I've finished most of what I wanted to do today and since it has been wriggling around in my thoughts since last night I have to comment on the three hours of Michael Jackson interviews and post-interview stuff shown on tv last night.

First off, I don't know quite what to think of his claim to have only had two plastic surgeries. His nose is definitely different and it looks to me like the rest of his face has been worked on too, but I'm not an expert. It isn't like breast implants, where you suddenly have cannons where pea shooters used to be and everyone can tell right away. Looking at the different pictures taken of him over the years, the changes in his face shape seem very gradual to me so I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that. He has vitiligo and the changing skin tones can probably account for some of the change in his appearance. Light and shadow and all that. If he did have some sculpting done on his face - um, excuse me, but it's his face, isn't it? He paid for it himself, no?

People should just shut the fuck up.

I tend to believe what he says about being abused. He isn't the only one among the Jackson children to mention that and he has absolutely nothing to gain by lying about it. One of the most painful things about the aftermath of abuse is that the person who was abused is very seldom believed. Societally, we seem to have a prove it attitude when it comes to people's stories of physical, emotional or sexual abuse and it sucks. Been there and it pisses me off.

Here's the flip side of that; no one believes he was abused, but everyone wants to believe he is an abuser. No one (but me, apparently), seems to remember the tapes that surfaced several months after he settled the sex abuse case that involved some very direct conversation between the child's father and his uncle, in which the father told the other man outright that he was going to find a way to ruin Michael Jackson for backing out of a movie deal that he hadn't fully committed to in the first place. He said he might be interested if the project looked good. After looking the script over he declined. A rather wise decision considering that the movie, though funny, bombed. This was all over the news yet no one remembers. What was the movie project? Robin Hood: Men In Tights.

I don't think it's odd that he spends so much time around children either. Really I don't. He plays with them, he listens to them, he befriends them and he gives them free run of his home. He seems to genuinely enjoy their company and even helped one of the kids he hangs out with survive a cancer that was diagnosed as terminal.

Yeah, he's a real monster.

I was concerned about him dangling his baby over the balcony, though. That is scary and extremely bad judgement. If he had dropped the baby...I don't even want to think about it. I was also concerned about the agitated way he was feeding his baby while trying to keep his face covered. How does the baby even breathe with his little head covered constantly? The feeding looked, for lack of a better word - aggressive. I know it wasn't, but it looked that way. Even so, I don't think his children were in any danger with him, but keeping their heads covered all of the time seems traumatic to me. I guess if they've grown up with it and become accustomed to it, they probably don't spare it a second's thought. Putting on the masks or covering their heads to go out is probably as natural to them as dressing and brushing their teeth. The didn't seem any the worse for wear over it. Even the journalist begrudgingly admitted as much.

Would I let my children hang out at his house unsupervized? Probably. Lots of other people do and have no complaints. I don't think he'd hurt them, I really don't.

John and I watched it together and reached the same conclusion. He's eccentric, sure, but he seems like a decent enough person. He does come across as anxious and often nervous but that doesn't make him any worse off than the rest of us. I think that because of his eccentricities and that fact that he is so private about some aspects of his life, yet so open in his feelings for children, people want to see him as some kind of freakish pervert who has more money than sense. Neither John nor I arrived at that conclusion from what we saw last night. Excuse me, but doesn't this world need more men who want to be involved in their children's lives as closely as he is? To hold his baby over a balcony was extremely bad judgement. I'll bet he doesn't do that again.

Anyway, he seems like an okay guy to me. A little wacky but not someone who is liable to hurt anyone.

And that is my (and by proxy, John's), two cents.