? Who will our children look up to? No one. The nation would be shaped. The unity would be shattered. Tragedy would be felt by all.

Except K-Fed, who's on his way out.