The world was shocked and saddened on on the morning of Tuesday June 21st by the sudden and unexpected death of veteran movie star Tom Cruise, only days before his 43rd birthday. The diminutive leading man was felled tragically by an assassin's water bullet, part of a prank gone bad. Immediately after the incident Cruise seemed to be almost normal, or at least as close to normal as he was capable, but his system seems to have absorbed enough water to drown his vital organs.

 "T'was the squirt that killed the squirt," recited London's pompous official Lord High Coroner, Darcy Worthington-Smythe. "Granted it was merely a small amount of water, but Mr. Cruise was a very small man indeed, and even that relatively minor dose was able to drown him."

The British legal authorities have not decided how to proceed in the prosecution. Although the United Kingdom does not normally have a death penalty for ordinary crimes, the penalty for regicide is beheading, and forensic scholars have opined that killing an important British celebrity like Hugh Grant or Elton John would be legally tantamount to killing the queen, especially in Elton's case. Cruise's murder is on shakier legal grounds, however, because there is no available precedent for the law lords to follow. Although Cruise is not a British celebrity, he was on English soil at the time of the fatal attack, and a beheading might be appropriate both as appropriate jurisprudence and as an outstanding marketing event to stimulate the flagging English economy.

"The television revenues alone for a single ceremonial beheading should easily reach nine figures if the bidding is opened to the Yanks," opined the Lord High Media Mogul, Ramsey Blythe-Teddington, "and it appears we may be able to separate the assault into four separate trials, with four separate dates for the beheadings. These murders may have the potential to be our equivalent of the Michael Jackson trial."

When approached for a comment, Cruise's fiancee, Katie Holmes, said, "Whoa, it's totally like, I'm a widow or something, right? Can I be a widow and a virgin at the same time?"

Cruise's friend and mentor, director Steven Spielberg, was more eloquent, although barely able to speak through his emotions. "One weeps to realize that there can never be a Far and Away 2. It appalls me that people have already come forward to say that Tom's death, coming just two days before the New York premiere, is just another publicity stunt to promote War of the Worlds, like his bogus engagement to Katie. That is simply not true. Tom did not choose to be squirted, and never saw it coming. If he had known that consenting to an interview would kill him, he might have refused, even though he knew the boffo box office potential. But we shall never know that answer because the assassin's cruel stream kept Tom from taking his fate into his own tiny, well-moisturized hands."

As we wave farewell forever to Tom and his intended, we join Mr. Spielberg in brushing away a tear and whispering, "Tommy, We Hardly Knew Ye."

Although based on the Oprah incident, we're kinda glad for that.