My sincerest apologies for the eye-roller of a headline; I’ll make up for it by making this a post about pictures rather than words, and making said pictures larger than they should be.

Michael Jackson moonwalked off this mortal coil yesterday, and the news that broke, as everything does these days, on Twitter. (CNN insisted, for an hour-plus following his death being confirmed on Twitter, that he was just hospitalized, then in a coma; they took a loss for guarding against being wrong.) The world at large reacted by flooding the entirety of Twitter’s “Trending Topics” with MJ, RIP, and variations thereof, and by trying to destroy the Internet with traffic.

Perez Hilton’s website, sadly, did not disappear, despite continued attempts to self-immolate.

But, of course, our sports stars, and the people who cover them, are also part of that world at large, and, in some cases, possessed of poor comedic timing.

For example, Matthew Berry:

We can see why he is no longer doing comedy writing, yes?

How about Chad Ochocinco?

I am glad Nick Saban doesn’t have a Twitter.

Both Berry and Johnson apologized, for the record.

What of Zaza Pachulia’s Borat-like response? The Big Twitter’s disbelief? Warren Sapp tweeting whatever this is? At least Terrell Owens took a moment to indirectly blast another self-aggrandizing diva.

I’m all for athletes being given their own platform to “seize control” of “their message” from “the media,” but it’s these banalities, the offal of our own bar conversations and IM chats, that we really don’t need to hear, and this sort of white noise that gives Twitter a bad rap.

Last night ESPN ran a compilation of tweets over the air, according to one person on Twitter; the network’s Wimbledon coverage that I watched yesterday included a mention of Andy Roddick tweeting about being asked about tweeting. Twitter, which gets an infusion of buzz every time anything newsworthy happens and people tweet up a storm, has the momentum (and the venture capital) to stick around as a medium for information and communication, so I would guess segments like that are here to stay as well.

While some of it is going to be good and revelatory, like Kevin Love’s rather frazzled reaction’s to last night’s NBA Draft (an athlete freaks out over his team’s rudderlessness in real time!), most of it is going to be high-style, low-value blather, much like everything Chris Berman has said since 1993. Sure, I love Shaq’s public persona and think that he is most fans’ ideal accessible superstar, if I want jokes, I’ll listen to Daniel Tosh.

We could asphyxiate while holding our breath for little more substance out of our incredibly rich and deified athletes, or understand that part of them being humanizied and being “one of the people” means being, at times, utterly uninteresting.

And tune out correspondingly.

(Some of TBL on Twitter: TBL | CRM | Duffy | Hernia | That Kansas Intern. I can’t find the USC guy and I already make up an eighth of Twitter’s daily posts, so you’ll be able to find me.)