Posted 5:43 PM by Gene

STUNNING NEWS, however you look at it. Jacko was the largest larger than life fool there was. We suppose the apologists the rock mu-SICK cri-TICKS (who will be CRAWLING out of the woodworks these next few days like the last infestation of termites) will excuse him for his GENIUS, which consisted largely of a beat and his (to put it politely) androgyny; but there is no getting over his incessant weirdness, and there is no overcoming the fact that this guilty child molester was "proved" innocent.

P. S. What are the chances he took his own life? Not exactly microscopic, I'd say. If so it's a wonder it didn't happen sooner.

P. P. S. at 6:07 p. m. The more I think of it the more utterly the word tragedy applies to his life -- if anything it's an understatement. Jacko went from being the clean-faced clean-living boy-king of Motown to a rancid joke. Several people especially deserve the credit for this, and we know who they are.

P. P. P. S. at 6:14 p. m. The TMZ story was dated 5:20. So far only DA POST!!!!! and SFGate are mentioning this, and they appear to be only parroting the news. Nothing from the AUGUST BODIES who've underreported on His Omnipotence custard eating.

TMZ now says Jacko dead at the scene.

6:25 p. m. THE MESS says LALA confirms. LALA confirms.

6:36 p. m. 1. UCLA Medical Center must be a war zone. How many news choppers can fit in the air space? 2. Some major weirdness is probably already breaking out on the Web, one way or another. 3. I can't imagine the logistics of refunding all those people for all those concerts. I'd guess the promoters are insured but you wonder how long it will take.

6:43 p. m. ROGER's likening him to MM and Elvis, which, in some ways, may not be that flattering a comparison.

6:48 p. m. AP finally at 6:34 -- about 70 minutes after TMZ, and almost an hour after I found it.

If you think the hacks have served up a solid diet of tripe these last few months -- wait for the next few days. People are drooling wallpaper and special sections. No, GanNETt, it won't get your stock above $4.00. I'd say the cable "news" nuisances are already unwatchable but that's par for their sand-trap-riddled course.

6:58 p. m. I feel for the family, which has already been through enough for twenty lifetimes. What will they do? That jackinapes "Col." "Tom" "Parker" turned Elvis's funeral into a backwater circus -- but most people didn't know about the drugs. Jacko's hangers-on and the bloodsucking media could turn it into fifty rings. My advice: mourn quietly and privately -- the leeches will be out wherever you go, and best to starve them.

7:07 p. m. Let's hope there's no Thomas Noguchi to screw up the autopsy.

7:17 p. m. Sometime tomorrow, somebody -- I'm predicting GRATE.com, or Salon, or one of Romy's permalinks -- will wail portentously: "Did WE kill Michael Jackson? Did we break his heart with our constant ridicule?" Well, we must paraphrase an old saying of Euripides: "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad" -- mad being in an ironical sense, but the gods who rule over us being thoroughly unironical; and the gods of bigmedia are nothing if not playing a mind game, whose purpose is to drive us all mad.