Ladies and gents, with all due respect for the king of pop, from Mr. Danny Jock, Michael Jackson's Glitter glove. Well Gonzo had his fist memorial.  I say Jackson needs a big one of these somewhere. In statue form too...

Some more good eulogizing, I think, here at Stereogum. Really like their opener, classy, succinct. And a good spread of pics and notes from musicians and fans.

Wow...rough day for icons, first I learn a first crush Farrah Fawcett finally succumbed to cancer, and now this - Michael Jackson dead from a heart attack at age 50.

I saw Jackson during the Victory tour with his brothers in hand, Tito and the rest, in Tennessee (Atlanta show sold out).  Went with a good friend of mine, James, who himself tragically died last year in an accident involving a tractor.

James could breakdance at age (what ...11?) like nobody's business. After the show we were hanging out in the basement bar (drinking cokes...guess it should have been Pepsi, right?) of the bed and breakfast we were staying at, and James was trying to show the bartender some of his moves.  My mom and her boyfriend, who got the tickets, were upstairs sleeping.

Well the traction was bad for the moonwalk inside, so we went out to the parking lot, way out to the far end were it was slick pavement. We were having a grand old time (I'm trying my best to sound like an old fart) until my mom came out hysterical, having had some premonition in her sleep that we were being abducted and about to be molested.

Well she grabbed me and drug me back upstairs and gave me a nice beating. I told her the guy was totally innocent, and that it was all ridiculous, and then she tried to get the guy fired. I felt awful.  

Of course years later we all know the drawn out sordid tales of Jackson’s involvement with children, and everyone's hysterical attention (see Foucault on this one).  So hell, maybe that was her premonition, just terribly off cue.

All I know is my mind was blown the first time I saw Jackson perform the moonwalk on TV.  I think it was the grammies, (no it was the Motown 25 special) and it came out of nowhere.  The hat, the one sparkly glove, the loose socks, penny loafers and high water trousers.  Half the school was wearing one glove the next day and trying to moonwalk.  Put me on the karoke floor and I might try again. Well...  -Casey McKinney

We have been following the events in Iran and won't make any quick chatter on the topic, except that our full support is for those out in the streets and twittering and so on, voicing their will for freedom, taking blows and bullets in the process. A friend on facebook just suggested doing this:

“If (you're) on twitter, set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut Iranians' access to the internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on.”

Also a friend in London suggested going to this site and registering: http://iran.whyweprotest.net/.  This site shows how to surf the web anonymously, for instance, and other useful information for those involved in the protest.

While jokes fly about the anonymity of the sources reporting on these protests, since foreign media has been shut out, and voicing one's opinion for Iranians can have serious repercussions, anonymity can be a powerful force in this case.  As we've watched in videos posted anonymously on youtube, real people have been shot, by real bullets, and real people have died (no surprise that these videos keep getting pulled). 

If you believe at all in the rights that our young women and men in uniform in the Middle East have been ensured they are fighting and dying for (like freedom of religion and speech, forget the WOMDs, the oil and the occupation etc at this point, and all the previous lies before; bottom line is we don't need any more fronts opened in the terror war, and young Iranians could be our best allies for democracy in the region), then show your support for the demonstrators in Iran in whatever way you can.

Heck, even as silly as it may sound, wear some green too. Oh and go here too for free demonstration logos and whatnot http://bijanberahimi.com/whereismyvote/. More soon.  Pass this info on.

-thefanzine.com

  _{Borel after the Preakness. First read the preview, what follows is the Postmortem:}  

So it ends. One of the most exciting, melodramatic, ya-need-a-scorecard, Triple Crown seasons in recent memory. A Bird won the 141st Belmont Stakes today, but it wasn’t the Bird that was getting all the ink this week. Long shot Summer Bird, who like his half-brother, Mine That Bird, brought up the rear for the first mile of this marathon mile and a half race, waited a bit longer to make his crackling move, went five wide around the turn, and overtook the first, second and third betting choices down the stretch.

There was redemption for winning jockey Kent Desormeaux on Summer Bird, who lost out last year in the Belmont on Big Brown, gunning for the Triple Crown. And there was a big old boot in the ass for Calvin Borel, courtesy of The Fates. Calvin will be criticized for moving his horse too soon, perhaps misjudging the gargantuan length of Belmont’s deep and sandy stretch, which has been the death of many a Triple Crown dream.

I was shocked to read this week that in his entire career, Borel has only run in seven races at Belmont Park. He could have easily doubled that number this week, I’m sure most trainers would have loved to have had him riding. You know, a couple trial runs for the Belmont Stakes. Maybe if he’d done one less late night talk show, and perhaps ridden in a few races this week at Belmont, he would have had a better feel for the track. In the parlance, Mine That Bird just hung in the stretch; some will say it’s because Borel mis-timed his move, (i.e., moved him too soon, and he tired). I happen to think it’s more likely that the three tough races in five weeks took it’s toll, finally.

