Michael Jackson's Nose

At some point between the time he recorded "Off The Wall" in like 1979 or 1980 (that was the one with the song where you can actually hear him crying at the end) and the time he released "Thriller" in 1982, Michael Jackson had a nose job. Lots of people have cosmetic surgery and I'm not judging anyone, but to me it seems a colossal waste of money. I could go on and on here about vanity, but I reckon everybody's a little bit vain and when you get down to it, if you try to do away with all vanity you wind up being Amish.

The thing about Michael Jackson's plastic surgery, specifically, is that it's so bizarre. His nose was kind of big before, ok, I think we all agree, but now he literally looks like he has no nose at all. I don't know if he had one plastic surgery too many, or if it was a botched job, or if the "skull" look is what he was going for, but the results speak for themselves. And when I say "speak," of course, I mean they scream "Hey, look at this weird-ass dude with no nose!" The little sliver of a nose he has left looks so pinched, it seems like he could hardly smell out of it. Maybe he couldn't decide which nose he wanted and so he just told the doctor "Just go on and take it off completely." Or maybe it was like when you try to cut your own hair and you take a little bit off one side and then a little bit off the other and that's not quite right so you keep going back and forth til you look like...well, like someone with a really bad haircut.

Perhaps even more bizarre than Michael Jackson's nose removal, however, is the fact that his sister Latoya had hers removed, too. She wrote a book and said that she and Michael were abused, which I don't really have an opinion on as to whether it really happened or not. But it seems to me that something really freaky had to have happened to them to make them insane and have their noses removed.

Over the years a lot has been said about Michael Jackson. They say he tried to buy the skeleton of John Merrick, the elephant man. He built his own amusement park. He bleached his skin. He lives in an oxygen tent and only goes out when he has a surgical mask on. He married Lisa Marie Presley, which ok, wasn't a weird thing he did so much as a weird thing she did. They also say he molested some kids, which a lot of people seem to be still convinced of even though he was never convicted.

I never paid him that much mind, at least not enough to know whether to believe the stories about him or not, but it seems to me that a lot of his problems could have been avoided. What I mean is, he's so bizarre and so ghoulish, and all you ever hear about him are these freaky stories, and you see him dancing in videos and hear his music all the time, but you know what you never hear? Him talking, or making himself the least bit accessible to people. You never see him giving interviews or going on talk shows or in any kind of normal, relaxed setting. That's why everyone's so willing to believe the worst about him.

In a way, I almost kind of feel sorry for him. Or, I would feel sorry for him, if he wasn't such a creepy, weird-ass dude.

WAR!!! Huh! What is it Good For?!

Right now with all this stuff going on in the Middle East, everybody's on edge. It's like everybody's extra-aware of what's going on around them, or like when a cowboy steps out to the street for a showdown and everything's quiet.....TOO quiet.....

It must be especially hard being an Arabic person or a Muslim right now in the U.S. Or a Turk or a Sikh or anyone wearing a turban or a headwrap. Even someone just getting out of the shower. They just have to be all nervous, I mean. I haven't seen anyone being harrassed, or even heard about anyone doing any serious harrassing, but everytime someone starts talking about the situation here in the U.S., they're warning us not to harrass Muslims or people who look Muslim.

I know there are Sikhs and Arabs and Indians who aren't Muslim, and even that most Muslims aren't terrorists, but anyone who's stupid enough to harrass a woman for wearing a headwrap isn't worried about these fine distinctions anyway. It must be kind of scary, especially for people with names that sound even remotely similar to Osama or Bib Laden. Those names will never be popular in the U.S. now. It'll kind of be like being named Hitler or Stalin.

We got all these other countries saying they're going to help us now. Most of them are probably sincere, like England and Germany, but some of those little desert countries are like Joe Pesci in the Lethal Weapon movies: "Ok! Ok? Ok, we're goin' to Waaaaaar hea-yuh guys, ok??? Jeez!"

It's funny whenever anything happens in the Middle East, some TV preacher thinks it's the end of the world. I mean, literally the end of the world. I saw one guy talking about it and behind his desk the sign said "The Beginning of The End". But if the world is really going to end, isn't every day the beginning of the end? I mean, isn't that like "The first day of the rest of your life"?

Also, someone says Nostradamus predicted this World Trade Center thing, is that right? How long have people been studying Nostradamus? And no one said anything? How come people always say psychics predict stuff after it happens? What good is that?

Why does a war always have to be the end of the world anyway? Doesn't the Bible say there will be wars and rumours of wars? Can't a war just be a war?

It's supposed to be a new kind of war, they say. I mean lots of covert operations and James Bond stuff. Of course I wonder how effective someone like James Bond would be: They say a 00-rating gives him a license to kill. But what good is a spy if they're not allowed to kill? And assuming all the agents are assigned three-digit numbers, then that means there can only be 10 of them with a 00-rating. Or 9, really, since they probably don't have an agent 00-zero. In binary code, James Bond would be 000000000111.