I've got 200 quatloos on Shatner...

Set your phasers to fun, everybody, because we're going to talk about death.

We're all fascinated by death. Especially celebrity death. I'm talking dead actors, musicians, political figures, and athletes. Who among us doesn't find it to be absolutely riveting front-page news to read about a Frank Sinatra, George Harrison or Johnny Carson dropping dead just the night before? You open up the paper or log on to CNN.com and see that Rick James died and you think, "Wow, Super Freak is super dead. Amazing."

So which celebrity will be next to cross the river Styx to the gates of Hades? Will Lindsay Lohan starve herself to death? Will Shelley Long bore herself to death? Will one of the Golden Girls finally die? Because Estelle Getty has got to be a well into her 120's by now. Is Conrad Baine from Diff'rent Strokes close to joining Dana Plato in the hereafter? Will gun control advocates finally get their chance to pry a gun from Charlton Heston's cold dead hands? Will Mickey Rooney's 4-foot frame soon be dropped into a 6-foot hole in the ground? What's that? Lady Bird Johnson is still alive?! Well geez, she has to be next, right?

It's all just so exciting to think about. The suspense of finding out who will die next is killing me. Pun intended.

The most recent celebrity death was that of James Doohan a.k.a. Montgomery Scott a.k.a. Mr. Scott a.k.a. Scotty a.k.a. Fatty Boombalatty from the original Star Trek series. And that got me to thinking. There's been two main cast members die now, Dr. McCoy and Scotty, and it's entirely possible that the rest may start to drop like flies rather quickly. So which original Star Trek cast member will be the next to breathe no more? Will it be Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, Kirk, or Spock? After hours of careful consideration, I've finally concluded that it will most likely be William Shatner a.k.a. James T. Kirk a.k.a. Captain Kirk a.k.a. French Kisser of Green-haired Aliens a.k.a. Master...of.......Melodramatics. Here's my reasons why:

1) The guy was born in 1931, which makes him 74 years old. Coincidentally, this just happens to be the average life expectancy of a male human being living in the United States of America. Just as a double-ended vibrator tends to break on the very day the warranty expires, this means that our beloved Bill Shatner is now on borrowed time.

2) His wife drowned in 1999. She was a big time alcoholic and apparently fell into the pool one night while drunk. Usually drinking and swimming at night are a winning combination, but not in this case. At any rate, this had to be an extremely hard, stressful time for Shatner. And stress only leads to premature aging and premature death.

3) Kirk's physical appearance is an excellent indicator of how close he is to transitioning to another plane of existence. Here's a side-by-side comparison of the young and old Shatner to give you an idea of how far from death he was, and how close to death he is:



He looks like he's been attacking pizza pies with the same vigor that he used to attack the Klingon Bird-of-Prey. He looks like he's smuggling a few Tribbles in his cheeks if you know what I mean. He looks like his face has been bombarded by tritium radiation from a warp drive reactor core meltdown. He looks like a few photon torpedoes damaged his shields and beemed them up to the bridge at warp factor 8. OK, I don't know what that means. The point is he's fat and old and ready to die. Want further proof? Let's warp into the future and look at a computer-generated projection of what Shatner will look like within 3 years:


Case closed! This guy can't last much longer. His only hope is that he hosts a telethon of his own to raise money to save himself.

In summary, if I were to put down a wager in some sort of Star Trek death pool, my money would be on Captain Kirk to die next. But I'm a little nervous because I just heard a rumor that S-U-L-U has S-A-R-S. Now, if you'll excuse me, I had some Taco Bell last night and I feel somewhat of an urgency to take a big ol' Shatner. Later.