Countdown to Hallows' Eve #1: Found Dead Near

Good evening, Hallowed Readers and Ticketholders! As promised, I am back to cleaning up my old blogs and re-posting their contents as part of my Countdown to Hallows' Eve event (I'm calling it an event even though I just came up with the name for it five seconds ago. Isn't that awesomely presumptuous of me?).

I begin the countdown with something I pulled from my sick imagination after reading Entertainment Weekly and drinking a vat of coffee on July 2, 2012 (Piece Offerings #20: Found Dead Near): I was reading News and Notes in this week's issue of Entertainment Weekly (y'know, the section that says who's getting a divorce, who's having a baby, who died, and so forth), and in the Deaths section, it said that some old movie actor was "found dead near" his home at the age of 74.

With those three little monosyllabic words, I couldn't help feeling sorry for the guy because the semantics painted a grisly picture in my head.
I mean, it's not like his wife or his son who was serving as his caretaker walked outside and found he had passed away in a lounge chair by the pool. The phrase "found dead near," used to fuzz the details, respect the privacy of the deceased, and avoid a legal debacle for the magazine and the man's family, instead gave me an image of some hired gardener pushing a lawnmower with his earbuds in so he can hear his iPhone tell him outside on a bright sunny day that it's great weather for gardening, and this gardener, who shouldn't be able to afford an iPhone on his salary, except that he just took out a second mortgage on his $500,000 one bedroom shoebox to pay for his data plan last month, suddenly bumps his lawnmower into the man's facedown dead body, at which point he runs away screaming (with the lawnmower still running and parked up against the dead actor's head) to make an anonymous phone call to the police so he doesn't get deported for bumping a dead body with a lawnmower that has his fingerprints all over the handle (dumbass!), but in modern Hollywood, everyone has a cell phone so there are no payphones for the next fifty miles. So when the police respond to the call and trace the gardener's fingerprints and the "Property Of" tag on the mower to his landscaping business, they put out a GPS trace on his iPhone and his company van, which they find abandoned out on some desolate highway with an empty gas tank because V8 engines get shitty gas mileage, and the gardener two miles down the road, dead from heatstroke and blood poisoning because he had a drinking problem and siphoned gas from his van to get an ethanol buzz.
So remember: If you're famous and you die of old age, don't get "found dead near" your home. Pass away in a lounge chair by your Olympic-sized swimming pool with a drink in your hand and some hot distant relative trying to give you mouth-to-mouth. It's more glamorous for you and safer for your gardener.
I've been watching too many cheesy police dramas.

So ends the first of my Countdown contributions. Tomorrow, I will get back to sharing some relatively old reviews of some relatively old horror movies. It's all part of my evil master plan that I make up as I go along. MWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA! Ahem.... Sorry.

Ticketmaster,
me go sleep now.
Bye-bye.