bruno we hardly knew ye

The best¹ production of the two-person play Greater Tuna I ever saw was² during my one-year stint as a reporter/editor at The Daily Spectrum in St. George, Utah. It was probably the best theatrical production I saw the whole time I was there. And it wasn’t even in St. George. It was at some itty-bitty theatrical venue in Hurricane, Utah. I would have to dig out my notes to remember the actors’ names, the actual date and location, and that ain’t gonna happen unless somebody asks me to make it happen and even then…

One of the old-lady characters approached somebody in the audience like she had known them all their lives, cried out her name and exclaimed she thought she was dead. This kind of thing has happened to me more than once, and in more than one direction. I’ve encountered people who I thought were dead but weren’t. People have been surprised to see me a time or two because they thought I was dead. Fun stuff. Details. It’s all details.

And so, I’m looking over Google Trends to see what is Googly and Trendy that maybe I can address here in this inane space. Bruno Kirby is dead, I see. His name is way up there, spicy-hot even, on the trend meter.  Wow. Too bad. He was a wonderful character actor. I remember him best from… no wait, he couldn’t be that stuffed military d.j. who put Vaseline on his lips in Good Morning Viet Nam, that guy died a few years ago. This begged to be researched at IMDB.com. Yes, it was the same guy. Yes. That guy died in August of ‘06 soon after learning of his leukemia.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has leukemia. That’s the real story as far as Google Trends tells us after we click around a bit.  Bruno Kirby figures predominantly in the story because Mr. Abdul-Jabbar said his first thought upon hearing the diagnosis was of his friend, Bruno Kirby.

As we move more toward taking glimpses of information as fact, we’ll probably make more mistakes like this. At least I will. Mistake is the real thing here. I took the news for something it wasn’t, something that had already happened, something that allowed further mistakes on my part.

At the risk of getting a little edgy around a sensitive subject, especially today, especially this moment³ I’ve got to point out that this is the result of something our President has cautioned us against:

“…I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.”

Yes, let’s wait till we have all the facts, then we can jump to conclusions. It’s what we do.

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1. and only [↩]
2. palindrome alert [↩]
3. as President Obama addresses the memorial service at Fort Hood [↩]