Twitterers have deemed this the Summer of Death. Bloggers have gone on Celebrity Death Watch. Someone at the office makes a bad/funny joke about how Dan Rather should be careful, what with the journalistic collapse of 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt (cancer), Robert Novak (brain tumor) and Walter Cronkite (cerebrovascular disease).

Remember in early June when we thought David Carradine was a lone loss, gone too soon and too mysteriously? Remember, in late June, after Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, how we nervously joked that deaths came in threes?

Remember Billy Mays? Steve McNair? Robert McNamara? Karl Malden! Maybe it's that deaths come in multiples of three, we thought. And then came guitar legend Les Paul. Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver. And on Tuesday, her brother, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

Celebrity deaths are always so nostalgic. The famous often seem to die in their prime because that's how we remember them, frozen in reruns. It's always unexpected, even when we've been expecting it.

``It may sound strange,'' says Tony Orciuoli, but all through the spring he just about predicted this. ``I'd been getting the feeling, wow, no one's really dying.''

Orciuoli tracks these things through his CelebrityDeathBeeper.com, which e-mails more than 20,000 subscribers when a famous person shuffles off this mortal coil.

In April 2007, for example, he'd sent out 17 death notices, but he'd sent only seven in April 2009, which made him worry. ``I knew it would pick back up eventually,'' he says. ``Statistically, things are bound to even out.''

Let's examine the truthfulness of the current celebrity death glut. With August not yet ended, Celebrity Death Beeper has counted nine deaths, compared with seven each for all of August 2007 and August 2008. The total for July 2009 was 12, compared with nine in 2007 and six in 2008. But in June, the opposite: Orciuoli counted nine in 2009, 10 in 2008 and 13 in 2007. Add up the totals, and 2007 saw the summer loss of just one fewer celebrity. At least so far.

This has not stopped the celebrity death pools, the bingo-esque games on sites like FlyMetotheTomb.com where participants predict which members of the glitterati are most likely to buy the farm in the coming year.

HollywoodMemoir.com tracks both the dead and the merely ailing (``Patrick Swayze likely to live a few more months,'' a recent update reads). On an average day, about 1,000 newcomers arrive at the site through a generic Google search for ``Hollywood deaths'' or ``celebrity deaths.'' If a famous person dies, that number generally doubles, says site founder John Park.

But in the week following Jackson's death, Park's server repeatedly crashed, as 17,000 people each day searched for famous demises. ``The only reason they even thought about celebrity death was Michael Jackson,'' Park says. Once they reached the site, they discovered everyone was suddenly dying.

Everyone was always dying, of course. It's the order and the context that were important: The surprising death of one of the most famous humans on the planet raised the public's awareness. Jackson made us seek meaning and see patterns.

Buddy Hackett was a funny man, but perhaps his 2003 death was intensified by its placement in the middle of the deaths of Katharine Hepburn, Strom Thurmond and Barry White. John Lee Hooker and Carroll O'Connor have been exponentially mourned since they died on the same day back in 2001.

Two deaths are sadder than one. And 30 is sadder than two. But there are limits. Really now, we've had enough.

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