"UFO over the Rocky Mountains" - The Denver Post"UFO over the Rocky Mountains"
Young boys used to find summertime trouble outside; now they go to YouTube.Posted: 07/12/2009 01:00:00 AM MDTAh, summer. The kids are out of school, which means it's time for my young sons to take up favorite vacation pastimes like baseball, bike riding, lemonade stands and duping the world with elaborate hoaxes about UFOs on YouTube.
It was a rainy day, and our three boys were confined inside the house doing what brothers usually do — socking one in the nose and blaming the other for the trouble. I was used to this. A few minutes later, however, came total silence. If ever there was a sign that the boys were up to no good — the kind of no-good that usually results in a call to our homeowner's insurance agent — this was it. I decided to poke around.
In the kitchen I found our 10-year-old with a cheap plastic digital camera and our 4-year-old with a circular LED light purchased from Wal-Mart for $4.88. The younger boy was reflecting the light off the kitchen window while the older boy shot a pixilated video clip. I have to admit: The reflection did look a little like a weird flying saucer, but the narration by my son sealed the deal.
"It's an alien!" he exclaimed in his most dramatic, breathless voice. "Oh my God, look at that!" (The video can be viewed below).
It all seemed so sweet and funny — two would-be Steven Spielbergs, one in pre-school and the other in elementary school, together serving up a Close Encounter of the Fraudulent Kind. Mostly, I was grateful that they were entertaining themselves indoors, without bloodshed, on a rainy summer day.
And then they posted their video on YouTube.
Within an hour, they had their first 100 hits. And then another hundred. And another. Before long, their 18-second clip with the take-notice headline "UFO Over the Rocky Mountains!" was the subject of an intense international debate.
Some viewers pronounced the video as conclusive proof of the existence of extraterrestrials. Others denounced it as a fake, but with impressive and elaborate CGI imagery.
My little 4-year-old and 10-year-old hoaxsters were thrilled. Adults from around the world were paying attention to them! They went to bed that night with dreams of Hollywood in their heads.
When they woke up the next morning, though, they learned a hard lesson about the movie business: Overnight they had been struck by pirates.
Their fake UFO video was so convincing that it was picked up by the Paranormal Network. Shortly after, another UFO site copy-and-pasted the video, and another, and then even a foreign-language site calling itself UFO Video Italia. Somebody else somehow stretched the 18-second clip into a two-minute epic, complete with ultra-slow-motion zooms and dramatic backing vocals that seemed to come from a strange marriage of Jerry Bruckheimer and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Boy, was I mad. All this work by my own two sons and now all the glory, thousands and thousands of precious Internet hits, was being hijacked by some shamelessYouTube pirates. Oh, the nerve!
Surprising thing was, it didn't bother my sons a whole lot. As my 10-year-old said: "Don't worry so much, Dad. It's the Internet. These things happen."
And so here I was, the father of two baby-faced boys who fooled the world with a $99 camera and a $4.88 light from Wal-Mart. And I couldn't help but think that summer vacations have sure changed a lot since I was a kid.
Mark Obmascik is a Denver writer and author of a new book, "Halfway to Heaven" (Free Press, 2009). He can be reached via markobmascik.com.
July 17, 2009
"UFO over the Rocky Mountains" - The Denver Post
Michael Jackson IV Junco Tracks
Michael Jackson IV Junco Tracks
Video sent by mrjynMichael Jackson IV Junco Tracks
SCARY Tito Jackson IN BEAT BOWLER BREAKS SILENCE OF PAST 30 YEARS TO DAILY MAIL
For years, the Jackson family largely presented a unified, denial-filled front in response to allegations of Michael Jackson's alleged addiction to prescription medication. But, following in the footsteps of sister LaToya, who was paid to speak to a British tabloid about her feelings that Michael was "murdered" by a shadowy group of conspirators, older brother Tito, 55, has broken his silence to a rival British tab, The Daily Mirror.
In a lengthy interview, Tito told the newspaper — which seems likely to have paid him for his time, as The Daily Mail did with LaToya — that the family was so concerned over Michael's alleged abuse of prescription pills that they planned a military-style intervention at Jackson's then-home, Neverland Valley Ranch. (Representatives for the Mail had not responded to MTV News' request for comment at press time.)
"I never saw him on drugs. Not once. He deliberately did it away from us. He didn't want his family to know anything about that part of him," Tito reportedly told the paper, adding that Jackson did everything in his power to hide his activities, even ordering his staff to bar his brothers and sisters from the ranch.
"We had to act," he explained, saying that as rumors grew of Michael's addiction his siblings rushed passed the security guards to confront Michael. "It was me, my sisters Janet, Rebbie and LaToya and my brothers, Jackie and Randy ... We bust right into the house and he was surprised to see us, to say the least. ... We went into one of his private rooms and had a discussion with him. Some of us were crying."
