What’s more I’m not even the slightest bit bitter when I think about the hundreds of millions of dollars that they earn, because really who am I to try and put a price tag on special? Such matter are best left in the hands of professionals like the RIAA or the MPAA. (What? Honestly my tongue was nowhere near my cheek when I said that…)

As usual, I digress.

The thing I love most about celebrities is how much of our collective time, money and energy gets spent on finding out all of the incredibly special things that are happening in their celebrity lives when they’re not doing the stuff that actually made them famous in the first place.

Inspired the hairstyles in Debbie does Dallas

You know the stuff I mean. Paris and her sex tapes, Tom and his crazy cult antics, Mel and his drunk driving ‘Jewmouth’ issues, Russell’s vicious phone beatings, Amy going to prison, Britney’s Taco habit and her giant razor-tooth vag, the latest addition to Madonna’s ethnic baby collection and that time Lindsay ate a whole packet of airline peanuts and didn’t throw up.

I believe one of the primary reasons behind the obsession our society has with these ‘larger than life’s’ stems from a need to identify with and relate with them on a mundane level so that we can imagine that all that really separates us from them is a few hundred million dollars, an army of consultants, coaches and assistants a small fleet of luxury vehicles and an extreme surgical makeover.

If you are a celebrity one of the most awesomely mundane things you can do to get people’s attention is dying. Michael Jackson demonstrated a textbook celebrity death on Friday the 26th. Tragically poised on the brink of a triumphant comeback tour, the mysterious cardiac arrest, the sketchy Demerol dispensing quack desperately trying to revive him.  This is the stuff of tabloid legends and I’ve no doubt that Elvis himself would sit up and applaud the effort – if he was actually dead of course.

Earlier in the week two other celebrities punched their tickets in failed attempts to garner media attention

Heeeere’s Cancer!

Ed McMahon the 86 year old long time co-host of the Tonight show, gave it up for bone cancer and other complications causing barely a stir.

Later in the week Farah Fawcett made it cancer 2 Celebs 0, however before anyone really had time to take notice of this Jackson trumped them both by loudly announcing ‘Who’s Dead?’

I’ve no doubt that the Jackson story will continue to unfold in the coming weeks as more dirt is dug up on Dr Demerol and we eagerly await the autopsy results, meanwhile over on e-Bay the price of Jackson memorabilia is climbing at a steady rate, with the Thriller item on the list being the domain name MichaelJacksonRIP.com, starting out at a price of (put your pinkies to your lips and say it like Dr Evil) one “million” dollars.

I’m talking of course about Microsoft Natal, the new 3d camera interface for the Xbox 360 that has the whole gaming world abuzz, or as I think it would have been better named – Microsoft Mime.

Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft have produced a technological marvel,

Walking against the Wind **Bonus! 5000 points**

with the 3d camera and the body motion sensing widgetry, but there are some fundamental flaws in the premise of this product.

Firstly I speak for the silent mass of all slightly pudgy unfit gamers when I say that leaping about in front of the screen simply does not become me. My own personal vision of immersive gaming and virtual reality has generally involved a lot of sitting around wrapped in screens while my ‘pretend body’ ran around doing insanely dangerous things that would land me in the ER if I tried them myself.

Just watching that kid in the video jumping around like Tony Hawk brought the schedule on my knee replacement surgery forward by two years.

Secondly?  Two words: Carpet burns.

I don’t want to dwell in this uncomfortable space for too long, but just think about the cost to your elbows next time you’re leopard crawling up the ridge behind the enemy base with your G36 slung across your back getting ready to pwn their mans. Let’s not even contemplate the potential damage that you could do to yourself if they start integrating this thing with ‘social networking’ activities.

Last but not least, please, just look at the picture and ask yourself this – if you think it’s bad enough that we’re raising a current generation of controller mashing zombie children – how about a future  generation of prancing, paste faced mimes?

The heavily sequined show is the birthplace of European pop cheese and has a traditional following in the gay community, with the inclusion of Graham Norton as this year’s British commentator firmly securing it’s status as a high point on the ‘camp calendar’.

It’s not completely clear if this is something that was taken into account by this year’s Russian hosts who dropped a considerably large sum of dosh into the event with the hopes that it would improve their image in the international community.

If it was part of their plan, they certainly didn’t get the buy in of Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, who must have been frothing at the thought of the satanic gay hordes of Europe descending on his manly city.

