Superstars and their deaths and vacation

This is a bit of a diversion from our usual posts, but Asha and I have been talking about first Farrah Faucet's death and then its extreme overshadowing by Michael Jackson's and it just seemed worth posting about, briefly, if for no other reason than how Hollywood and Celebrities seem to infringe on everything. I use the word infringe with some trepidation. We didn't have to see the announcements on yahoo (although that would require that we access our email without the yahoo front page which might be possible but is beyond mine and Asha's internet knowledge); it wasn't forced on us, and it certainly won't change our trip in anyway. And, yet it feels strange to me that their deaths are so important that they pervade all the media and will for days.
Ironically, about 10 years ago on another road trip, Princess Di died and for at least a week, Asha (who was then 4) was obsessed with this. I wish I could dig up the picture we have of her sitting in a hotel room with her little legs crossed holding Time magazine with the cover of Princess Di on it (this was what she picked out at the bookstore). She wasn't a very competent reader as yet, but she poured over this magazine whenever she got the chance and listened and watched raptly to any broadcast about her. In fact, today in the bookstore we saw princess Di's biography and immediately both of us remembered her infatuation with the dead princess.
Now, what's up with that? She didn't even know "who" princess Di was and yet her image and story captured her imagination. Most of us don't know Jackson (and perhaps wouldn't want to, really) or Faucett, but their death is a national (international) calamity.
OJ Simpson also carried out his famous chase during one of our road trips back in 1994 (I think that's the date?). The only time I have television is on road trips so I don't know if these kinds of things tend to happen in summer or if they are happening all the time but I only know about the ones that happened in summer.
I'm sure there are all kinds of psychological explanations for this response, none of which would go far to fully explaining the human interest in these stories, but I find it fascinating (and somewhat scary) every time.
Okay, hopefully now that I've posted about this I can forget about it and stop thinking about why these events are so important and other events that seem much more significant (like Global Warming, for example) tend to get so little of the people's attention.