Thursday, December 30, 2004
Celebrity threes
Why do famous people die in threes?
I don't mean to be callous here, but I find this phenomenon fascinating. Whenever someone dies, someone famous enough to have his or her death noted on the front page of the paper, two more such people will die within a few days to a week.
Reggie White (December 26) : "a fearsome defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers who was one of the great players in NFL history."
Susan Sontag (December 28): "the author, activist and self-defined 'zealot of seriousness' whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century."
Jerry Orbach (December 29): stage and film star "best known for his long-running role as New York police detective Lennie Briscoe on Law & Order."
My rational side objects that this must be some sort of false consciousness -- that famous people die all the time, and the mind just groups them into threes as a funny way of imposing order on the world. But no -- I swear, they really do die in threes.
I won't go so far as to say that there is some cosmic connection within any given celebrity three. Though Susan Sontag might be able to discern some sort of subtext. If there was foul play connecting these three deaths, Lennie Briscoe might be able to piece it together but, ironically ...
A couple of years ago I thought about creating a web site documenting celebrity threes. Now it occurs to me, "Hey, I have this blog!" I now make this vow to you: so long as I continue to blog, I will post all celebrity threes that come to my attention. I really want to get to the bottom of this.
I don't mean to be callous here, but I find this phenomenon fascinating. Whenever someone dies, someone famous enough to have his or her death noted on the front page of the paper, two more such people will die within a few days to a week.
Reggie White (December 26) : "a fearsome defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers who was one of the great players in NFL history."
Susan Sontag (December 28): "the author, activist and self-defined 'zealot of seriousness' whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century."
Jerry Orbach (December 29): stage and film star "best known for his long-running role as New York police detective Lennie Briscoe on Law & Order."
My rational side objects that this must be some sort of false consciousness -- that famous people die all the time, and the mind just groups them into threes as a funny way of imposing order on the world. But no -- I swear, they really do die in threes.
I won't go so far as to say that there is some cosmic connection within any given celebrity three. Though Susan Sontag might be able to discern some sort of subtext. If there was foul play connecting these three deaths, Lennie Briscoe might be able to piece it together but, ironically ...
A couple of years ago I thought about creating a web site documenting celebrity threes. Now it occurs to me, "Hey, I have this blog!" I now make this vow to you: so long as I continue to blog, I will post all celebrity threes that come to my attention. I really want to get to the bottom of this.
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