A Three Ring Funeral

You gotta be shittin’ me. As if the death of The Fantastic Plastic Pedophile wasn’t enough of a circus, his family has honest-to-shit enlisted the aid of the REAL circus to do his memorial, and he’ll be buried in what amounts to nigh on a pharaoh’s sarcophagus.

The memorial service will take place Tuesday at the 20,000 seat Staples Center, and big screens outside will televise the spectacle from 10AM onwards to a million or so idiots outside who weren’t lucky enough to be the idiots inside.

The memorial will feature performances and tributes from a host of music and acting legends and will open with a parade of circus animals, including tigers and elephants walking trunk to tail - part of LA’s annual Parade of the Elephants.
The parade was devised by The Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, which has had to postpone its own show at the Staples Center.

A spokesman for the circus said Tuesday's event would be the 'greatest show on Earth', exactly the phrase Jackson used in 2002 when asked what he thought his funeral would be like. Eerily, Jackson replied: 'It’s going to be the greatest show on Earth. That’s what I want. Fireworks and everything.'

How utterly asinine. I don’t want any of you to say a frikkin’ word of derision when I ask for a bagpiper and a couple soldiers to fold the flag. My request pales in comparison to this lunacy.

Details of Tuesday's public memorial were released in Friday by the owners of Staples Center. CEO Tim Leiweke says 17,500 free tickets will be provided, with 11,000 tickets being for seats inside Staples Center and 6,500 for seats in the adjacent Nokia Theatre, where fans will watch a simulcast.

People who want tickets must register on the Web at Staplescenter.com. After 6 p.m. Saturday, 8,750 names will be randomly selected to receive two tickets each.

Notifications will go out on Sunday. Those selected will obtain their tickets via Ticketmaster on Monday. No word yet on whether Ticketbastard will charge handling and processing fees on those free tickets.

Among the guests expected to attend the memorial service are Diana Ross, Elizabeth Taylor and Paul McCartney, who is likely showing up in hopes of getting back the rights to his Beatles songs.

President Barack Obama has also been invited, one report claims, and last night he spoke for the first time about the singer’s death. He said: 'I still have all his stuff on my iPod. I grew up on his music.' He added that he thought Jackson had experienced 'a tragic and in many ways sad personal life'.

Nice to know our Dear Leader has such a tremendous grasp of the fucking obvious. My 9-year old stepson knew that MJ was messed up, so I’m glad the man with his finger on the nuclear button …oh, who am I kidding? …the guy who’s taking all my money…has at least that much situational awareness. Did Obama issue any statements on Ed McMahon’s death? Or Billy Mays? Or Farrah Fawcett? Or Karl Malden’s?

If by “sad personal life” on your TelePrompter, do you mean “slept with little kids in his bed in a house filled with chimps and surgery-grade sedatives”?



SuperFreak will be buried in a $25,000 golden casket, no less.

The coffin, a rare design called the Promethean, is made of solid bronze but is 14-carat gold-plated, with a hand-polished mirror finish and velvet lining. It was ordered from the Batesville Casket Company and is identical to the coffin used to bury James Brown in 2006.

After the memorial, there will be a private ceremony at Forest Lawn cemetery in Hollywood which will be attended by family and close friends only. Grid coordinates will be made available in the next couple days so that the media can hover overhead and people can swarm the “private” event. DVD’s and t-shirts will be on sale shortly thereafter to ease the burden of debts…

Jackson, who was believed to be $400 million in debt, also held giant assets, including the rights to his own songs and a 50 percent stake in the company that owns the majority of the Beatles' catalog. Jackson was worth $237 million as of March 31, 2007. Like so much else that boggles the mind about Jackson's life, though, he had $700,000 of that amount in actual cash, a relatively paltry sum given his opulent lifestyle, prodigious borrowing and ridiculous seven-figure shopping sprees. And then there’s Uncle Sam, who, once debts are stripped out of the Jackson assets, will want to exact his pound of flesh; as much as 45% of what's left of the estate once the legislated $3.5 million exemption is accounted for.

So, after the funeral, the Obama Administration will force-feed a Michael Jackson American Legacy Relief Stimulus Package of 8.6 billion dollars, of which 200 million will alleviate Jackson’s death and the remainder will be pork for ACORN.