In the weeks since Anna-Nicole Smith’s death many ostensibly serious news outlets have displaced major current events stories in order to satisfy the public’s ravenous hunger for details about the demise of this very 21st-century celebrity.

That’s as nothing though compared to the veritable explosion of blog posts looking for significance, sentiment, or a whiff of suspicion in the court case which has followed her meteoric burnout. As Hollywood.com suggests, Anna-Nicole would probably be thrilled could she but have known that reaction to her death would echo, however faintly, the enduring wave of sentimentality engendered by the death of Marilyn Monroe. Wildstarz takes the comparison further, revelling in that perennial bloggers' hobby-horse, the conspiracy theory. Concurring opinions gives us a lawyer’s take on the unseemly squabble over her millions, while Bodogbeat offers us an oleaginous portrait of Howard K.Stern, the lawyer at the centre of the case. Celebrific is similarly damning, outlining the scale of his financial motivation.

Mr.Stern is also shown in court as Live Leak carries a video of the judge's emotional summing up at the end of the curious legal squabble over her remains. Stern is by no means the only competitor in the unseemly competition to lay claim to the paternity of Anna-Nicole's recently born daughter, Dannielynn Hope, and by extension her vast fortune, as Celebrity Hack wryly illustrates with a handy wall-chart.

As befits a life lived principally for the benefit of the cameras, Anna-Nicole is well represented on YouTube: everything from a mawkish tribute which wil surely interest Elton John's publishers to a home video showing us Ms Smith pregnant, altered, and wearing makeup that we should warn you may unnerve the more delicate viewer.

Families.com reminds us that, behind all the noise, this should ultimately be seen as just another sad waste of a young life. But then again, as Cranky Grammy points out so acerbically: while she was alive, nobody really liked poor Anna-Nicole anyway.

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