Britney Spears Makes Light of Recent Celebrity Passings

Pop star Britney Spears has made light of the number of recent celebrity deaths, jokingly posting a notice of her own passing to her official Twitter account moments ago.

The Womanizer singer, who has just announced plans to tour Australia for the first time in her career, posted a picture of a rudimentary black cross via TwitPic, with the caption: “Britney has passed today. It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come.”

This tweet comes hours after American television pitchman Billy Mays was found dead in his Tampa home, and days after Hollywood lost the shining lights of Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Ed McMahon.

UPDATE: The tweet has since been removed from Spears’ official Twitter page. No doubt her management got wind of the tweet and removed it before it could offend any members of those families who’ve lost loved ones over the last week.

UPDATE # 2: It appears Britney Spears’ Twitter account was hacked earlier today, and the offensive tweet was posted by an unknown hacker. Twitter has since disabled the ability to upload mobile photos via TwitPic.

Celebrities On Twitter

With all the attention Facebook receives, it is good to see that some celebrities have embraced Twitter to tell the World about their lives.

Of course, Barack Obama made good use of it during his campaign, but the take up by other non-political celebrities has been somewhat less than startling, which is kind of strange.

Even stranger, is that many of the celebrities using Twitter are much older than you would expect for tech-savvy celebrities.

The most notable celebrity that I have found on Twitter, is Britney Spears. While her account primarily relies upon her PR people doign the actual tweeting for her, some of them are reportedly written by Britney herself.

Gee, isn’t that novel, actually writing 140 characters all by yourself……

John Cleese, who has 24,700 followers on Twitter, expressed a liking for Marmite but in a later tweet declared a greater penchant for German mustard ‘of which I possess an epicureal collection’.

If that is a little too cerebral for you, perhaps you would prefer to follow the Shaq, who with 24,500 followers is only slightly behind Cleese in the popularity stakes.

If celebrity sports people are more your thing, you may choose to follow Lance Armstrong as he embarks upon his return to cycling.

Or maybe, MCHammer is more to your liking.

Outside of a complete meltdown, don’t expect to see any tweets saying:

“Going to take a dump”,

“Doing a line of coke in the ladies toilet”, or

“Planning my next sex tape”.

As more PR firms realize the benefit, you can probably expect more of the usual sanitized releases you have come to expect from celebrity publicists.

However, the more savvy celebrities and publicists may realize the potential Twitter has to really build and enhance a celebrity profile by making it more personal. These celebrities would gain much more kudos for doing so.

Time will tell I guess.

If you have no idea what Twitter is, go and check it out, but be warned, it can become very addictive.

I have set up a Twitter account for those that want to follow the goings on of Staralicious, so go ahead and add me if you liked to join the in crowd…..