Exciting stretch run though. Summer Bird gobbled up the track and picked off one by one those in front. He was fourth going around the final turn; according to The Bloodhorse magazine, you have to go back to 1933 to find a Belmont winner who was farther back than third going around the final turn. That’s an astounding stat.

Summer Bird is fast improving, he’ll get a freshening, and hit the big summer races, perhaps locally at Saratoga. Ditto Mine That Bird. It’s always interesting to see which of the Triple Crown also-rans turn into monsters in the summer season. One of the reasons these races are so tough to handicap is because three-year-olds are still learning the game. Invariably, there are always one or two horses who don’t run so hot in one or more Triple Crown races, then suddenly bloom and win key races in the summer and fall season. Dunkirk is probably that horse this year. He ran a great race today, almost won this one gate to wire. He hung in for a tough second; it was an impressive second for him, one of those races that builds character. He should do well in the summer.

In closing, a shout-out for Mine That Bird, the surprise star of these last five weeks and a horse we’ll likely see for many years, as he’s a gelding. There is so much money to be made in breeding thoroughbreds now, that if a horse does well as a three year old--especially if he takes one or more of the Triple Crown races--his stud fee skyrockets and the owners are afraid to race him, lest he sustain a life- or stud-threatening injury. So, colts are often retired before their time, and we are denied the pleasure of watching them race. But Mine that Bird will hopefully thrill us for years to come, as he did in his out-of-the-clouds performance in the Derby, his ballsy second in The Preakness, and his gut-check third in The Belmont.

-Pete Hausler

If you caught the early AP reports of David Carradine's death, you may have gotten a different mental image of the nemesis of Kill Bill's demise. The first reports had Carradine found "hanging from his neck and genitals." Only later, when the story started to spread through the Internet, the story was quickly changed to "hanging from his neck and body." Although Thai police are ruling the death a suicide, a contention his agent denies, hanging from one's "neck and body" is more of a Harold from Harold and Maude kind of stage trick (or Veronica from Heathers for that matter). Hanging from the "neck and genitals" implies something a little darker, but at least it's probably accidental, as those close to Carradine seem to believe. Unfortunately for them, the officer who first arrived at Carradine's hotel room, told the Bangkok newspaper The Sun, "A rope was attached to his neck and also to his penis." Believe what you want; my mind is made up.

Of course, the guy from INXS, who I previously believed to have died from a drug overdose, also died in a similarly ignominious fashion. I suppose that kind of death is relatively peaceful, maybe even enjoyable if you get your jollies off that sort of thing, and the real pain is relegated to the guy's family, friends, agent, etc.

As a man of Chinese descent, I should probably hold a permanent grudge against Carradine for stealing the part of Caine in Kung Fu from its rightful owner, Bruce Lee. I suppose it's not all Carradine's fault though, since the producers and executives (the suits, if you will) didn't think the U.S. was ready for a China-man in a leading role. Boy, did they blow that one. But what won me back over to Carradine's corner wasn't his coolness and relaxed atmosphere he brought to just about every scene he ever shot, but rather it's the memory of what I consider to be his best movie, Cannonball.



Cannonball involves six or seven drivers on a deadly cross-country road race. It's basically Cannonball Run, which came later, but without the fun. This is a serious race, and there is no time for laughter. What really got me into the film as a little kid were the cars: 1974 DeTomaso Pantera, a 1976 Chevrolet Corvette, a 1970 Pontiac Trans Am, a 1969 Ford Mustang, a black 1968 Dodge Charger, and a 1969 Lincoln Continental Mark III—driven of course, by the only black dude in the movie. The movie has more than just blacksploitation though—it also has the redneck drunk, Cade Redman, and the douchebag European driving the Pantera, which eventually blows up as he gets his come-uppance.

The 1970 Trans Am is, in my opinion, the best American car that was ever made. The best way I can say it in words is if the girl next door went away for a few years and came back an international supermodel, this car would be the embodiment of that magnificent transformation. It was so great in the movie that Carradine, who played Coy "Cannonball" Buckman—who is not gay at all with his yellow driving moccasins and red bandana tied neatly around his neck, had two of the same exact blood-red cars (he got the second one after he crashed the first when his arch nemesis Redman, played by Bill McKinney, kicked in Buckman's headlights). Cade Redman drove the Dodge Charger, another great looking car, but it ended up the way most cars did in the 70s and 80s—in a huge spontaneous fireball midway through a freefall from some precipice. He did (Cade) leave us with us with a pretty memorable quote though: "Ahhhh. Best damn beer in the world. Better than spinach. Better than porburgers. Better than possom."

