I say, is that tape holding up his face? If that is his daughter in the background, she is pretty.

Michael Losing Face

He started using a straight razor recently, and since he's also coming down with Parkinson's, well...this morning his bathroom resembled an abattoir. Vanity is such a harsh mistress.

HAH! You are a funny, funny man!

I know he's had ill-advised plastic surgery, but by most accounts he has at least one devastating skin disease. It could also be a misguided PR stunt. He certainly has experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows.

Well, the bandages are covering up his lips and I suspect he has had lip tattooing - maybe the tattoos are 1. still healing, 2. infected or 3. he just had collagen lip injections or 4. He had laser surgery on or around his lips - could be to remove tattoo color that has turned from red to black.

I thought it was one of his other disguises.

OMG, and he's raising two children. Michael just goes deeper and deeper into the abyss. This shakes me to the core.
I can't look at that picture without shivering.

Leprosy?

I'm serious. I wonder if he has a condition of some sort. What a sad little man.

I wonder if the chemical he uses to really bleach his skin this pale is somehow breaking his skin down? Just a thought.

What stands out about MJ , to me, is that he has no peers (or so few peers), I don't think anyone has ever been a REAL close and honest friend to him, maybe Eliz. Taylor, but she may have been wigged out on drugs, but seriously. He is all alone in his madness. the kids seem to be pretty normal despite MJ's madness, but who knows....When I look at him, I see a detatched, far gone person, even when he surrounded by fans.

I had the same gut reaction. None of us really know, of course, but with his history you expect that's it's something more complicated than patches of poison ivy, for instance.

Such a shame he's so isolated and weird, because he was (and maybe still is, I don't know) greatly talented.

It is possible that the hydroquinone (or some other chemical, perhaps-- I think I read he used a banned or experimental chemical for a while) used to treat the parts of his skin not affected by vitiglio have caused lesions or sores. I buy the vitiglio explanation because it would be very hard to do what he's done to the skin he had originally.

It's all very sad.

Laser beard removal? Bruises from Restylane?

I saw another shot from that same moment and it clearly showed a nose prosthetic (sp?). you can't see it too good in this pic, but in the one I saw, it's the bandages plus the nose and he looks, simply, scary. I can't imagine those children having a father that is so openly and obviously WEIRD, I would find him very frightening if I were a child. I hate to say that - it sounds so mean, but honestly, I don't know how he's even allowed to keep children with those many charges of child molestation and his openly strange and anti-social behavior......

I thought about old MJ the other morning, and as Mrs. T and I are turning in our application to become foster / adoptive parents, I hope I remember this shell of a man, the former king of pop, and how it seems to me that the blind idolatry he enjoyed for so long has come to haunt him.

After Thriller, I have to wonder if anyone, anywhere, ever told Michael "no", and I suspect that this might likewise explain Ms. Britney Spears and her younger, knocked-up sister.

I think the knocked-up sister would also have been better off if she had said the word "no" in addition to hearing it once in a while.

wonder if MJ contracted MRSA on his face - that has to be kept covered.

Just poppin' in to say good luck to you and Mrs. T, Thomas. :-)

How wonderful and exciting! Best of luck to you both. Hoping for sooner rather than later, but whenever it happens, it will be right.

Thank you both. If new parents had to fill out the paperwork we endured, I suspect there would be a LOT fewer children. It was incredibly tedious.

Aw, hell. With the screwed up kids I see every day, I think there should be a license required.