You can see the "pb" logo on the side of the boat; you can see the Bahamanian flag; you can start to make out the boat name; it goes something like P L – N – and then presumably there's a B in there as well... It is not on the list of the world's 82 longest yachts, of course, as it's only about 50 meters, and that list bottoms out at 67 meters; it doesn't seem to be on the best charter lists, but... oh ho! Duh! It's the Plan B!

Formerly the HMAS Flinders, a "a hydrographic survey ship of the Royal Australian Navy," then owned by a New Zealander, then sold again to a mysterious owner, a very mysterious owner, one much shrouded in mystery! The rumors were that it was owned by Brad Pitt, since his production company is named Plan B, but that seems terribly unlikely. According to the megayacht message boards, "their is only one owner well i guess there is two if you count his wife and her dog." [uh, sic]

Ownership aside, equally importantly, it also has a submarine, as well as python and chinchilla cushions and the "Japanese symbols for luck and harmony painted onto a hessian background and mounted to the exterior wall of the Main Deck."

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Why Betty? Why now? Perhaps the yukster-known on Livejournal as "jerseyfux"; her bio reads simply "idk" — was enraged by White's decision to side with Jay Leno in the Late Night Wars. Or maybe she was just sick of people lobbying for her to host "Saturday Night Live." (Either way, we can at least partially blame NBC!)

A glimpse at a screenshot of the ONTD post reveals a bit of trickery that shouldn't have passed even the least savvy gossip-reader's smell test, let alone a moderator at the frantically updated site. Sure, Miss jerseyfux did go to Wikipedia to verify White's age, but everything else was wrong-grandchildren who didn't exist, speculation about foul play involving prescription drugs (gasp!). The post was quickly deleted from the site, but not before word got to Twitter that she'd passed. Unlike pretty much every other fake news story that makes it to Twitter, however, this one seems to have been replaced by actual facts. Is that a sign that the Internet is growing up?

Well, first it has to stop with the whole "killing of celebrities through the spreading of bad data" thing. In the weeks following Jackson's passing last June, famous types ranging from Jeff Goldblum to Harrison Ford to Miley Cyrus were killed off by fake wire stories and cryptic Twitter posts. It's tempting to think that the Internet hive mind's desire to kill celebrities is some sort of weird grasping for community-the immediate hours following a famous person's death tend to be a relatively lulz-free zone when compared to, say, the normal comment-section sniping that accompanies even the most mundane news about those stars. (One could argue that the nature of said mundanity is what contributes to the vitriol-the whole "why should I care about these people?" attitude curdling into rancor.)

For her part, White was enjoying dinner and a show in Los Angeles while people were sitting in front of their computers and speculating about her demise. Living well is the best revenge, right? I don't even know what word in that time-worn cliché would be best to emphasize in this particular case!

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Your recent email blast of this morning? The one headlined "TMZ EXCLUSIVE: Balloon Dad — Don't Worry About Dropping Soap," which begins "Richard Heene won't have to worry about the "shower situation" in lockdown — TMZ has learned dude will get to shower alone"? This suggests that you require some forcible reeducation. (Particularly as you are an outfit with a gay man in charge.) We hereby sentence you to read the Human Rights Watch paper on prison rape and also to get, for the office, a guest speaker from Just Detention International. Here, you can read testimony from people who have been raped in prison. Also maybe you could donate to stop the epidemic of prison rape in juvenile facilities? Alternately, you could just not be evil, smirky shitheels.

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Sure, as Styles correspondent Allen Salkin generously explains, the coinage belongs to the rival L.A. Times, which together with the terminally addled celeb site TMZ, was among the first outlets reporting the saga of the gang of Calabasas, Calif., teens who ransacked the houses of Hollywood's dumb, rich and famous set while its members were out filming, attending benefit events or otherwise toxing or detoxing. But the Times is the Paper of Record, after all, and the Sunday Styles section rightfully owns the official sanction to sort out the bewildering tangle of players and social forces that conspired to make Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan-hell, even Brian Austin Green-the quarry of common, striving, starstruck hoods from the San Fernando Valley.

