by Ian Punnett

Few stars of any art form are as polarizing as Michael Jackson in my opinion.  As an advocate of responsible adult behavior and somebody with a certain amount of experience with victims of clever sexual abusers, I can never separate Michael Jackson the musical genius from Michael Jackson the never-criminally-convicted but civilly financially liable pedophile.

I’ve been buying his records since I was ten and will always enjoy his catalogue of hits up to the time when he started paying off kids with millions in hush-money. 

He relished his eccentricities so I think it’s fair for us to talk about them a little bit up front.  Some of his issues--like his drug and sex problems--were traits we see in many great modern men.  Elvis Presley could be classified as a pedophile for his romantic relationship with Priscilla Presley started when he was in the U.S. Army stationed in Germany and Priscilla was just fourteen.  There is some dispute about when they got sexually serious but the general consensus is that Cilla and Elvis did everything but intercourse years before their marriage.  Elvis’ drug use is well-do****ented.  What is lesser known is that Priscilla has said in the past that Elvis appeared to have lost interest in her romantically shortly after the birth of Lisa Marie.  Of course, Lisa Marie and Michael Jackson were married later and he was worried about dying like Elvis--addicted and in career trouble--for years.

Much can said of John F. Kennedy.  His sexual appetites ran the course from hookers to mob girls to friends’ wives, starlets, etc, and his drug addictions have been well do****ented.  Once more, the woman that Kennedy leaves behind also intersects with Michael Jackson in his long friendship with Jackie O.

So weird, isn’t it?  Three larger-than-life men, icons all, and each one of them connects again through the life of Michael Jackson?

That’s not all that weird in the news this week, however.  We may have been contacted!

AFTER you've spent more than 20 years hunting for an alien signal, you think you'd be celebrating if you noticed a mysterious pulse suddenly rising up on your computer readouts. A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message.

But when Ragbir Bhathal, an astrophysicist at the University of Western Sydney, who teaches the only university-based course on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in Australia, detected the suspicious signal on a clear night last December, he knew better than to crack open the special bottle of champagne he has tucked away for the history-making occasion.

Instead, he's spent the past few months meticulously investigating whether the unrecognised signature was caused by a glitch in his instrumentation, a rogue astrophysical phenomenon, or some unknown random noise.

Even if he picks up the signal again - he's been scouring the same co-ordinates of the night sky on an almost daily basis since - the scientific rule book dictates he'll need to get it peer-reviewed before he can take his announcement to the world. "And that is a lot of ifs," he concedes.

The hunt for extraterrestrial life has been boosted recently by the discovery last month of a rocky world not unlike our own, about 20 light years away, which its Swiss discoverers have dubbed Gliese 581e, the latest in a long line of planet discoveries during the past decade (350 and counting).

Although Gliese 581e is too close to its host sun to support life, it's the first planet believed to be rocky like our own, a kind of super-hot Earth quite unlike the long line of gas and ice giants discovered to date.

And if that doesn’t sound enough like an episode of the X-Files, this one actually was!

    BEIJING, June 26 -- Do twins have telepathy? When twin sisters got the same scores on this year's national college entrance examination, villagers in Shaoxing, east China's Zhejiang Province started to wonder if the girls read one another's minds, according to a story on Zjol.com.

    The twin sisters, Zang Jiahuan and Zang Jiale, took the annual college entrance exams at the beginning of this June. When they received the results showing they both scored 644 points, they were shocked.

    "We never expected it," the girls said in unison, telling a reporter who asked if anything like this had ever happened before, "this is the only case." (Chinese News Service)

The case is being investigated to determine that it’s not a hoax.  This next story definitely IS a hoax but I think you need to see it anyway.  This scary, e-mail text that’s going around teen cell phones has no known origin.  Here’s exactly how it looks as it appears on the cell phone screen:

fm1071.com/show_elements/link.php?entryI...

And on this Gay Pride weekend in many place around the country, here’s the latest science on whether or not gay people are “normal” and how futile it is for some people to try to find ways to “fix” gay people.

Examples of same-sex behavior can be found in almost all species in the animal kingdom — from worms to frogs to birds — making the practice nearly universal among animals, according to a new review of research on the topic.  

"It's clear that same-sex sexual behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies," said Nathan Bailey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside.

Interesting about bonobos.  Not sure you’ve ever heard of this website but I had to pass along this link that the last story reminded me of--how much the veteran broadchaser--er, I mean broadcaster, Larry King looks is morphing into something not human: 

fm1071.com/show_elements/link.php?entryI...

I know it’s mean, but funny is funny.