Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson walk into a bar...

Abandon taste, all ye who enter. My perspective doesn't seem to be welcomed on facebook, so this is going to be my own little pressure release valve.

"You know how he really died?" Cory, one of my customers today, asked. "Food poisoning. He ate an 8-year old weiner."

Think of all those prosthetic parts. What's going to become of all those spare parts when his body decomposes? The inside of his casket is going to look like a Mr. Potato Head kit, sans potato.

Hey, maybe we can go for a triple-play and something will happen to Carrot Top.

I've been strangely unaffected by this whole thing. I think it's because I said my goodbyes when I was 8 years old, around the time Michael Jackson quit making good music and started raping people.

I'm dumbfounded by the outpour of sympathy. Sure, let's celebrate his music. I've got no problem with that. What irks me, though, are some people I know who are acting like they lost a member of their family. I guarantee you, though, that if Jacko was your uncle you would be able name more than three of his songs. And you'd also be in therapy indefinitely.

This is what happens when Americans lose a mainstay. We've never known life without Michael Jackson. We elevate our celebrities (especially the trainwrecks) only to watch them crash. And then we mourn them like Mother Teresa. I guarantee you-- guarantee you-- that when Britney Spears keels over here in the next few months there will be those who push to nominate her for sainthood.

And so when I write the line on facebook, "Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson walk into a bar," I'm jumped on by a former high school classmate who condescends from her lofty perch upon her ivory tower to remind me that these people are "real people too."

There's no such thing as just a joke. At least not with me. It's all commentary. Now, Gina Trapp, do you really think I'm so jaded, disillusioned and shallow that I get a kick out of making fun of dead humans? Or, maybe I'm subversively trying to indict a culture just as perverse as the biproducts we manufacture and worship-- our celebrity class.

Gina, it's true, they probably are real people. But not in the way the majority of us perceive them. For 99% of us, it's pure soap opera schlock. I think if there were an appropriate time to play the "humanity" card here, it should've been twenty years ago when the tabloid infotainment media began to feed us stories about the drawn-out, pending decline of a once-was pop icon for the sake of ratings.

Maybe the focus shouldn't be on a joke I made (hardly a joke-- doesn't even contain a punchline) but rather on the way our society has disgraced these individuals with the inhumane treatment our media has served them, and the eagerness in which we scarfed it down.