“By the way, death rumours are the worst chat in the world – for anybody, even really stupid people.” Calvin Harris
Not that he is around anymore to appreciate it, but it must be a bugger to be a recluse for so long that certain people (such as myself) thought JD Salinger was already dead, until they saw some tweets indicating otherwise this evening.
But trusting Twitter when it comes to obituaries can be problematic. Contrary to popular Twitter belief, Jeff Goldblum, Johnny Depp, Rick Astley and Kayne West are not dead. The miscommunication of information that social networking sites, especially Twitter, generate has created a glut of such memes, in part powered by the odd and untimely actual celebrity death, such as Michael Jackson’s demise.
But this is not a new phenomenon. When I was younger, my Dad told me the reason Lt Col Henry Blake was written out of M*A*S*H was because McLean Stevenson had died in a plane crash during filming in 1975. The reality was the cast of M*A*S*H were not told the storyline of Henry’s death (a plane disappearing over the Sea of Japan) until the day of filming, to give a genuine emotional reaction on film. McLean Stevenson died of a heart attack in 1996. (The day before Roger Bowen, who played Henry in the M*A*S*H movie, also died of a heart attack. At least according to Wikipedia. Who knows what source you can trust…)
My Dad and I also debated on whether Paul Samuelson, whose economics textbook both of us – thirty years apart – studied at university, was still alive. Professor Samuelson concluded the debate when he died just before Christmas. And my partner had a stand up argument with a Labour colleague that Jim Callaghan was dead on 25 March 2005, the day before… you guessed it.
It would seem the only way to tackle such ignorance is by using the same web
tools that generate it (and for everyone wondering why I didn’t just google to check on the health of Paul Samuelson and McLean Stevenson… I’m wondering that too). If you’re lucky enough to be able to watch the Colbert Report online, watch this one, with Jeff Goldblum interrupting Stephen Colbert’s report on the death of Jeff Goldblum.



our manifesto will, with what the country needs in the coming five years’. With the debate between Labour and the Conservatives going to the ‘political fundamentals’, Miliband recognises:
our manifesto ‘to be full of passion, of confidence, a movement for change’. As Miliband posits the existences of ‘ideological unity within our party’, Purnell too recognises:
Expenses finally published – ‘I won’t lie to you Stace’
