Persons of the Year

*just a little side note from me. I've never been a Bono fan until recently. I'm weary of people with just one name like Cher, Madonna, Sting and Bono. I didn't jump on the U2 bandwagon but I don't tend to be the first to love a group anyway. Geeze, it took me like 3-4 seasons before I 'discovered' Seinfeld. I still don't watch Everybody Loves Raymond for crying out loud. I am not one of those Kill Bill Gates people either. I happen to think a monopoly isn't a bad thing when it comes to computers and software. The cool thing about him is that he has given away more money than anyone on the planet. He wants to cure disease and educate people. Bono wants to do the same and together, with Bill's wife Melinda have set out to make a change in the world. I think they are a wonderful choice for Persons of the Year, they are changing the world for the better. Here is the article from Time magazine, reprinted without permission (of course)

These are not the people you expect to come to the rescue. Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time. Billionaires are even more removed, nestled atop fantastic wealth where they never again have to place their own calls or defrost dinner or fly commercial. So Bono spends several thousand dollars at a restaurant for a nice Pinot Noir, and Bill Gates, the great predator of the Internet age, has a trampoline room in his $100 million house. It makes you think that if these guys can decide to make it their mission to save the world, partner with people they would never otherwise meet, care about causes that are not sexy or dignified in the ways that celebrities normally require, then no one really has a good excuse anymore for just staying on the sidelines and watching.

Such is the nature of Bono's fame that just about everyone in the world wants to meet him--except for the richest man in the world, who thought it would be a waste of time. "World health is immensely complicated," says Gates, recalling that first encounter in 2002. "It doesn't really boil down to a 'Let's be nice' analysis. So I thought a meeting wouldn't be all that valuable."

It took about three minutes with Bono for Gates to change his mind. Bill and his wife Melinda, another computer nerd turned poverty warrior, love facts and data with a tenderness most people reserve for their children, and Bono was hurling metrics across the table as fast as they could keep up. "He was every bit the geek that we are," says Gates Foundation chief Patty Stonesifer, who helped broker that first summit. "He just happens to be a geek who is a fantastic musician."

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