Mother Russia, to be fair, does not have a history of tolerance for anything (except large amounts of neat Vodka and cigarettes made of pure tar). Homosexuality was outlawed under the Bolshies and firmly labelled as a ‘western decadence’ – A good Comrade is a straight Comrade apparently. With the deconstruction of the Communist doctrine , rather than undergoing the mass liberalisation some might have expected, Russian society has almost reset itself to 1917 with the Orthodox Church heavily influencing government policy on civil liberties.

It’s no surprise then, that when a few very brave members of Slavic Pride and some very silly western gay rights activists took to the streets in an unauthorised protest on the day of the contest Yuri wasted no time in knocking back a dozen vodkas and then sending in the riot squad to remove them with extreme prejudice.

Peter Tatchell, a veteran activist and one of the people arrested complained of having his arm twisted behind his back, quite honestly he got off lightly considering the fact that a year or so back when he was involved in a similar incident the Russian police tied their shoelaces for a bit while some skinheads gave him a right kicking.

It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the cause, but for the most part the Russian gay community themselves aren’t all that keen on parading it out in the street so why as liberated westerners are we so obsessed with the need to tour the world systematically kicking in the door on social taboos in every other culture we encounter?

The contest itself went off with little incident. Russian snipers up on the balconies held their fire as the Georgian contestants nervously performed their entry entitled ‘We don’t wanna Put in’, the German entry had to be persuaded to have their ‘dancer’ keep some of her kit on during the performance and Lloyd Webber played piano for Jade Ewen – sadly without any earth tremors abruptly closing the lid and fulfilling a lifelong fantasy which I share with Roger Waters.

Top honours where taken by Norwegian fiddler Alexander Rybak with his entry entitled ‘Fairytale’. A sentence so full of innuendo I’m really having to bite it back here. 

“Why did they (the Moscow police) spend all their energy stopping gays in Moscow when the biggest gay parade was here tonight?” Rybak asked the press during a later interview.

If you live in a world that runs on memes that spread across the globe in a matter of hours and sub cultures that spring up around the latest social network, or MMORPG, sometimes the slang can get a little confusing – even for the most hardened of Internet users. For this reason I like Urban Dictionary. I find it enlightening and often amusing to skim through the user submitted definitions for the latest buzzword, or catch phrase.

Here’s a user submission that caught my eye the other night as particularly surreal. Apparently doganuses is not at all taken with the spirit of blogging and has strong feelings about the use of some of the jargon attached to the scene. More after the jump.

It did get me to thinking – this rather strange and random outpouring of disgust and anger in the middle of cyber nowhere – about the similarities between cyber rage and road rage and the Internet as an outlet for the copious amounts of suppressed anger most people are carting around these days in our increasingly neutered society. Not guilty? how many times have you yelled curses at someone from behind your steering wheel in the last week…?

This in turn got my thoughts running towards the uglier side of such matters and the Internet as a vehicle for people to find outlets for their darker tendencies, such as was recently highlighted with the arrest of Phillip Markoff, aka the The Craiglist killer earlier this month.

Markoff is not even the first Craiglist killer by the way. Nineteen year old Michael John Anderson, claimed this dubious honour back in 2007 when he lured a young lady to his apartment with a babysitting advertisement so that he could shoot her and shove her in the trunk of her car.

Coincidentally I just finished watching the first season of Dexter and the loveable serial killer himself pays homage to Craiglist by using it to send a furtive message to the Ice Truck killer. We are getting increasingly good at humanizing our demons and letting them out to play aren’t we? A charming serial killer, who lives by a code and only feeds his urges on truly deserving victims – its an intriguing concept – no let’s not soft soap it – it’s an exciting concept! It’s justice in rubber gloves, with a scalpel, a bonesaw and an industrial-sized roll of shrinkwrap.

Dexter sums this up beautifully in his chilling narration of the final scene of the season finale where he imagines the crowd cheering for him.

“My Darkness revealed my shadow self embraced, yeah they see me I’m one of them – I’m their darkest dreams.”

Its brilliant TV, punchy story line, socially relevant and unafraid of itself and as long as we’re parading demons down main street I’m not about to miss the show, or the ride in the hand basket.

I do have this nagging question that won’t go away though… has anyone checked the brakes on this thing recently?