TMZ briefly threw a scare into the celebrity media by reporting a rumor that Jay-Z (or "rapresario," in the parlance of our TMZ times) might have maybe possibly perished in a plane crash:

NICK DOUGLAS — "Hi, I'm the guy you're bashing today," writes Dough Mahugh in a Slashdot forum comment. He's the Microsoft employee who offered to pay an outside XML expert to edit a Wikipedia entry about Microsoft's Open Office XML format. It's a big story for many sites (and papers such as Australia's The Age) this week. But why? Mahugh debunks the myth that Microsoft PR was involved, and he makes a decent case that he wasn't asking much — he even said that the expert was free to write whatever he wanted.

Some internet prankster seems to be spreading around a link to this fake (and, quite frankly, very poorly written) press release claiming that Will Ferrell has died in a paragliding accident, apparently trying to stir up some buzz for a hoax: