"i'm not dead yet..."

a headline i saw on msn.ca from ctv news today made me think of that scene from monty python and the holy grail where the guy is trying to sell his 'dead' father to the body collector. the old guy was saying stuff like "i'm not dead yet..." "i feel fine..." "i'm feeling much better now..." and so on. okay, i'm sure you've all seen the scene, so i won't go into further detail. anyway, the headline was:

"Arafat is 'not dead', docs say"

the first paragraph says "... reports Yasser Arafat is dead are gravely exaggerated..."

now, to be fair, i didn't actually hear any reports of his death, so this whole thing was news to me. the last thing i heard was that they had ruled out leukemia, which seemed like good news to me. so, yeah, i didn't hear about reports of death, but i have no reason to doubt the good folks at ctv.

a couple questions went through my mind, first the one that is actually vaguely interesting in a political context which is, who is spreading these rumours of death? and who is believing them? and what is the motivation? i have guesses at the motivation, i don't know enough about the situation to guess at the others.

now for the frivolous questions...

first, apparently these are "gravely exaggerated" claims. what exactly would a mildly exaggerated claim be? Yasser Arafat is mostly dead but as long as we can find billy crystal and carol kane to administer a chocolate coated pill from miracle max's stash and we can all run off and defeat prince humperdinck and live happily ever after?

second, also on this choice of wording. um, did they notice that they were using the word "gravely" when talking about death? am i actually just a twelve year old in disguise as a grown up because it made me giggle? (the word usage of course, not the man on his death bed...)

and those are my thoughts for the evening.