Dead Celebrities

Amy Winehouse was a British singer with big hair who wore a lot of dark eye makeup. I never heard her music or saw her perform, yet her death from a drug overdose made the front page of the New York Times. No doubt her music will now be played much more frequently, at least for a few weeks, and we will certainly read more articles and see footage on TV news shows about how great she was.

Honestly, I don't care a whit about her. I did care about Janis Joplin, another 27-year-old singer who overdosed long ago, back in my own youth, so I understand that Amy's fans are sad today. But I care much more about all those young people murdered on that Norwegian island by a crazed shooter with a political agenda, and we will never know anything about them.

I hope Amy will just die, and not hang on or even gain strength posthumously, like many celebrities do. Some of them, like Elvis and Marilyn, Anna Nicole Smith and Princess Di, and even James Dean, who was only famous for less than a year when he crashed his car, keep hanging around here. There's nothing worse than a dead celebrity dominating the news, if you ask me.