As Andy Warhol predicted, everyone gets their fifteen minutes, and while for most of us it will only happen on a small scale, every year a handful of ordinary people become briefly, wildly, un-ignorably incandescent with fame. It can happen for a variety of reasons: Either by action, or by accident. Because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right time. Either way, their notoriety is usually fleeting, and it’s not long before we forget who they are entirely, the way we forget the people we’ve spent time talking to at cocktail parties. But in managing to shed their everyday anonymity and captivate the world, however momentarily, these people have achieved something, and for that, we at Intel should honor them. Therefore, we present you with our first annual Fifteen Minutes Awards, in which we look back — one last time — at the people we’ll soon never look at again.
