creepy thought

If McCain wins, there could be a significant fraction of his voters who start literally praying for him to die, so that they can get the President they really want.

Celebrity Death Threesome Blowout Sale!

This is a little dated but I’m going to mention it anyway. A while back when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn bit the big one, I thought, hey, here comes another chance to predict which celebrities will die next. Looking at historical trends, my choices were Clarence Thomas and renowned Inca historian Jean-Jacques Decoster. Then Morgan Freeman got in a car crash, and I thought, Ah shit, not a good celebrity. Fortunately he seems to be OK, so he could still potentially narrate some Obama ads. (Note: This is a great idea. I decided to post it by itself and it should be above this post soon.)
So then I quit paying attention to the news for a while, and mentioned the post idea to my roommate. “Oh, Bernie Mac died,” she said. Perfect! But then Isaac Hayes died before I could make any predictions. Now all that’s left is rating this celebrity death threesome. It doesn’t look good. An important but insane and slightly overrated writer is a good start, but then we’ve got a mediocre comedian and a mediocre musician best-known in recent years for voicing a fat cartoon chef before quitting because he was offended as a Scientologist.
Obviously that doesn’t rise to the historical level of a Parker/Einstein/Fleming trio. But is it better than this year’s earlier threesome of Russert/Carlin/Helms? Let’s pit them against each other:

Solzhenitsyn vs. Helms: These guys face each other because they’re the strongest members of their teams. It’s an interesting fight. Helms was eviler than Solz was good, and as a real fucker of a senator he screwed millions of Americans.
But Solz battled the USSR and kind of won and will still be remembered a century
or two down the road. Ivan Denisovich is a pretty good book. Advantage:
Solzhenitsyn.
Mac vs. Carlin: Because they’re both comedians. Neither was very good. Carlin is more important and revered but Mac seems to have been less of a smug asshole. Advantage: Mac.
Russert vs. Hayes: Because they’re left over. Also, both are oddly respected despite few real accomplishments. In a fight, I see both of them getting winded and asking to forfeit. Advantage: There are no winners in this fight.

So the Solz/Mac/Hayes trio is currently in the lead for Celebrity Death Threesome of the year. But wait! I just looked it up and Heath Ledger died about the same time as Sir Edmund Hillary and Bobby Fischer. So that one is the clear leader.

Dying in Threes

With what may have been the single act of kindness in a life of spewing disease-ridden piss from his every pore, former Senator Jesse Helms graciously confirmed that celebrities always die in threes when he keeled over on July 3. We had predicted Clarence Thomas, but Helms is good enough, and not that different if you consider their civil rights work. Helms, a strong contender for Worst Living American, has received touching eulogies from Hendrik Hertzberg and Ken Layne of Wonkette. Now he has to compete for Worst American of All Time, where he is just another anonymous terrible person, somewhere between your average KKK Grand Wizard and John Wilkes Booth.

All in all, this was a pretty boring Celebrity Death Threesome, consisting only of soon-to-be-forgotten telejournalist Tim Russert, mediocre comedian George Carlin, and Helms. So I got to thinking, what is the best Celebrity Death Threesome of all time?

Two strong contenders deserve special mention, but are disqualified for involving too many celebrities:
Between Spetmeber 3 and October 4 of 1970, we lost Vince Lombardi, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Marie Remarque, John Dos Passos, and Janis Joplin.
Three years later, also in September, there went John Ford, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gram Parsons, Pablo Neruda, and W.H. Auden.

So those were bad months for humanity. Anyway, here are five strong contenders for Best Celebrity Death Threesome:

1826: Carl Maria von Weber (composer), John Adams, Thomas Jefferson

1827: Alessandro Volta (guy "volts" are named after), Beethoven, William Blake

1955: Charlie Parker, Albert Einstein, Alexander Fleming (guy who discovered penicillin)

1961: Carl Jung, Ernest Hemingway, Ty Cobb

April 1994: Kurt Cobain, Ralph Ellison, Richard Nixon

Those are all pretty strong, and it's tempting to give it to the Parker/Einstein/Fleming trio, but consider this:

In 1963, Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, and John F. Kennedy all died on the same day.

That's definitely worth bonus points. Also, on February 3, 1959, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper all died at the exact same instant, but they lose points because who the hell is the Big Bopper?

Even with that tremendous 1963 effort, however, mankind still has not managed to match that April 23 in 1616, when Shakespeare, Cervantes, and renowned Inca historian (the best Inca historian? We say yes) Garcilaso de la Vega all collapsed and died.

Do we even have celebrities good enough to equal that today? Probably not. Maybe if Gabriel García Márquez, Bob Dylan, and Barack Obama all died in the same minute. Anyway, 1616 takes the gold.

Third Time's the Charm!

We've all heard that celebrities die in threes. A while back it was Gerald Ford, James Brown and Saddam Hussein. Before that Mitch Hedberg, Johnny Cochran and Pope John Paul II. Before that Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Inca historian Garcilaso de la Vega. Coincidence? No.
Now that George Carlin and Tim Russert have both died of heart problems, someone has to come next. But who?
Well, usually two important people die at the same time as a relatively unimportant person (Cochran, Ford, the Inca guy). Some people think Russert was important, but they are confused. "If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press," they said, even though, as everyone knows, if it's Sunday, it's no one has ever watched TV on Sunday morning.
So someone important has to die, preferably of heart disease. The obvious candidate is John McCain. But he didn't crash land his jet on a Vietnamese infant just to come back and die right as his weird long-term plan for political ascendancy (Step 1: Crash; Step 2: ASCEND) comes to fruition.
But wait! Sometimes a black guy dies too (Cochran, Brown, the Inca guy (?)). Bill Russell? I hope not, because he is awesome. This strongly indicates that Clarence Thomas will die on the bus tomorrow. He will be so angry at black people that his heart will explode. He will die as he lived, in his robes, clutching his chest, yelling at the floor.