Weblog Sin Pies

Or, “Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits”: How George Carlin’s death affects me

By Charley Daniels

Within an hour of word spreading that George Carlin has died tonight, the blogosphere lit up with posts reporting the news and commemorating the man. So I thought I would spin it forward and talk about how his death (and the death of other celebrities at odd, non-business hours) touches me.

See, I’d barely finished my treatise on summer planning and had settled in to browsing through sites on Project Wonderful, when at around 10:45 or so my cell phone rang, which is never a good sign. Assuming it was someone with a correction for one of the recently posted stories at THR.com, I answered hoping that whatever was wrong was not my fault. You get this feeling a lot when you’re an editor.

But there was no correction. What had happened was someone had died, etc., and so I switched into work mode and did what I needed to do. It didn’t take long, but I’m beginning to notice a troubling pattern.

I’ve been working at THR for about six months now, and it seems like there have been an abnormally large number of celebrity deaths in that time. I don’t know if I’m just more aware of it now, or if it actually is more than normal, but one thing is certain: Most people don’t die during regular business hours.

Has there been a study done on this? Is it built in to our DNA after years of “work weeks” that we need to die at a time when it’s most convenient to drop everything?

Now, it may seem insensitive to be talking about people’s deaths being extra work for me, but that’s because you’re not thinking about it from the right perspective. You just see, “Blah blah blah, doesn’t it suck that someone’s death gives me extra work, nyah, nyah, nyah, I’m a jerk.” That’s all it sounds like to you, but if you look a little closer what you’ll see is that I’m just extra saddened by the death of celebrities during off hours. Don’t you get it? I’m more pained than I would be otherwise.

That’s right, it’s super sympathy — not only for the dead guy and his family and friends but for the myriad on-call night editors working for news organizations everywhere. We all feel the pain just a little more sharply when someone as talented and giant as George Carlin dies at some odd hour of the week.