No thanks.

In what is surely one of the most distasteful (in every respect) promotions I’ve ever seen, Best Online Casino have seen fit to create a Flash game in which you can win – er – a ball containing Michael Jackson’s hair. No, that’s what I said.

It’s described as a “fantastic prize”, which I can only assume is a typo for, “The creepiest, most morbid and unpleasant prize we could think of”. And it’s worth, they claim, $10,000. Because that’s what it went for at auction. Because humanity is spiralling out of control.

So dealing with something as grotesque, yet sensitive, as the hair of a dead man, you’d assume some level of decorum has been embraced. No. As if the concept itself weren’t already pretty gross, the Flash game is an unbelievably lazy, extremely poorly programmed Arkanoid knock-off, in which the bat is replaced by Michael Jackson’s head. A crude caricature of Jackson, wearing a surgical mask, because that’s a thing he did. Because, well, something! I’ll save you the urge to check it out by forgetting to link.

They call it “a unique, $10,000 tribute to the King of Pop”. As someone who never gave a shit about Michael Jackson at any point during his life, nor since it, even I’m managing to find this somewhat unsettling. But mostly just pathetic. Why not enjoy this video of how the roulette ball containing the hair was manufactured?!



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The sheer insanity of it is that even if you are some super-weirdo Jackson obsessive, desperate to own something that may or may not have grown out of his body, what you’d get is a tightly welded together roulette ball that may as well contain the secrets to eternal life for all the good it would do you. So on trust you assume that this pointless metal ball contains some hair you can’t see, that there’s no sensible way of verifying ever came from the body of the dead singer.

Would anyone like to win a ping pong ball filled with my snot?