A Bad Time To Be A Celeb

As I sit around, pondering the recent spate of celebrity deaths, I find myself wondering if this was in fact the most prolific fortnight of celebrity deaths ever. We've got Michael Jackson, Steve McNair, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays, Robert MacNamara, and Academy Award-winning Karl Malden. Of course, the first thing I notice is that this was a bad time for people with "Mc" or "Mac" in their last names. So if you have are a "Mac", best beware. But, anyhoo, there may be only one other time in history that rivals this fortnight, and that would be the period from March to April, 1994, in which John Candy, Eugene Ionesco, Kurt Cobain, Richard Nixon, and writer Ralph Ellison all passed away. If you extend that period to the last week of February to the first week of May 1994, you will also have comedian Bill Hicks, George Peppard, Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis, and race car driver Ayrton Senna. Quite a collection of people indeed. I would like to think that they all faked their deaths in order to get away from the celebrity spotlight, and that they are all now living together in an underground lair, along with Tupac, Princess Diana, and Elvis. Of course, Elvis seems to be the only person who is occasionally willing to go above ground and get the groceries for everyone, but sometimes he has a hankering for fast food, so he'll stop in at a Burger King now and again, and most of the time, it's in Kalamazoo. So, if I had to guess on the whereabouts of this underground lair, I would suspect it's somewhere in the western Michigan region.