You know the five stages of grief? Well, at least three are clearly represented in the comments.

Denial is by far the most prominent (that's both denial that he died of natural causes and denial that he is dead at all). Just today a reader commented that he could have been injected with something that gave the appearance of a major heart attack. Many have invoked his relationship with President Bush to imply all sorts of alternative scenarios -- quite often involving the witness protection program.

Most convincing was a doctor who wrote that he found it implausible that a man of Lay's age and wealth could have an undiagnosed heart condition that would trigger a massive coronary without warning. That one got me thinking...

Anger would be next, as far as representation in blog comments. I would say the bulk of the 139 commenters to date are very angry at Lay -- for losing their money; for losing the money of his employees, for possibly preserving great wealth for his wife by dying before his sentencing (video news report). Many of them even are mad at him for dying since they liked to imagine him suffering during his prison term. Just let it go, I say.

Acceptance was another stage clearly in evidence. Surprised? Lots of of these folks clearly found comfort from the Bible and urged others not to cast the first stone and the like. 

Depression is one stage that didn't show up in great numbers in the comments. I'm sure there were plenty of people depressed by reading all those angry comments hurled at a man we just learned had died. But do truly depressed people comment on blogs? I doubt it.

What about Bargaining? I didn't see much sign of that. It's not really applicable here -- that's the stage where you basically bargain with God (or your deity of choice) not to let something bad happen and you'll donate all your money to charity or something. But we're talking about Ken Lay, one of the most disgraced corporate executives in history. And who would bargain over him, even posthumously?

Message boards are burning up over the news. Lay's critics (I admit, a tepid word to describe their pure hatred), are howling at the idea. They think that he somehow got off through his death. Many of them apparently don't believe it was a simple case of a heart attack. Some speculate there was foul play involved in his death. Some even believe that he faked his death through a stunt of some kind and has escaped authorities.

The truth is that Lay's death by heart attack shouldn't be too great a surprise. I'm no doctor and I know a massive coronary can strike the healthiest and certainly the most honorable people without warning. But could many people have been under more stress than Lay? Given his May 25 conviction, he seemed destined to live out the rest of his life behind bars. Sentencing was set for October 23. If he had been deluding himself that he would be found innocent during his trial, his conviction erased any hope.

Maybe Lay would have died of a massive coronary at age 64 even if Enron had stayed on the straight and narrow. And, if Ken Lay knew his fate was to die at that relatively young age, would he have risked his company and his legacy on fraudulent dealings?

To me, that is the most interesting question: If Ken Lay  had remembered how short life can be, would he really have wasted his time on earth causing so much pain and destruction?

For any other corporate leaders who about to slide down a slippery slope of fraud and corruption, his early demise provides a chilling lesson: Life's too short to be a crook.

Because today is the day that everyone's reviewing the keynote speech of longtime cable exec Leo Hindery, at the Convergence 2.0 conference yesterday. Hindery (representing the "Washington Insider" viewpoint but, seemingly, attacking his subject matter in an Infrastructure-is-King Insider kind of way) represented the media universe as consisting of three pillars:

• Content (ABC, NBC, Disney, Time Warner's content side?),
• Portals (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, and eBay) and
• "Non-Broadcast Distributors" (notably, cable and the satellites)

He put numbers to everything, so I can make fun of it more easily. Portals have a collective market cap of $225 billion, he says. Advertising represents two-thirds of this, or about $150 billion. But as the content that makes up the backbone of these portals is non-proprietary, it will be easy for the content providers to steal that money away.

Hence, death to Google. And three of the other four (I haven't found where he said which of the content providers would survive).