··Also today: Michael Jackson continued his race-baiting, bridge-burning descent into madness. (For more details, see Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday.)
TUESDAY JULY 9 Speaking of allegedly sick fucks: Today brought an extraordinarily creepy Hot Tip from Hot Tipper Manzell Blakely, who was riding the #66 Metro Express to Northgate today when he overheard a conversation that made his skin crawl. The participants were a white man in his mid 40s and a young, high-school-aged couple. The topic was the older man's website, for which he was seeking "12-, 13-, and 14-year-old girls" with "cute, bubbly, teasing personalities" to model for "racy" pictures. The old guy ("who looked a bit like William H. Macy, if he'd lived with his parents for 40 years") offered the young guy $250 for each model he provided. "The boy looked interested," says Manzell, adding that the Man Who Would Be Macy assured his teenage talent scout that the girls "wouldn't be naked or topless," as he "didn't want to do anything that the girls would feel bad about, or the police would feel bad about." Thanks to Manzell for his inspired eavesdropping. As for the creepy webmaster, we suspect he'll be making a repeat appearance in The Stranger very soon, with Charles Mudede eloquently explicating his arrest in Police Beat.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 10 Today brought more thrilling evidence of Michael Jackson's forever-in-the-works/finally-in-the-open psychosis. According to the New York Post's trusty Page Six, the nominal King of Pop continued his rampage into insanity by appearing at yet another New York City press conference to denounce those he says conspired to bring about his demise. Following last week's blasting of Sony chief Tommy Mottola, today Jackson informed the world of the diabolical conspiracy against him, fueled by a "racist" record industry that decided to ruin Jackson after he "outsold Elvis." Before a packed house at the Rev. Al Sharpton's Harlem headquarters, Jackson delivered his crackpot cri de couer: "I was called a freak, a homosexual, a child molester. That I bleach my skin. Everything to turn the public against me. It was a complete conspiracy." Never mind the million-dollar payoffs for the parents of the pre-pubescent boys invited for sleepovers at Jackson's Neverland Ranch; disregard Jackson's sacrifice of his artistic gifts for his megalomaniacal pursuit of world domination; and please, forget the evidence provided by your own eyes, which have seen Michael Jackson transform from a perfectly lovely black man into a hideous white woman from Mars. Every negative thing you've ever suspected about Michael Jackson is the result of a vast conspiracy to deprive him of his rightful title as the greatest entertainer of all time, and anyone who thinks otherwise is racist.
THURSDAY, JULY 11 Speaking of complete and utter bullshit: Last Saturday, a man in Inglewood, CA, videotaped a run-in between 16-year-old Donovan Jackson and the Inglewood police, during which Jackson was slammed onto the hood of a patrol car and punched in the face by Officer Jeremy Morse. By Tuesday, the tape had hit the airwaves, and by Wednesday, the family of Donovan Jackson had filed a lawsuit against Officer Morse and the powers behind him. But tonight on CNN, Jeremy Morse's lawyer--John Barnett, Esq.--denounced all who would prematurely judge his client's actions, which the lawyer-to-the-core Barnett described as "not excessive in any way." To a flabbergasted Connie Chung, Barnett shared his view of the Inglewood altercation, during which his client "placed" Donovan Jackson on the hood of the car, only to have the recalcitrant Jackson grab Officer Morse's testicles, a random act of horniness that Barnett presented as just cause for the punch seen 'round the world. To her credit, Connie Chung refused to dignify Barnett's ludicrous tale o' the crotch-grab, opting instead to grill him on his ridiculous willingness to tell big fat lies. "Do you honestly believe that your client simply 'placed' the minor on the hood of that car?" Chung inquired on three separate occasions. Each time, Barnett answered without a flinch: "Absolutely." May God have mercy on his soul. (As for thuggy Officer Morse: Don't worry about him. With his burly glamour and bendy morals, he could easily parlay his shameful dismissal from law enforcement into a booming career in gay pornography.)
FRIDAY, JULY 12 Today brought further news of the impending demise of Michael Jackson. In a fascinating Fox News report, longtime Jacko chronicler Roger Friedman dished the dirt on the one-time (but never when he said he was) King of Pop and his nearly bankrupt kingdom. From mortgaging his zillion-dollar Beatles catalog to Sony, to securing millions of dollars of loans against his own work (from 1979's eternal Off the Wall to 2001's vincible Invincible) and his Neverland Ranch, Jackson has spent years playing "a shell game in which [he] kept using his copyrights as assets, against which he was constantly securing cash." (Worse, Friedman quotes an "inside source" who reports that a few year ago, Jackson's formerly adored chimp Bubbles died from neglect.)
SATURDAY, JULY 13 Okay. It's one thing to bounce from a lost childhood to a bizarrely insular adulthood, or to respond to lifelong, worldwide adoration with an equivalent degree of self-loathing, or even to react to allegations of child-molesting by writing humongous settlement checks to the allegedly injured parties' parents. But what kind of sick fuck neglects his pet monkey to death?
SUNDAY, JULY 14 Nothing happened today (unless you count that kick-ass Block Party).
Hot Tips? lastdays@thestranger.com
