Just Call Me "The MJ Memorial Grinch!"

I like Michael Jackson as much as the next guy, but why the hell is our broke City of Barrel-Wearing Angels , hot on the heels of splitting the tab on the $2 million dollar Lakers victory parade, footing a $4 million tab on this memorial? AEG should pay for it, but evidently the fact that they've invested so much into downtown with Live L.A. has given them a free pass.

How about charging fans for those tickets, even $10 a ticket, to defray costs? Those hardcore freak fans from Berlin or Tokyo will pay up the wazoo to be at that event. That's one way of reducing the tab on this event. Or how about having all of those participating celebrities hitting the PayPal button and kicking in on costs?

But don't drag all the rest of us into this mess. To quote my man MJ, "why don't they just leave us alone?!"

Or better yet, they should've held it in Gary, Indiana, which could probably use the big economic boost. At a time when our state is going under, and there is no money left in this city to pay municipal workers, many of whom are taking furlough days, why put our city through another deficit? Adding insult to injury, let's screw up these workers morning commute to work by not giving the city access to freeways and downtown while this was going on. Hear that hissing? That's the sound of thousands of struggling people's cars overheating because they're stuck in bad detour traffic.

All this city-footed fanfare doesn't make sense. As a tax-payer who may not get my state refund thanks to bureaucratic bungling, I find all of this disturbing.

This really has nothing to do with my feeling about MJ himself. Even if they were throwing this memorial for my favorite singer of all time, I would feel the same way. And like I said, I like his music, especially OFF THE WALL.

(As for the Lakers parade, I say either let the Lakers pay for that or, better yet, how about the losing team pay for the winner's parade? That would give each team more incentive to win the championship...in order to avoid paying for the other team's victory parade...Hear that, Orlando? You owe us 1 million dollars!)