WE ALL DIE ALONE -- EXCEPT FOR CELEBRITIES, WHO DIE IN THREES

So: Are the deaths of Shirley Temple and Sid Caesar the second and third -- with Phlip Seymour Hoffman holding down first place --in the latest  "celebrity deaths travel in threes" sweepstakes (or curse!)  that some people believe in?

Or, Shirley Temple having shuffled off more than a week after Hoffman, are she and Sid the kickoff for new trio, with third-base player yet to be designated?

Depends on how you look at the "comes (or, more precisely, 'goes') in threes" craziness. I've always heard that for the triad of Big Name Deaths to be official, the deaths have to occur within a week. (Never have heard, by the way, just who it is who decides on whether or not a dead star belongs to a ghostly trio.)

In a good look at this silliness,  taken by Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon a few years ago, Williams took the position that the "deaths should come within a close time span." In which case put three mourning bands on your sleeve: one each for Hoffman, Temple, and Caesar.

But if the one-week rule time-span applies, the Hoffman died alone, and Temple and Caesar are awaiting the arrival of the final member of their threesome.

This particular variety of American Crazy has it roots, according to Williams and others, in the deaths in a plane crash, on Feb.,3, 1959, of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the "Big Bopper" (aka J.P. Richardson). That would seem to set both a tragic and also pretty high bar for celebrity death proximity. Hard to imagine "a close time span" getting much closer than theirs.

But while you can make a list, and a fairly long one, of musicians killed in plane crashes, that sort of thing doesn't have a lot of appeal for the numerology crowd who count fallen stars by threes. The pattern there has a lot more to do with the planes than the fact that the passengers included musicians.

For this sort of thing is all about pattern-finding. And then superimposing something /mystical/supernatural/conspiratorial/inexplicable/choose-your-own-description to "explain" the perceived congruence.

I'm far from the first to make this point -- Williams makes it well in her article, and countless others have been saying similar things for as long as people have detected patterns where there really are none.Not that those explanations every seen to take hold.

What does take hold, to a powerful degree, is the role of celebrity in our culture, and the amount of media attention given to celebrity deaths. When those deaths involve big names -- and in their times there were none bigger than Shirley Temple and Sid Caesar -- the media attention skyrockets. Add a tragic element and relatively young age, as with Philip Seymour Hoffmanm, and the attention not only skyrockets, but also lingers. News shows and sites were still talking about Hoffman's death, when Temple's, and the Caesar's, times came.

It';s all just coincidence, of course, no pattern at all. One wishes for Sid Caesar's professor character to come back, if only for a moment or two, to explain it all:

Und for ze true nature of ze pattern to be revealed, you musht be zertain to understood zat ze zelebrities deaths must first and foremost come at ze END of zeir lives!

 Caesar would do it better than that -- far!.

But of course, if he did come back for that last curtain call, his presence on the stage would kick off a far larger, and more important, discussion than the lack of patterns in the deaths of celebrities.