Michael Jackson. Lottery is closed. Memorial is July 7.

The lottery has closed and applications were received at a rate of around 50,000 per hour, more than 800 per minute. The current issue is that many people probably used multiple e-mail addresses to register in the hope of re-selling the free tickets for profit. Then again, the family has control over thousands of the tickets so Michael's father the always-willing-to-exploit-an-opportunity Joe Jackson is probably already selling tickets.

Los Angeles government officials are worried that a crowd of nearly one million people who did not get tickets will show up near the Staples Center. People are being warned to stay away from that part of the city amid fears it will be swamped.

The service is being held at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles where large barricades have been already been erected around the arena to stop fans trying to storm the building. Only 11,000 of the available tickets are for the service itself. The other 6,500 are for the adjacent Nokia Theatre where fans will watch on three large screens.

The service will be broadcast live on television and the Internet and is expected to attract a global audience of hundreds of millions. Police are telling the million people they expect to come to the Staples Center to stay home and watch the Memorial on television. They are warning people that without a ticket and / or credentials, they will not be allowed within a quarter mile of the Staples Center.

This memorial will probably be bigger than that of Elvis or Princess Diana, but without the financing. The British government spent tens of millions of dollars on Diana's funeral, but no one has yet to step up and foot the bill for Jackson's.

And so our bankrupt government is again faced what appears as an enormous expense. It's not really a lot of money when compared to the billions of dollars we are spending daily on war. The Michael Jackson Memorial is the type of expenditure people want the government using our money for. We don't want our officials using our money to kill and torture people in other countries.

May we all recognize the futility of needless spending on killing and begin to focus our attention on supporting the needs of the living. And may we all have an opportunity to properly grieve all loses including that of Michael Jackson.