Thanks to everyone who sent it nominations — there were many excellent entries that just missed making the cut. We leave you with the words of columnist Bob Patterson, who emailed to point out that, if nothing else, the pope’s death has had one positive outcome: Getting the media to stop focusing on Terri Schiavo. Had he not died, says Patterson, this week partisans on television would have been “haranguing us constantly about [Schiavo] being a martyr who died at the hands of the Clinton-appointed judges,” using her death “as a PR lever to pry a move to change the Senate filibuster rules into motion.” So he says he doesn’t mind the even the most egregious MIPSYs. “I find each and every infinitesimally small bit of minutiae about the funeral remarkably fascinating and much more preferable to a torrent of browbeating,” he writes.

Hard to argue with that.

—Brian Montopoli

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