It's a fearsomely difficult business, as Salkin stipulates early on: "The tale lies at the intersection of celebrity, teen culture, reality TV and the Internet"-the latter being the medium the gang used to pinpoint the locations and track the whereabouts of its celebutant prey. Indeed, one of the alleged perps, Alexis Neiers, "was arrested on the set of a reality show pilot she is filming for E! with her sister Tess Taylor, a Playboy model." Whereupon Salkin supplies the echt-Styles section set-up for the sumptuous narrative to follow: "Rich enough for you?"

Well, no, actually-since Salkin's laundry list of intersecting social trends omits the one key motive force that lurks through the contemporary mediascape like the ghost of Tom Joad: social class. It's a reality that his chronicle strenuously seeks to deny at the outset, by noting that Calabasas is "an affluent suburb." True, it's "more rural than the Hollywood Hills, some 30 minutes away," where Bling Ring members did much of their thieving. But hey, it definitely "has its share of stars: Will Smith and Kourtney Kardashian from the reality show 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians.'"

Now, you know your enabling sociological conceit is creaky when you're resting fully half of it on a Kardashian who isn't even Kim. And you know it's effectively dead in the water when you craft your nut graph around this crucial insight from Jason Pierce, the host of the local-access cable show, Calabasas Teen Forum: "Young people see a lifestyle on television and have peer pressure and constant bombardment from the media to have what other people have, to want what other people want and to try to live the dream." There you have it: Calabasas is a place so tantalizingly proximate to the glittering cathedrals of LA celebrity that TV has precisely the same effect there that it does everywhere else!

Nevertheless, if you're Sunday Styles reporter, you press gamely on. But even as Salkin recites gauzy evocations of la vie Calabasasianne like this-"celebrities and a celebrity lifestyle are close enough to reach out and touch, even more so thanks to gossipy Web sites that track the nightly antics of celebutants and reality shows like The Hills"-a very different set of social conditions obtrudes, via the irksome biographical details he must provide about the background of the six actually detained Ring members.

Take the teen who the LA police have fingered as the ringleader of the gang, Rachel Lee. She met up with Nicholas Prujo-whom other alleged perps have claimed is the real mastermind-while both "were classmates at a remedial high school, Indian Hills, to which they transferred because of truancy issues at Calabas High School, friends said." Not much reality-show glamour there, I'm afraid-nor in the news that Lee lived in a "small house near the high school," where her mom, "who had been single for many years, started a relationship that displeased" the daughter.

The legal countercharges already flying are also far more suggestive of the kind of class conflict you see on The Jerry Springer Show rather than My Super Sweet Sixteen. Prugo's attorney, Sean Erenstoft, for instance, is "seeking to portray Mr. Prugo as a young man with low self-esteem who was manipulated by Ms. Lee," as Salkin notes.

Not that Lee comes off as an especially cunning Svengali-type, in the Prugo team's account. "Rachel for fun would break into cars in rich neighborhoods," Erenstoft told Salkin. "She would yank on the handles of cars to see if they were locked. They find an open door, grab a roach." Now, maybe it's just me, but the spectacle of kids collecting marijuana leavings from car floors, presumably to assemble into a furtively toked bowlful of the stuff in a remedial high school parking lot, doesn't exactly conjure an image of teen celeb voyeurism run amok.

Indeed, the patient reader, plowing on to the thirtieth or so paragraph of Salkin's piece will discover that even the delicious reality-TV set piece that furnished our Styles reporter with his "Rich enough for you?" catchphrase is a decidedly down-market affair. "A person familiar with the show the sisters are filming for E! said it is about growing up on self-help books like The Secret."

The Secret, of course, is the Oprah-endorsed New Thought treatise positing that all good things are realized through a simple "law of attraction" and that "the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts"-the sort of singularly destructive twaddle, in other words, that desperately unsuccessful people throng to as a last spiritual resort. None of which, of course, will stop enterprising E! producers from minting all sorts of chuckle-and-snort reality drama out of such pitiful longings. (Indeed, carelessly including "reality TV" in the litany of cultural forces now deranging our proper social hierarchies was a telling oversight on Salkin's part, since the rarely uttered byword of the genre is class predation.)

