Farrah who?

Farrah Fawcett-Majors, that's who. You know, "Jill" from "Charlie's Angels," and the girl in that famous poster from the 1980's, the one with the hair and the nipple shot that spawned so many adolescent male fantasies...

The woman who died the same day Michael Jackson did. NOW you remember, right?

If this applies to you, then I feel sorry for you. The world lost a genuine talent, a genuinely nice person, and a valiant, brave woman when Farrah Fawcett-Majors died.

Unfortunately, fate laughed at her and chose to take Michael "Wacko Jacko" Jackson on the same day - within hours, actually - thereby ensuring that her untimely passing would be totally and completely eclipsed by the media feeding frenzy that would undoubtedly ensue once "The Gloved One" keeled over and died. And that's exactly what happened. On that fateful day, at nine o'clock in the morning if you checked out the main page of CNN.com, the lead story was Farrah's death. A mere four hours later, if you looked at the page again you'd see Jackson's death as the lead story, and Farrah's death dropped all the way down to the FOURTH news item on the page - not the second one, mind you, but the FOURTH. To their credit, someone at CNN.com got a case of the guilts later on that day, because at nine PM her story was in the #2 slot. Too little, too late, in my humble opinion.

In case you may have figured it out, I'm not a Michael Jackson fan. I'll be the first to say that he was the single most-talented person to ever come out of the 20th century; I mean, face it - he could sing, he could dance, he could even act - and it all came to him NATURALLY. The man was born with more talent than should be legal, and he was a fantastic performer. I personally think that "Thriller" is the best video ever made, period, and will always hold that spot. I mean, after the dancing zombies scene, what can you do that can top that? The whole video was absolutely great, and I loved it.

Believe it or not, at that point in time I actually liked Michael Jackson. After all, I grew up to his voice when he was with the Jackson 5, and followed him through his career when he grew up and went solo. He was simply a fantastic performer, a natural talent.

But then he got weird. Not "eccentric," not "strange." WEIRD. Mind-numbing, "what the HELL was he thinking?", "can you BELIEVE this shit?" WEIRD. For example: how many of you out there under the age of 25 knew that at one time, Michael Jackson was BLACK? Yep, sure was - just do a web search of "The Jackson Five" and check out the picture- that little kid in the center with the afro is Michael Jackson when he was ten years old or so.

And it seemed the older he got, the weirder he became. I mean, c'mon, he turned his mansion into a theme park and called it "Neverland," obviously named after the ficticious place in the novel and movie "Peter Pan." He at one time changed his will so that all of his wealth would be left to his pet chimp, Bubbles. And then, out of the clear blue nowhere, he up and married - of all people - LISA-MARIE PRESLEY! I'm sure Elvis was spinning in his grave at that one. Of course the marriage didn't last - it was a sham to begin with - but to "further disprove" the nasty rumors about his sexual preferences floating around Hollywood and the rest of the world, he up and gets married again and has three kids. Oh, and His Weirdness named the first one PRINCE. I mean, after all, Michael Jackson was "the king," right? So why not name your first-born male child PRINCE?

I can think of about a thousand reasons NOT to.

The weirder Jackson got, the less I liked him. I mean, really....eccentricity is one thing, but the crap that Jackson did was just WAAAAAAAY over the line. After a while he became the self-styled poster boy for excessive and bad plastic surgery in his attempts to NOT look like what he was - a black guy. The more he tried, the worse he looked, and the sadder he became in my eyes.

Am I sorry he died at 50 years of age? Certainly, but not for his sake - I'm sorry for his kid's sake. Now they're without a parent - they really don't know their birth mother - so what's going to happen to them? As for Michael Jackson, he was the architect of his own fate just as Elvis Presly, John Belushi, and Chris Farley were the architects of their own fates. But in this case there were kids left behind in the lurch, and that just ain't fair.

It also ain't fair that hardly any attention is getting paid to Farrah Fawcett-Majors. It just ain't fair.

RIP, Farrah. We'll miss you, and we certainly won't forget you.

IHC