That's right. Better than possom.

Back to Carradine, though. He's an uncle to Martha Plimpton, who is best known for playing Stef Steinbrenner in The Goonies. He's also probably best known for playing Bill in Tarantino's Kill Bill series. Carradine, who never reached and never will reach Chuck Norris status, made a pretty good living playing cowboys and reluctant heroes of kung fu, and kung fu cowboys. He will be missed, but he had a pretty good run. The characters he played were as cool as cucumbers. Speaking of which, thank Christ he didn't die with a cucumber up his ass along with the rope on his penis.

Personally, I always thought he'd go out like he did as Coy "Cannonball" Buckman—by driving his Trans Am under a freight train. Dying by autoerotic asphyxiation was probably his equivalent idea of that. As a poster named "Davisourus" wrote on a message board recalling board members' favorite memories of Carradine, "Goodnight sweet autoerotic prince."

—michael louie

It wasn't just the fact that the NHL scheduled the first two games of this Stanley Cup Final series as back-to-back games that had me bugging this morning. The scheduling, while hardly a precedented move in professional sports championships; hell the Superbowl has two weeks between the conference finals and the big game—was an effort to garner more weekend ratings for the ailing sport and "deemed" necessary since hockey playoffs as they are—if games go into overtime, the extra periods accumulate until one team scores, a mechanism that can lead to five or more extra periods (a good, appreciative article on that aspect of playoff hockey on the NY Times site)—there was a danger NBC's coverage would preempt Conan O'Brien's debut on The Tonight Show tonight. But what really got it going this morning was the NHL exposing itself again as a farce with blatant favoritism of certain players, throwing more fuel on the fire that is the clamor that the league is increasingly making a mockery of itself.

Pretty much all morning I was reading reports, blogs, and forums from Sunday night's game two in Detroit, between the Red Wings and the Pittsburgh Penguins. It's a rather good matchup for the Stanley Cup finals, so good in fact they've reprised their respective roles from last year and are having another go at it. But the least interesting reports from last night's game were about the score—which Detroit won 3-1 on, again, a couple of fortunate bounces and a knuckleball of a shot by rookie Jason Abdelkader. Stats and figures notwithstanding, the real meat of the hockey news today was whether Penguins star Evgeni Malkin, who leads the league in playoff points with 30, would be suspended for instigating a fight with the Red Wings' Henrik Zetterberg in the final 18.2 seconds of the game. According to the NHL rulebook, any player who instigates a fight in the final five minutes of the game is to be suspended for one game. Not surprisingly, Malkin wasn't.

He was, in fact, pardoned by league executive VP and director of hockey operations—i.e. the disciplinarian—Colin Campbell for mysterious reasons he (Campbell) did well to talk his way through with all the gusto and self-deluded conviction of George Costanza talking his way out of pushing women and children out of his path while escaping a kitchen fire—prompting a strident and vociferous howl from the hockey masses.

A little background: the rule in question is 47.22: "A player who is deemed to be the instigator of an altercation in the final five minutes or at any time in overtime shall be suspended for one game, pending a review of the incident. The director of hockey operations will review every such incident and may rescind the suspension based on a number of criteria. The criteria for the review shall include, but not be limited to, the score, previous incidents, etc..." (keep the nebulous "etc." in mind). The idea behind this rule to keep teams from "sending a message"—meaning the losing team wanting to keep its opposition from getting too comfortable, to let the other team know there's still fire in the belly, and that they plan to settle the score in the next meeting. It's a weird rule, meant to keep frustration from boiling over into potential injuries, and it's part of the "new" NHL, but a rule nonetheless.

Here is the incident in question:

As one can see from the video, the whole thing starts with the Penguins' Max Talbot, who is quickly gaining a reputation of a dirty stickhandler akin to Glenn Anderson of the '80s era Edmonton Oilers (i.e. the guy who caused Ron Hextall to do this:

), giving a jab to Red Wings goalie Chris Osgood. Then, as usual, a scrum around the goal builds with some pushing and shoving, until Malkin starts swinging his stick at Zetterberg, before throwing punches and losing his sweater in the process. Even CBC announcer Jim Hughson was shouting "He's throwing haymakers at Henrik Zetterberg!" At the end, Malkin is sent off for fighting (5 minutes) and a fighting instigator minor (2 minutes). One could well argue that this is just playoff hockey, the old time, ultra-competitive, hard-nosed stuff we love to see in a good game. We love to see teams' top players go at each other, and we love to see things get heated and a little scrappy. But rules are rules, right?

