COPOUT: Ranting Time!
OK, folks, I may have said this before, but the fact is, people ain't listening. That may very well be due to the fact that my readership hovers in and around the dozen mark, but the Web is a global network, so I'm going to pretend I have a global audience.
Henceforth, the entire planet, especially North America, will cease and desist all discussion about or expression of the concept that "celebrities die in threes". Or penalties will be created and enforced.
I swear, it's like the entire US population, once they hit a certain age, realized that stepping on a crack does not in fact result in maternal spinal trauma, and the resulting superstitious void needed to be filled by something. Anything. So we get people, like they did this weekend, counting off like they're in gym class. Carroll O'Connor! "One!" John Lee Hooker! "Two!" Shut the hell up! "Three! Wait! When did Shut The Hell Up die?"
Of course celebrities die in threes. They also die in sevens, fours, eighteens, and most importantly, they die in ones. There are a lot of celebrities. They're all going to die, with the apparent exception of Bob Hope. That means a lot of dead celebrities for which to form a tiny, meaningless pattern out of the formless void we call "jack shit".
That doesn't mean it's not fun to watch, of course. For a little while. Especially after two die, with no obvious third for a while. Then you get the speculators. The people wondering who's gonna have the common decency to fall over in a pool of his or her own vomit so that everyone's ridiculous faith in the power of three can be assuaged. If I were a celebrity, I'd double security right after two big deaths just in case some wankmeister snaps and decides to make -sure- the law holds true. The only thing funnier than watching grown men and women, some of whom have even completed a course of higher education, go on and on about "who'll be the third" or "that makes three" is when they actually argue about who the three are. I could watch that for hours, if I didn't have a circulatory system, that is. The embolism five minutes into the conversation usually does me in.
"No, he's not the third, SHE is." "Her? She's not a celebrity. I bet nine out of ten people wouldn't know who she is." "Yours doesn't count, it's a famous horse. Only humans count." "My corpse completes the magical trinity, not yours." "BLASPHEMER!"
That's actually how the Crusades started, people. It would have been even worse, but the whole "Popes die in threes" meme didn't spread real far. It only got as far as it did because the science of "counting" wasn't all that established back then.
What's the excuse now, folks?
