Special gossip edition!

"His image as a freak unhealthily obsessed with children is a permanent one," says Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst for CNN and a writer for The New Yorker. "There's nothing he can do to get rid of that."
—USA Today

To the whole entire world, agitated about what will happen to Michael Jackson now that he has a weird reputation—oh, wait, he had that already—I say, Remember, people, this is the land where fresh P.R. makes it all better, and Time Inc. hails all the wounded. Did you see The Aviator last year? Do you remember what it was about? Yes, the handsome Leo version of a reclusive weirdo who had formerly caused the world to sorrow over his irreparably strange reputation. We won't be waiting any kind of decades for some pretty young thing to give Jackson the Oscar treatment, because we're too impatient. Next year seems likely. Toobin again:

"I went into this trial thinking that Michael Jackson was a largely forgotten, irrelevant public figure," Toobin concedes. "But I soon learned that there's still a huge amount of interest in him—some in the United States, but especially abroad. It was shocking to me how many people came from outside the country to give him support. And I've never had as much interest from CNN International as I did here."

He might want to consider refreshing the page on Gawker occsionally. Anyway, I don't have to tell you there are only about a billion examples of people who went crazy, did stuff, got away with it, and are magically more famous than ever. Besides, with E.T. (the extraterrestrial and Liz Taylor) on your side, who the heck are critics? Michael Jackson is America—scarified (like all the men in Hollywood don't have surgery too), racially and sexually confused, wheedled by the ad world to love child-flesh and told by the law he can't have it, a slave to his own image, desperate for attention, perpetually 5, love-starved and worshipped, etc., etc. We just can't, ah, face the man in the mirror.

In other freak-obsessed-with-children news, my sister writes to say she just saw a Freudian typo on E! Online: "Last month, Cruise sent eyebrows skyrocketing with his now infamous appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, during which he bounded around the stage, springing on and off furniture, before sinking to the floor to declare his rapturous admiration for Cruise." So even if he's not gay, he does love one man very, very much. 'Course, if he's seen All the Right Moves too, I can't blame him.