the gloved one and then some

had dinner with friends at café breton (great crepes, but annoyingly disgruntled waitresses – sorry ladies, no smile, no tip) – and heard about this spam going around about The Gloved One (recently acquitted Michael Jackson to you) that the King of Pop has been dead for 20 years and the mutated version we have been seeing henceforth is an impersonator who was actually responsible for killing the real McCoy. Strange, but possible, considering he didn’t release another album after his series of Grammy slams in the 80s, save for a double CD that came out in the 90s which was more of a compilation. I mean, consider this, for the duly gullible (I’m holding off guffaws now), it’s possible, because of one: physical appearances. ENOUGH SAID. Two: physical appearances. Three: physical appearances. I mean, who remembers his physical evolution after Thriller? Then again, I could swear by the life of my cellphone battery, that he and only he could do The Moonwalk like that when he flew to Manila to perform years ago.

One of my friends said it could well be a ploy from the Jackson camp to fend off further child molestation charges. Smart, eh? Now the harassed would only have to deal with Willy Wonka, you know, that loner of a weird man running the Chocolate Factory. Consider the similarities: both have ashen faces, prone to cloth themselves lavishly, both are unmarried and reside in a dreamy wonderland, both don’t quite know how to behave themselves properly around children, and both are fictitious characters. Hah!















on the same note, I came across a new book called “Love and Death” where the authors suppose that the apparent suicide of legendary grunge hero Kurt Cobain of the Nirvana fame, was actually pre-meditated murder and that previously “forensically impossible” evidence has cropped up, pinning Cobain’s widow, effervescent and perpetually stoned and on bail Courtney Love, as the pre-nup hungry mastermind. I am not completely buying this story yet (I didn’t buy the book, either) until this piece of item fights for air space in the news.

And I can’t believe that Magic Johnson is still alive, after being diagnosed as HIV-positive more than 10 years ago (left photo taken from Wikkipedia). I remember this quite well, since back in college (yep, that long ago) several classmates and I put up an exhibit to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS around the campus. I borrowed my brother’s poster of Magic Johnson caught in his famous slam dunk pose and used it in the exhibit. Next day, the poster was gone. My brother was pissed. More than ten years later, Johnson is still in the pink of health. Imagine the unfathomable gap between this African-American who could very well afford cocktail drugs and extend his life, and the thousands of native Africans from Zimbabwe to Mali dying every hour of AIDS, practically wiping out an entire generation where young children (at least those who are HIV-negative) are left to the care of grandparents, if at all. Imagine the irony.