Dead celebrity threesome

The blog's not dead (yet), but these three are. Thoughts on each:

Ed McMahon: We know the last few years weren't easy, but what a ride this guy had. Best job ever and all the free Bud he could drink. And the Super Bowl ad may have been some of his best work ever. Shed no tears for Ed, America; he wasn't super smart or super hot, but he rang the bell anyway. Gives the rest of us hope.


Farrah: We were big on the "Angels," young but filling up quickly with testosterone and in prime Farrah poster age, and we liked her well enough, as friends and all, but we were firmly in the Jaclyn Smith camp.

But here's the thing, as we remember it: After Farrah's poster blew up, Jaclyn did a poster with the idea that it would be more modest, reflecting her more modest values. Translation: No swimsuit, no nipple. She was in a nightgown under a comforter, or something like that. They may as well have put her in a burkha. And did Kate Jackson even get to do a poster? It sucks to be the smart one.


Michael Jackson: Not MJ, because that's Michael Jordan. And not the King of Pop, because we think we remember that, out of nowhere, he made MTV call him that repeatedly so they could premiere his stuff or something like that.

We were also of a prime age for MTV's glory days, and in our crowd Michael Jackson was what you had to suffer through to get to ZZ Top, Van Halen and the metal bands. We can understand Michael's meaning in the grand scheme of things, and the videos were cool to look at the first 70 or so times, but there's a whole army of guys our age who are looking at all the hoopla right now and thinking, "He wasn't our king." Or worse.

That said, we understand what an innovator he was. In fact, we always felt that he was so creative that it was like radioactive material within him, and after a while it started to burn through from the inside and destroy him. That's what turned him from sweet, lovable young Michael to creepy, bizarro old Michael. America's OK with weird genius, but Michael starting out so young and adorable hurt him in the end. When he transformed into a freak show, people still had that image in their heads for comparison's sake, and it wasn't pretty.