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.

Death is good for the bank account

If ever you needed proof that dying increases your popularity, radio play for Michael Jackson's music is up 1735% this week. Yeah, One thousand, seven hundred thirty-five per cent. That ain't a typo.

According to research provided by Nielsen BDS of monitored airplay from over 1,600 terrestrial and satellite radio stations, 143 of Jackson's recordings totaled 67,383 plays for the week ending June 28, up 1,735% from last week's sum of 3,671 plays.

After having just one song("Rock With You") post more than 500 plays in the week prior to his death, 22 of Jackson's tracks eclipsed 1,000 plays this past week, led by his biggest Billboard Top 100 hit, "Billie Jean" (4,500 spins). That total places the track at No. 51 among all current or recurrent titles for the week. It was followed, of course, by "Thriller", the video for which received more spins after his death than anything else I saw on VH1 Classic.

And since he had over a hundred songs stashed away for release after his death to feed his kids off future royalties, we'll be hearing him for years to come, just like every other dead pop star. In fact, it's almost time for another album from either Tupac or Biggie...

Can leeches feed off plastic?

Y’know, I was just gonna let the whole Michael Jackson thing die a quicker death than the mainstream media will. But holy shit, I’m absolutely sick of hearing about it already. Five days after his death, they were still running a non-stop marathon of Jackson videos on VH1 Classic as of 8:00 PM Eastern on Sunday, and every 15 minutes there’s a new headline over at FoxNews’ website, highlighting some new and improved macabre aspect to the death of someone who lived a rather strange life.

Are they only treating his death as a circus because his life was a circus? His last number one single was in 1995. His last single was in 2003, and that made it to 83. Granted, he was a pioneer of pop music and music videos, but his relevance to pop music had seriously waned. Let’s say, for example, that if it had been Jackson’s idol Liz Taylor who passed away, would there be a non-stop marathon of her movies for 5 days straight and everyone making it a spectacle? I mean, she’s a legendary icon and has had her bouts of media circus chicanery too, no?

Is it because he was only 50? Are we that shocked that someone died so young? Noted TV pitchman Billy Mays passed away this morning at the same age of 50, but I really doubt that HSN or QVC will be holding any 24-hour infomercial Billy Mays tributes.

I think what bothers me the most though about the media hypefest is that those two noted leeches of the black community, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have crawled out from the woodwork to get their faces in front of the TV cameras. Who appointed these two media whores the Official Spokesmen of All That Is Black in America? I mean, shit, anytime something happens to anyone of African descent in America, and providing that it’ll get them 15 more minutes on TV, there they are.

Granted, I think that Jesse is an old family friend of the Jackson clan, but he can’t have been a friend to everyone else he has to get on TV for.

No, I fear that neither of them have completely altruistic motives here. I think that both of them are rabble-rousers on the scene to point fingers and babble for the media. No sooner was Jackson's death announced than Sharpton was on the streets of Harlem, waving an old black and white photograph of himself with Michael and then off to Los Angeles to consult the Jackson family about plans for simultaneous worldwide commemorations, and the hugely profitable television rights that are likely to be sold with it.



Jesse might actually be trying to help the family sort things out, but I really think Al is just there because of his almost OCD-like need to be in the spotlight. I bet his ass has a team of straphangers to photoshop his face into pictures of famous people so that when they die he can wave around a picture of them together and call a press conference.


Al Sharpton with Queen Elizabeth II of England


Al Sharpton with Korean nutbag Kim Jong Il


Al Sharpton crosses the Delaware with his homeboy G-W


Al Sharpton at the last supper with Jesus. They was tight!

The Final Act of Derailment in a 50-Year Train Wreck

Yeah, I get it. Michael Jackson died. It’s a shock, and it’s a shame, since the dude was only ten years older than me. I know that some of you were fans and that you think I’m being crass about it. However, let’s keep shit in perspective…

He was a singer and entertainer, and that was really about it, unless you count Train Wreck as a resume point. He hadn’t had a hit single in years, and had pretty much passed from his King of Pop relevance into Comeback Tour status, almost bankrupt, and a twice-accused pedophile who wore pajamas to court and danced on the roof of his limo after complaining to the judge about back pain.

However, here we are at 9:00 Eastern time on a Thursday night, and the media is milking the Death Tit like he was an assassinated President. NBC and ABC are running retrospectives, reminding us of his poor little rich guy story replete with sad childhood, sad adulthood, mental and physical health maladies, and praise for his genius.

In a rare move that reminds us old folks that they used to be about music and playing videos, there’s a news broadcast being simulcast on MTV, MTV2, and VH1 that is so serious and somber it’s actually funny. They interrupted their usual shitfest of faux reality shows to make an attempt at serious music journalism, hoping to be relevant again and just coming off rather stale and fake. They even dragged Kurt Loder out of his nursing home to make a report.

Of course there’s non-stop coverage on E! Entertainment, and BET is interviewing people in the streets and playing his videos hoping to remind us all that once, Jackson was black. In about 45 minutes, the nightly TMZ show will be on Fox, and they’ll get to take a bow and pat themselves on the ass for scooping this. Yeah, really…..TMZ had the news up before CNN, MSNBC, or FoxNews did.

There's thousands dying on the streets of Iran, the economy is still in shambles, unemployment is at record highs, North Korea wants to nuke Hawaii, and there's minute-by-minute scrutiny of the final act of a pop-star's train wreck on every channel.

Poor Farrah Fawcett…her death gets kicked to the curb and relegated to the back page of the paper. I guess there wasn’t enough of a circus spectacle in dying from cancer.

Who's gonna dangle Blanket from a Berlin balcony now?