You know we're completely in favor of anything that suggests NYC IS EDGY. But we'd argue things have gone too far when shopping for ironic t-shirts becomes a potentially fatal extreme sport. A tipster reports:

If it were up to us, we might not put this article — or at least this quarter-page picture of Terri Schiavo — in the section of the magazine called "What You're Dying to Know About."

Another addition to Deathweek 2005: Word came last night that Barbara Bel Geddes, who was Miss Ellie on Dallas (and — who knew? — the original Maggie the Cat on Broadway), died Monday.

So first there was David Shaw last week. Then Peter Jennings over the weekend. John Johnson on Monday. Abe Hirschfeld yesterday. Now there's news on the wires that even the author Judith Rossner has finally finished her search for Mr. Goodbar. And somehow we have this feeling that the recent spate of deaths isn't quite over yet.

We wondered yesterday who'd be the third famous media figure to go this week — because these things always come in threes — and we're afraid this is it: Insane parking-garage magnate Abe Hirschfeld, who owned the New York Post for about two weeks in 1993, died yesterday.

A headline from Publishers Weekly:

RIP John H. Johnson, 1923-2005.

John H. Johnson, 87, Founder of Ebony, Dies [NYT]

It is remarkable for those of us who were children in the 1970s and '80s, who have virtually no memory of a time before Peter, Tom, and Dan were the network anchors, that the three men, who just a year ago seemed a fixed part of the landscape, always there when you looked for them, even if you didn't look for them often, that today none remains in the job.

It's been a bad summer to be a kid in the New York area, as the Times points out today. So far:

A little off our "beat," but pertinent nevertheless: Late yesterday afternoon, suspended Miami Commissioner Art Teele walked into the lobby of the Miami Herald and committed suicide. After instructing a security guard give a message to Jim DeFede (asking the columnist to tell Teele's wife that he loved her), Teele pulled a pistol from his bag and shot himself in the head. Later that night, Jim DeFede was fired from the Herald after he told superiors that he had recorded a phone conversation with Teele without Teele's permission. Interestingly enough, however, it was Miami New Times reporter Francisco Alvarado who wrote the following introduction to a front-page story on Wednesday:

Free snuff films? Sweet.