Bret Michaels shows off his owie

Bret Michaels fall down go boom.

Let's get something straight-- we've reviewed the footage over and over, from multiple angles, at multiple speeds, and a single immutable fact has been proven: the set piece didn't hit Bret Michaels-- Bret Michaels ran into the set piece.


The evidence is irrefutable, gentlemen: Michaels is a tool.

So can we stop blaming this poor descending prop wall? Hasn't it suffered enough being first linked to the Tony Awards, and now to Bret Michaels? As far as we're concerned, that wall was just minding its own business and simply refused to make way for a prancing faded hair metal star. That wall, in so many words, is the Rosa Parks of the inanimate world.

We're not denigrating Michaels' injuries. We've had our fair share of broken noses and scraped lips.

But the real bad guy here isn't the wall-- it's that god damned cowboy hat Michaels has been using to fool himself (and no one else) into thinking he's not sporting a skullet. If he had been wearing, say, his trademark bandana instead of his trademark cowboy hat, he would have seen that wall from a mile away, and wouldn't be sporting an unusually mushy proboscis.

In any case, Michaels has been showing off his boo boo on his Myspace page. He doesn't seem especially pissed about it. In fact, he seems to think it's pretty cool. After decades of being regarded as a pretty boy, a little ding in the paint job might give him that bad boy air that will make people forget he ever had his pubic hair groomed for a shoot in Playgirl.

But that wall. That poor, poor wall. Getting scapegoated for all of socieity's pent up resentment for our inanimate sturctural bretheren. The wall isn't the bull in the china shop here, people. We are.