Well, not necessarily. What this morning's announcement confirmed is that rules are rules for certain people. In the new NHL, the league disciplinarian appoints himself not as an enforcer of league rules, but as a sovereign Judge of Character. And this Judge has deemed thusly: "None of the criteria in this rule applied in this situation. Suspensions are applied under this rule when a team attempts to send a message in the last five minutes by having a player instigate a fight. A suspension could also be applied when a player seeks retribution for a prior incident. Neither was the case here and therefore the one game suspension is rescinded (emphasis mine)." None of the criteria... applied in this situation. Are we reading the same rule? It seems to me like all the criteria was met here. How Campbell conjured this one up is probably best left to the conspiracy experts on hockey forums, but to me it appears Campbell has looked at Malkin's record, and apparently into his soul as well, to seek the answers for the question of intent. He looked into Malkin's eyes and looked for malice, and upon seeing dollar signs instead, absolved him.

As Yahoo! Sports columnist Jeff Passan wrote earlier today: "It is a rule to prevent the kind of thuggery and frustration spilling that Malkin displayed. The punishment fits... Except in the NHL, which includes out clauses with its rules. This suspension can be reviewed by Colin Campbell, the NHL’s executive vice president and director of hockey operations, who certainly doesn’t have anything riding on Malkin, the potential MVP, no, sir, and wouldn’t at all let his decision be compromised by the quality of the player involved, no way, no how, because he is a fair and impartial jury of one, yes, indeed."

So when is a rule a rule? Not surprisingly, at least for me, as a Philadelphia Flyers fan, it's when the penalty is on the Flyers. Or, in this case, not a penalty. In game one of the Flyers-Penguins playoff series, Flyers forward Dan Carcillo gave Max Talbot a headshot with his gloved hand, which was still attached to his stick by the way, after a late faceoff. No penalty was called, but the league later reviewed the play and handed Carcillo the required 1-game suspension. The league also fined Flyers coach John Stevens $10,000 for "creating a situation" in which a message could  be sent—meaning sending an enforcer like Carcillo onto the ice during the final moments of the game. At the time, hockey writers and bloggers hailed the call as justified and The Right One.

So when is a rule not a rule? Well, the next day Calgary Flames' foward Mike Cammalleri does his best Carcillo impression late in the game against the Chicago Blackhawks' Martin Havlat (who probably had his clock cleaned more than any other player this postseason, yet played very well until his team was eliminated), only Cammalleri gets a penalty for his actions. The league reviewed Cammalleri's hit, too—only instead of looking objectively at the play in hand, decided the move was uncharacteristic of Cammalleri—while Carcillo was a "repeat offender"—and decided to keep Cammalleri golden.

Likewise, Scott Walker of the Carolina Hurricanes cheapshots the Boston Bruins' Aaron Ward and is let off the hook. Why all the subjectivity? Well, I could go on for about 5000 more words about why it's usually the Flyers on the bad end of the call, but that's a whole other column. The fact is, the league has exposed and embarrassed itself with this Malkin non-suspension and its blatant double-standards, and I personally think the rule for which he should be suspended is a terrible one. Let 'em play the game, as they say. Let the players settle it on the ice.

But that's not what happened here. Even the NBA, the epitome of a league "arranging" marketable talent, suspended Orlando's Dwight Howard early in the playoffs. While Malkin is no goon (and Carcillo is, despite some NHL-level hockey skill, considered a goon), his singling out of Henrik Zetterberg was significant. From Greg Wyshynski's Puck Daddy hockey blog: "When a team attempts to 'send a message' is code for 'when a team sends a goon out to start a fight'; and no, that can't be applied here. Especially after seeing Malkin fight.

But Zetterberg is one of the players checking Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin into oblivion. He's a reigning Conn Smythe winner for his defensive prowess. That Malkin picked him out of the pile is no coincidence, no mistake. It may not specifically be 'retribution for a prior incident,' but it sure as hell was a message being sent about the frustration Malkin's feeling this series."

In an extremely rare occurrence, I actually agree with Sidney Crosby—who, although I view him as an arch enemy, has been superb during this much of this postseason—on this one: "Those guys weren't even punching each other. They didn't even take their gloves off." Crosby, for one, knows what it's like to punch a guy with his gloves on.


[I counted about three gloved punches to Valabik's nut sack there.] Rule 47.22 is a dubious one at best, yet another example of the short-sightedness of the current NHL brass of Colin Campbell and Gary Bettman. But if one player is judged by his action, and others judged by character, when and where (and by whom) are the rules decided?

The real damage here is to the NHL, which lags by leagues behind the NFL and the NBA in terms of television viewers. Its latest example of short-sightedness, double standards, and rules-as-convenience is abandoning even the most dedicated hockey fans, most of whom, like me, won't see their favorite teams play again except on XBOX for another several months. If this is the kind of message the NHL wants to send as a league, for the sake of hockey and its fans one hopes the unspoken one is that Campbell is setting himself up for a sending off of his own.

-mkl (sorry for the lengthiness)