Dear A and E:
In light of your recent "Biography of the Millennium" special, let us say we agreed with most of your picks for the top 100 influential people of the last 1,000 years, save one: Princess Diana.
Please accept the following suggestions to replace her on the list:
Igor Stravinsky, Muhammad Ali, Friedrich Nietszche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Bob Dylan, Mother Teresa, Oliver Cromwell, Sanford Fleming, Banting and Best, Hernan Cortez, Frank Lloyd Wright, The Bronte Sisters , Mary Shelley, James Cook, Tycho Brahe, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Noam Chomsky, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, Buckminster Fuller, Lester B. Pearson, John Maynard Kaynes, Milton Freedman, George Orwell, Frank Zappa, Rosa Luxemburg, Marshall McLuhan, Blaise Pascal, Che Guvera, Desmond Tutu, Fidel Castro, John Cabot, H.G. Wells, Eli Whitney, John Stuart Mill, Ernest Rutherford, Miguel Cervantes, Albert Camus, Bob Marley, Franz Kafka, Moctezuma, Otto Von Bismark, Nikola Tesla, Charlemagne, Samuel Morse, Joseph Smith, Soren Kirkegaard, John Calvin, Nelson Rockefeller, Rosa Parks, David Hume, Thomas Crapper, Edgar Allen Poe, Heinrich Himmler, Lewis and Clark, Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, Johannes Kepler, Arthur Carnegie, Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand, Jackie Robinson, Jim Thorpe, William Randolph Hearst, Salman Rushdie, Emporer Hirohito, Dolly (the sheep), Jean Paul Sartre, Tycho Brahe, Jim Henson, Carl Sagan, Allen Ginsberg, Jesse Owens, Trotsky, Terry Fox, Shaka Zulu, Malcolm X, Stephen Hawking, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Blackbeard, Lord Nelson, Charles de Gaulle, Scott Joplin, Juan Peron, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Conrad, Anwar Sadat, John Paul Getty, Leo Tolstoy, Sitting Bull, Aphra Behn, Francois Botha, Ivan the Terrible, Douglas MacArthur, Andre Wagner, Nikolai Gogol, Laika (the Russian dog), Victor Frankl, James Nasmith.
It’s hard, we know, and you really start to stretch it at the end, but seriously, Diana is a bad pick. She didn’t shape the world or contribute to a lasting change in society or culture. She was a princess, and while her life and death was tragic, it did not enter into our common experience. In fact, we promise to never mention her again-ever.