Tito claimed that the siblings kept asking Michael if it was true he was using drugs and the singer kept denying it, saying they were overreacting and asking a doctor who was on hand to assure them everything was OK.
Investigators are still trying to determine what caused Jackson to collapse and die on June 25 at the age of 50, apparently of cardiac arrest. Numerous news outlets have reported that the singer was taking a number of prescription pain medications and anti-anxiety drugs at the time of his death and that he was also allegedly using the powerful doctor-only approved anesthetic Diprivan as a sleep aid to counter his chronic insomnia.
Tito said that despite the assurances, the siblings didn't take Michael's word and attempted to speak to him about the problem for hours, to no avail. He did not say when the intervention took place, but noted that the family subsequently tried "many times" to speak to Michael about the issue, but were shut out by his handlers.
"I don't know if they were just doing their job or if it they were part of some kind of conspiracy," he said, adding that the security staff would often set up roadblocks to keep the siblings out. Tito said he first became aware of Michael's alleged problems with prescription drugs after the singer was treated at a rehab clinic in 1993.
"He had been taking pain medicine because of the burns to his scalp and evidently he got some type of addiction from it," Tito said, referring to injuries Jackson suffered from burns during a 1984 shoot for a Pepsi ad.
Though LaToya claimed that Michael was killed by a group of conspirators trying to get their hands on his money, Tito said he is not convinced of that. "I don't know whether he was killed or not," he said. "But I would say that sometimes he had people around him that were not in his best interests. ... Whether his death was an accident or whether it was deliberate, something has gone on and we need to get to the bottom of it."
On another topic the family declined to discuss over the years, Jackson's proclivity for image-remaking plastic surgery, Tito said that obsession may have come from taunting the singer endured from family patriarch Joseph Jackson when Michael was young about his nose and acne. "Michael's plastic surgery started around 1979, when he went solo," Tito said. "It was just something that a lot of entertainers were doing at the time. ... It started with just an alteration of his nose. He never told me why, but I think he thought it would improve his looks."
The former member of the Jackson 5 also countered reports in a new unauthorized biography by Canadian writer Ian Halperin, who said that near the end of his life, Michael was obsessed with fears of his own death.
"Michael was one of those people that was always worried about someone having to take care of him," Tito said. "He didn't want to turn into someone who couldn't make it up the stairs or couldn't make it to the bathroom. ... But I don't think losing his life at an early age was part of his plan either. ... He never talked to me about dying, but most of us are a little in fear of dying."
NOOOOOOOOO! Amy Winehouse Granted Divorce From Blake Fielder
Amy Winehouse Granted Divorce From Blake Fielder-Civil
Singer's headline-making marriage ends after two years.
After a tumultuous union filled with arrests, public spats and accusations of drug abuse, the turbulent marriage of British singer Amy Winehouse and onetime muse Blake Fielder-Civil ended on Thursday (July 16). The Associated Press reported that neither Winehouse, 25, nor Fielder-Civil, 27, were present when a judge granted the divorce petition at a brief Family Court hearing. The divorce becomes final after six weeks and a day, ending a marriage that provided dozens of international headlines and, according to sources close to Winehouse, nearly helped to write the epitaph for the troubled singer.
The couple, who met in a London bar in 2005, were married in a simple ceremony in front of a few friends in Miami in 2007 but spent much of their wedded life apart, as Fielder-Civil was arrested six months later on an assault charge and sent to jail.
Winehouse's father, Mitch Winehouse, has frequently accused music video production assistant Fielder-Civil for introducing his daughter to hard drugs, and the couple's up-and-down relationship made for plenty of tabloid headlines. Winehouse mined her misery over Fielder-Civil's early abandonment of their relationship for material on her multi-Grammy-winning breakthrough Back to Black, crying in her beer on songs including the album's title track. In interviews, Winehouse frequently spoke of her breathless love for her often disheveled Blake, and the couple appeared inseparable during the international promotional blitz for Black that made Winehouse a household name.
In addition to the reported drug use, Winehouse was famously caught on video carving the words "I Love Blake" into her stomach with a shard of glass, and during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, she displayed photos of the couple passing pills to each other with their tongues.
But the Sid-and-Nancy-style love affair was also accompanied by photos of heated arguments that ended with both sporting bruises and scratches, as well as an arrest in Norway in October 2007 for marijuana possession; the couple were released with a fine. Just months after the wedding, Fielder-Civil was arrested on charges of suspicion of attacking a bar landlord and attempting to bribe him to drop the allegation. Following his incarceration, Winehouse was frequently seen wandering the streets of her Camden neighborhood in a daze, and she subsequently canceled a U.S. tour.
Fielder-Civil was released from prison in February and shortly after filed for divorce on claims of Winehouse's infidelity; she acknowledged adultery and said she would not contest the divorce. The AP reported that the divorce papers filed with the court stated that he found living with Winehouse "intolerable."
Winehouse recently returned to England after several months of living on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where she was reported to be working on the long-awaited follow-up to Back to Black.