I am not one of those people who mourns Elvis in observance of his birthday or the day he died, but to me he is the King, and not Michael Jackson, like the headline in our local paper said this morning: The King is Dead.

Mr. Troutbend clarified that Michael Jackson is called the King of Pop, and I suppose Elvis is King of Rock and Roll, but if we start having too many musical kings I am going to get confused and then nobody will be King.

I admired Michael Jackson to a degree in his younger years because I think he had talent, but then he got weird on us and we heard too much about his problems. I blame this on our society's need to know everything about anyone famous and the news media's supplying it. It's a chicken and the egg thing, though - the media created the demand by making us think we needed all that information all the time and we encourage them.

I fervently hope that people don't start pining over Michael Jackson, glorifying his memory, and seeing his ghost like they have done with Elvis.

Elvis got weird, too, but I don't recall knowing so much about it until after he died, so I don't think back when he was alive we were blitzed by all that information like nowadays.

The same applies to presidents. We didn't know all the stuff about John Kennedy until after he died, but now we're inundated with news bulletins every time Barack Obama swats a fly.

Our ability to transmit and receive information via the Internet, television, and cell phones is both a blessing and a curse. I find myself taking for granted that I will be able to use Street View in Google Maps to see anybody's house or any destination in the world. We can be in Colorado and use the Internet to see the temperature inside our house in Las Vegas. And I can send instant photos of anything at all anywhere in the world. And when I can't do one of these things, I'm disappointed.

Speaking of photos, here are a couple.

Usually peonies are fluffy flowers, but in Greenlawn Cemetery where my relatives are buried there are some single peonies like I'd never seen before.



Here are this year's hummingbirds. They look just like last year's so I'm not sure why I keep taking pictures of them but it seems like the picture I send out needs to be fresh, not some stale thing I've had for years. It would be like telling the same tired old fish story over and over, along the lines of: "You should have seen all the hummingbirds we had in 2006. We don't have that many this year, but you should have seen them in 2006."



The same goes for the cat. He has gotten bonier in his old age (14 years, 70 years if he was a human being) but he doesn't look a lot different. I could post an old picture of him, and it'd be the same as the one I took today. This actually is one I took today. Buddy the TGIF Cat was patiently waiting for some deer to walk by the window so he can be scared, but when I started cooking breakfast he turned his attention to me in case something might happen in the kitchen or someone might bring some fresh catnip in from the yard.