And on the litany of suburban SoCal seediness goes. Another alleged Bling Ringer, "Ms. [Diana] Tamayo, who has been charged in the burglaries of Ms. Lohan and Ms. Tisdale... lived in one of the few apartment buildings in Calabasas with her family while attending high school"-again, at the remedial Indian Hills facility, where she won the office of class president and "best smile" honors in the 2007 yearbook while also earning "a reputation for getting into fights," according to current and former students. Even Prugo, the only gang member with an identifiable entertainment-world pedigree, is the son of a low-end international film-distribution executive, whose firm recently got lucky by handling the rights to the $11,000 breakout smash Paranormal Activity. His mother-who would likely not work at all if his dad possessed real studio-executive bona fides-"runs a dog-walking service," Salkin is obliged to note.

But there's no way that Salkin and his editors can permit this depressingly banal social background-the class-determined fatalism that shapes the careers of petty criminals throughout these United States, even in suburbs in no way adjacent to the capitals of the culture industry-to swarm the gossamer Internet-as-agent-of-social delusion foreground of their dispatch. So the last word in the piece of course belongs to Lindsey Lohan's attorney, Blair Berk, who writes the whole affair off to the mad carousel of renown in our age of instant celebrity. "Wait until they become the people they robbed," she says of the Bling Ring's members. "Give it 60 days before these kids are household names."

Actually, give it 60 days before someone like alleged Ring member Roy Lopez Jr.-who worked as a bouncer "at the Sagebrush Cantina, a popular restaurant in Calabasas" and in no way "looks like the cast of Twilight," as another waggish Hollywood attorney characterizes the suspect list in this case-is keelhauled on charges from the talentless hotel heiress he is purported to have robbed (charges that his lawyer roundly denies). Upon his release, he'd likely have to count himself lucky to find a busboy job. But you have your fun, Mr. Salkin and other members of the Sunday Styles cognoscenti: It turns out that this yarn, at least as you're telling it, is actually way too rich for the likes of me.

Haven't had enough of Chris Lehmann fulminating about class inequality? Then go see him this Thursday night at the Tishman Center of the New School, where he's hosting a star-studded panel on Labor Issues in the 21st Century.

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A reader writes!

You know what's funny is how everyone was all like "oh it's TMZ so we don't believe it." But TMZ broke it and had the story right from the get-go, while LA Times had it wrong initially and no one faults them. If TMZ said "coma, not dead" everyone would get all mad and be like "they suck." Instead, everyone's all like "oh see the LA Times says it's true so he is really dead!"

5:20 p.m.

As of 6:19 p.m., Drudge was still hedging, going with "REPORT." While updating the top left with "LA TIMES: MICHAEL JACKSON IN A COMA...."

An LA Times story today says that this headline was already up at 5:51 pm, but that is not what we saw looking at their website. (Nor is it obviously what Drudge saw.) As late as 6:20, we were still seeing something like "Michael Jackson rushed to hospital/in a coma," on front and inside pages. (It should be noted that their servers were getting hammered (as were Twitter and AOL's servers!), and so things pushed through may not have appeared immediately online. Clarifications welcome!)

At 6:26 p.m., CNN, citing the LA Times, pronounced Michael Jackson dead.

In any event, at 6:33 p.m., the New York Times was fronting this. Which: ouch.

At 9:23 p.m., the television critic of the LA Times was perhaps the first person at a non-blog publication to write this true fact: "Folks at CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other outlets refused to acknowledge that it was TMZ that first reported the superstar's death because, presumably, TMZ is a gossip website and that's just tacky."

(Disclosure: I have tried to stick to observable facts above, as I have a life-long favorable bias towards the LA Times, in part because it was my hometown paper growing up and in part because they pay me to contribute to the paper, unlike everyone else in this world.)

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