(the post is mostly about Michael, the poster's all about Farrah.)

mamasaymamasamamakoosah. (if you don't know, you better ask somebody)

The happiest, luckiest man in America on Thursday evening? Mark Sanford of course. His bumbling, rambling, crazytalking press conference about his affair just dropped right off the map instead of being THE story for the whole weekend news cycle.

One interesting tweet I read yesterday when reading the Michael Jackson trending tweets was to the effect that you really know where you stand with your news agency if you're assigned the Farrah Fawcett beat tonight.

Michael to me is my early years in NYC. I arrived all new wave and shit only to have cool NY punk kids turn me on to Michael and Prince and the Treacherous Three and Grandmaster Flash and Afrika B. . . , to DANCE music. I remember dancing to Thriller and Off the Wall over and over and over again. While the song "Thriller" got old fast for me, and I was never one for the ballads at all, none of the rest of the dance songs did, and still hasn't, and in fact I was sad to realize, this morning, that I only had five MJ tunes on my computer. I'll have to fix that pronto. And then there's all that great Jackson 5 stuff.

If you just want to celebrate the Michael Jackson that many of us were attached to, not the sad figure he became, that's fine for now. If you want to think of him a little more deeply, and in terms of America and race, then watch this video. But maybe save it for later, I saw it today, would rather not have. Starts with a scene from "Three Kings" (many of you know which one), then shows a morphing montage of Michael's face over the years. Jackson may or may not have been a pedophile, but he was treated badly by this country for being a freak long before he was accused of anything. I suppose everyplace in the world abuses its freaks; this just happens to be place where I live.

Last, while I was never a huge Farrah Fan, I was an adolescent when she was at her Charlie's-Angel's-sex-object peak, after all, and the poster above, er, let's just say it moved me. It's not the kind of thing my parents would allow, but I remember very well being embarrased at how I couldn't stop looking at it on a cool friend's wall. Funny, behavior like that, staring too intently at the poster, is just the kind of thing that would get me called a fag. Go figure.