Death takes a holiday, visits Hollywood

After the double whammy of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, suspicious celeb-watchers, convinced of the rule of three, have been scrutinising the news media for details of who would complete the terminal tryptich. Conveniently disregarding the death of long-time Johnny Carson cohort Ed McMahon and shouty infomercial legend Billy Mays, the harbingers of doom have grown increasingly random in the search for celebritragedy.

As a result, we were treated to the shocking news that stuttering movie mumbler Jeff 'one note' Goldblum had fallen off a cliff whilst filming in New Zealand. Suspicious movie fans' skepticism was presumably piqued by the very idea that Goldblum was working, given the fact that almost a decade has elapsed since anyone has seen him in anything. Nonetheless, it only took a couple of hours for the lanky ex-BrundleFly's supposed demise to be ranked in Google Trends' top five most popular search terms.

A day later and it was Britney Spears' turn to do battle with the Grim Reaper's online counterpart, as pranksters spread bogus information after hacking into her Twitpic account. Why no-one bothered to question how Britney was able to tweet from beyond the grave I'll never know. Still, with the world already in mourning mode, I guess it didn't seem too much of a stretch to add Louisiana's favourite pop tart to the 'in memoriam' guest list.

The whole phenomenon of prematurely announced celebrity mortal-coil-shuffling is nothing new, even Mark Twain once famously had to write a letter stating "the report of my death was an exaggeration". The difference is, tweets and blogs give the anonymous masses the power to make up whatever story they like and transmit it across the world in a nano-second. And information overload means its almost impossible to seperate the factual wheat from the fictional chaff.