As you surely are aware by now, over the weekend, both 50 year-old Bernie Mac and 65 year-old Isaac Hayes died. The former succumbed to pneumonia after several weeks of speculation over his health; the latter apparently collapsed whilst exercising at home. At first, the news––especially in regards to Mac––was greeted with shock. But by late Sunday, the two deaths had been conflated into a meme of jokes about how Samuel L. Jackson should, as one Tumblr put it, “head to his doctor tout de suite.”

Surely, some of the jokes were of the spontaneous, “Quick! Think of another middle-aged black man in the entertainment industry!” variety. But pretty much any of that was cut short when a number of bloggers received a press release from Daryl Toor, “CEO & Chief Awareness Officer” for AttentionPR. The subject of the email: Is Samuel Jackson Next? Death Comes in Threes.

Toor’s email pointed to a publicity photo for the upcoming movie Soul Men, which coincidentally stars Mac, Hayes, and Jackson. Toor, somewhat inexplicably, claims the image “is as eerie as the time I read a newspaper obituary on its own obituary writer.” The release earned Toor a mention from Kevin Dugan, who runs a hall of shame for tasteless publicity faux pas called the Bad Pitch Blog, but other, less sensitive bloggers took the image as the starting point for new jokes, such as “OMG, this is like Back To The Future except they’re black and i don’t have a DeLorean to save them.”

You could say that Toor’s pitch certainly had the desired effect, in that we––and half the rest of the internet––are talking about it first thing on a Monday morning when Russia and Georgia are at war and the US female gymnastics team seriously embarrassed themselves the night before. Yes, Toor got our attention. But what is he promoting, exactly? Did Soul Men distributor Dimension actually hire him to do this, or is this a self-serving gambit, a self-underwritten testament to his, uh, skills? Even if it’s the latter, does Dimension now basically just sit back and let the internet correct itself, simultaneously spanking Toor for his tastelessness while drawing thousands of eyeballs to a studio-sanctioned piece of publicity? Win-win, right? Too bad two stars had to die for this meme to get off the ground.