Peter Sealey, I owe you an apology. Surely you remember him. He's the Bay Area consultant and former Hollywood executive who back in the early '90s was the CMO of Coca-Cola Co. At the time, in addition to presiding over history's best Coke slogan (Always Coca-Cola), Peter was flogging what he called a "New Paradigm" of marketing, in which brands like Coke were not merely goods but media unto themselves.

Remember Comcast Must Die? It was a blog jihad I mounted back in 2007 not to kill the cable provider, but to shame it into some modicum of customer-service responsibility. The project had not one but two jingles, and a horrifying/funny video and a podcast. But what it mainly had going for it was righteousness. Thousands upon thousands of frustrated customers used the blog as a CRM tool of last resort -- and so did Comcast, which was reduced to employing a site called Comcast Must Die to fix problems it was incapable of solving through its own vast but …

When good people die young, we mere mortals are hard pressed to divine Divine Purpose. Not in this case. God's plan was evident the moment the Hollywood elite began converging on the funeral chapel on the Upper East Side. In the race to the moral bottom that defines the fashion industry, there is a difference between mere opportunism and malice aforethought. Yes, the human frailty of celebrity obsession is pathetic, and the surrounding ecosystem of parasites contemptible. But better a parasite than a scavenger.

I picked up the phone and it was Al Jazeera, seeking my opinion on Super Bowl ads. "Gotta put you on hold," I said. "I've got E! on the other line asking me about Egypt's constitution." Okay -- that's not what I said, although I would have if I'd thought of it.