So I emailed the editors of TIME, I mean enough already.

So I got my new Special Issue of TIME, The TIME 100, the lives and ideas of the world's most influential people and there's a short list on the front:
Condoleeza Rice, Martha Stewart, Jon Stewart, Clint Eastwood... and I start thinking, Hey, if this is the short list, maybe I have a shot at this!! I mean two people named Stewart, come on. And I noticed that the articles about the people on the list were written by people who used to be on the list: Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, Sean Penn. So I'm thinking hey, they have dumbed this down a little and with a little luck I'll have something to talk about at my fortieth high school reunion this October.

So, I start looking through the pages trying to think what photo they might have used

No. No. Dated.

Probably this one:
Yeah, that's the one. Wish I had combed my hair. Or shaved closer. Well, it does have a certain current cultural reference.

And here's the thing, I see the expected ones, you know, Bush, Karl Rove (James Carville has to write the suck-up paragraph for that one.), I almost die when I see a picture of Jane Fonda, but she is just flogging her book wherein she flogs herself, a condition and practice with which she is not unfamiliar. I mean, married to Ted Turner and well, never mind we are discussing deeper issues like how far down the list am I?

Okay, so now here's HuJintao. Three guesses who he or she is. And Thabo Mbeki is billed as the most powerful man in Africa but who no American has ever heard of because the coiffed crew at ABC7 and FoxNews can't figure how to pronouce Mbeki. Meanwhile, a couple more pages in there's Hugo Chavez and I thought for a second it was the guy who did the grape boycott but then I remembered that whathisname oh yeah, Cesar, he died, so this guy is someone else, but he still is someone who is sticking it to the fat cats of the USA. So what's the point here??

(Finished guessing on Jintao?? He is President of China. HU NHU?

That's a joke. I'm kidding. I kill myself. Sorry. I'll stop now.)

Anyway, I'm flipping pages now thinking about what I will say to Patricia Tremontana when I see her at the reunion and she says"Who?"when I see they've got Bill Clinton (jesus, let someone else have a chance!) Jay-Z and some guy named Bram Cohen who like wrote a bunch of software to pirate stuff with. He's in the list and I'm not!?? At least, not that I've seen but there are still a lot of pages to go.

On one page they've got Melissa Etheridge, Hania Mufti and Oprah Winfrey. It's beginning to dawn on me that the editors of TIME are spending too much time trying to tell us something we already know. They should put in someone different, someone who would surprise and tantalize, someone who people would say who dat? about. Someone like me.

So enough already with the list of achievers, people who have actually done something with their lives (and our lives in many cases). Let's have a little spotlight for the Joe Nations of the World: the regular schmoes who write good tag lines on the unending poetry threads and hardly anything else. I mean you want to put Wangari Maathai in your list but no one on radio or tv will give you the TIME of day, but put (dare I say it) Joe Nation on the cover and the world will stop.

And maybe buy a copy to find out who the hell...

So I emailed them and called them and I faxed them and I spoke to a very nice person named Jeniffer who is one of more important phone people at TIME and I suggested that they have another issue entitled "Oops, we left out JOE" and to have it on the news stands right about early October.

Vote now!

Joe( Come on. I need this.) Nation