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Congratulations to The Gloved One. No, I don't mean Mickey Mouse, though that was a good guess but rather, the late Michael Jackson, who has been named to the absolute toppermost of the poppermost list of highest earnings by celebrities who have shuffled off to Buffalo and points Yonder.

I am not allowed by law and the canons of good taste to make this up. I am, however, impressed that MJ has returned to the top spot after a year's absence and that of the last five years he has occupied the #1 position three times. Perhaps distressed is a better word than impressed.

Of course promotion of dead celebrities has lower overhead than when they're topside here on terra firma-no touring expenses and entourage overhead costs and Bubbles can scavenge for food out of garbage cans for all any of the hangers-on would ever care. I'm not sure these days whom Tito Jackson calls for advice and/or cash advances (I am the meanest person alive and mock Tito for no other reason than I can).

I think the saddest thing in all of this is that it has nothing to do with the music the man made so well for so long. Once he climbed into the Sleek, Chic Freak Machine and allowed his every waking moment to be chronicled around the world, thanks to connectivity, often in real time, Michael Jackson became a sideshow to his own life and collateral damage on the human highway.

 William Shakespeare, who didn't make the top ten again this year in the rankings of post-mortem earnings, once wrote in Julius Caesar, "the evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." Jackson would not be the only one of whom we might say "he is a dreamer, let us leave him."
-bill kenny