Farrah Fawcett, 62. (Her I will miss, if only distantly.)
Michael Jackson, 50. (Say hello to the homeworld, ET.)

I wonder if the traditional third figure is now lying on a bathroom floor somewhere... or if it was Ed McMahon (86, 86'd yesterday.)

I will miss Farrah the most - a fellow Texan whose pinup poster graced countless dorm room walls, but nonetheless was not the dimwitted blond she portrayed.

Michael Jackson I enjoyed as a kid during the heyday of the Jackson 5. Incredibly talented and incredibly troubled.

Fawcett didn't interest me in the 70s; I wasn't into Hollywood or beauty pageants. I suspect I might have liked her personally if I'd known her, though. It sounds like she had both grace and courage.

I'm not entirely sure that MJ was a victim of the system as are so many of his peers. He certainly began his life under a lot of pressure (from dear old Dads as well as the studios)... but so did his brothers and sisters, most of whom turned out fairly normal.

Jackson went so far, so weird, so bizarre, so off the maps, nearly all on his own, that the summary page holds only two names: Michael Jackson and Howard Hughes. Both may be a combination of high intelligence/talent, far too much money, and a nucleus of genuine mental illness.

But the mean ol' studios who churn out the Menudos and Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montanas and Monkees and Brady Bunches aren't responsible for that level of bizzarity. (Just the usual sick, sad spectacle of lost and broken twenty-somethings, and there are many causes for those.)

My apologies to our host, but the Monkees don't belong in this group. They answered an ad in Daily Variety for auditions for a proposed TV series. Two of them (Mickey and Davy) had been child or teen actors previously, but by the time of The Monkees all four were adults - and behaved like it too, when they quickly chafed at the prefabness of the situation and demanded (and got) the right to play instruments on their records and to write some of their songs.

Apropos of Michael Jackson: It so happens my family and I watched most of an early-1990s TV miniseries on cable last week, The Jacksons: An American Dream (we couldn't stick with the whole thing because added commercials bloated the thing to 5 hours from 4 originally), and from that script you wouldn't know that Quincy Jones had ever been involved with any of the best-known solo albums; evidently Michael self-produced, you see him at a mixing board and everything. Well, it wouldn't be the first film/TV biography to grossly distort the facts.

my 2 cents worth on the Michael Jackson debacle- the media should have detailed his musical career "only"- as a musical performer he was phenomenal and worthy of respect.

on a personal note, i believe he was a very sick human and i could've have pitied him and what the influences in his life turned him into (a freak) if not for his victimization of the kids- yep, they never convicted him and supposedly we are all presumed innocent until "proven" guilty. michael damned himself in my eyes when he decided to settle (for tens of millions) with the parents of the kids he allegedly molested. Sorry I can't buy his innocence here. In his place, if I was innocent, I'd have fought these battles through every court in the land to my very last dollar. To settle (to me) was a declaration of guilt !

A special place in hell exists for both Michael AND the parents who willingly exposed (even after michael was charged ) their kids to this sick individual

my wish is the media would allow michael jackson to ignobly die by a dearth of coverage of his death

Billy Mays? Isn't he the infomercial guy? Never heard him, never saw him.