Michael Jackson. Has one man with so much talent ever gone so completely mental? So stark-raving, beyond-the-pale bonkers? I mean, there are plenty of documented cases of geniuses who weren't quite full-decking it, particularly in the social skills department. But this? This is not "I'm on a different intellectual plane and don't have time for your average-people norms" crazy, this is "I'm the mentally-ill homeless guy on the L who paces up and down the aisle having conversations with myself and cooing like a pigeon" cra-zay. Seriously. Has anyone ever gone this loony in such a disturbing and public way before? I'm too young to remember Howard Hughes.

It started a long time ago, I know. The signs were all there. We just wrote him off as eccentric. Sure, he built his own amusement park/zoo/compound up in the mountains. But we cut him slack because he was so amazing. Then it started becoming apparent that something was going on the face region--something off-putting and so, so wrong. He was getting whiter, and he was grabbing his crotch a lot when he danced. Hm, we said. Well, that's a little odd. But we just shrugged, because he's Michael Jackson! His moonwalking ways are not ours. Then he started ramping up the crazy. There was Lisa Marie, and the other chick he married, and the molestation accusations, and he walked through all of it like he was reading a book called "Stranger in the Night: How to Make People Think You're From Another Planet." His nose started disappearing, but no one could tell because he always wore a surgeon's mask. He surrounded himself with other celebrities just barely clinging to the fringe on top of the Pretty Little Surrey of Sanity.

I thought it couldn't get any worse. After a horrifying experience in a Target checkout where Jessie showed me a close-up photo of Michael in which it appeared that SOMETHING (cartilage? I don't KNOW!) was poking through what was left of his NOSE, I mistakenly believed that he would be carted off to spend the rest of his days somewhere in a celebrity asylum. I look back now and smile a little at how naive I was. Oh, Mandy of last December! So young! So innocent!

Because now he's gone and trumped himself. He told that British interviewer that he's slept in the same bed with many children, but that it was innocent and charming. Wha-? Even if it was innocent, it's hardly charming. Sleeping in the same bed of any child not related to you is the essence of creepiness. It's Eau de Creepy. And he named names! The Culkin boys must be freaking out. They did not need any help in tipping the scales of normalcy towards "Maladjusted."

Then, he tries to demonstrate what a great father he is by talking about taking his newborn daughter home from the hospital before they could even wash her off. Thankfully he left out the part where he reveals exactly what he did with the placenta, although I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that it's been bronzed and sits in a glass display between the elephant man's bones and a collection of fingernail clippings.

He also said that he wants to adopt two children from every continent. To which I say, haven't the children of Antarctica suffered enough? Really, though--can you imagine being pulled from a famine and AIDS-wracked country in Africa, only to be forced into a Halloween mask and the nightmarish arms of your new father? I can't wait until his kids get old enough for a tell-all, assuming that they can communicate in English and not some language that Michael made up. Dude, what if he had plastic surgery done on them so they would really look like his children? Has anyone thought of THAT? What if he wanted them to "breathe better" too? They're going to reach the age when they can finally pull away the shrouds and masks from their faces, only to reveal grinning, fleshless death masks just like daddy's.

Sweet Lord, won't someone stop him? Please?

--Mandy