A week of strange happenings

Last week was one of those special ones. You go all year with not much happening, and then in one week, everything happens.

On Monday the big news was South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. The week before he had taken a few days off. Now, ordinarily that wouldn't be big news, but in this case it was because he didn't tell anyone he was taking the time off, or where he was going--not even his wife.

After people began to notice that he was gone, his staff's first explanation was that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Then it came out that that was the same weekend that another group of men always hike the trail naked. At that point the governor returned and admitted that he had been in Argentina with his girlfriend. Even he knew that it was better to be caught naked with a girl than with a group of men in Appalachia.

Then, on Thursday, to the governor's great relief, Michael Jackson dropped dead. In a split second nobody seemed to care where Mark Sanford had been because the king of weird had died.

I know that Jackson was self-titled the king of pop, but when you are a grown man who likes to have sleepovers with little boys, you become the king of weird to me. Jackson always claimed that nothing inappropriate happened during the sleepovers, but still the whole thing is creepy.

The sleepovers were just one example of the strange life he lead. Jackson had enough plastic surgery to virtually destroy his face, and change his skin color to ghost white. He bought the bones of the Elephant Man, and slept in a hyperbolic chamber (when he wasn't hosting a sleepover). When he took his children out in public, he hid their faces.

The only thing Jackson ever did as a rock star that was normal was to die young. Here's just a partial list of rockers who died young -- Elvis, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Buddy Holley, Rick Nelson, Jim Croce, and Ronnie Van Zant. Jackson lived longer than any of them, but still died comparatively young.

You might think that those two stories were the strangest things that happened last week, but you would be wrong. I will close with this story that you might have missed. It turns out that Stephen Murdoch, 45, of Tustin, Ca. was arrested last week after he was found in an apartment gym complex wearing a bustier, a miniskirt, fishnet stockings and heels. He was also watching porn on a laptop. You'll never guess why he was arrested. Drugs.