Fedora and overcoat-wearing fans around the globe poured into streets this past Wednesday at word of the unexpected death of Karl Malden, the acting great who appeared in such films as “On the Waterfront,” “One Eyed Jacks,” and “Birdman of Alcatraz,” but was perhaps best known as Lt. Mike Stone on TV’s “The Streets of San Francisco” and as a pitchman for American Express travelers checks.

Malden was 97 at the time of his death, and had not appeared in a motion picture for several years. But his eccentric behavior and opulent lifestyle at Riverside Homes Retirement Village in Boca Raton, FL - he was known to dine later than the early bird special - regularly kept him in the news.

Born in Gary, Indiana in 1912, Malden’s life changed considerably with his sudden stardom. He appeared in his first film, “They Knew What They Wanted,” in 1940, at the tender age of 28. Many pop culture observers feel that the lifelong glare of the spotlight was responsible for his increasing isolation and impenetrable conduct. Along with a penchant for collecting such animals as dogs, cats and hamsters, Malden, who fathered two daughters via sexual intercourse with a woman, had an apparently insatiable need to remodel his body through surgery.

Family members recall that Malden was admitted to an unknown hospital in 1921 for a procedure known as a “tonsillectomy,” after which he claimed it was easier to swallow. Shortly thereafter, his lifelong odyssey of surgeries began. The full extent of Malden’s obsession is not yet known, but official records reveal he entered New York City’s Roosevelt Hospital in 1962 to have his gall bladder removed, then had a root canal done by a Syracuse dentist in 1973. In recent years, he also had a cyst removed from a shoulder blade, and secured a Miami-based surgeon who agreed to lance a boil on his right buttock.

You’re looking at a Topps 1969 Aurelio Rodriguez baseball card, lucky you. Rodriguez, a third baseman, played for seven different teams over the course of a relatively undistinguished 16-year career. He ended up with a lifetime .237 batting average, which, to be honest, isn’t merely undistinguished. It’s plain old bad.

In all fairness, Rodriguez was pretty good in the field - he beat out Brooks Robinson for the Gold Glove award one year, and that was almost impossible to do - but it’s not like people were getting drunk and singing songs about him. So why then, you might wonder, did somebody take the time to press his rookie card between two thick pieces of plastic, the better to keep it in sharp-cornered, super-pristine, mint-style condition?

Because that’s not Aurelio Rodriguez, stupid. In fact, that guy’s not even a baseball player.

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I collected a lot of baseball cards when I was an Alabama-bogged tyke back in the 1970s, and I was always fascinated by “error cards”— that is, cards that have a misprinted picture or some misleading piece of information on them. For instance, I recall that there’s a Hank Aaron card from the late 1950s (when the Braves were still in Milwaukee) in which the negative was accidentally flipped, so Hammerin’ Hank is batting left-handed and has a backwards number 44 on his uniform. If this guy were to hit a home run, he’d run to third to second to first to home, only to be called “Uot!” by the umpire, at which point Milwaukee fans would almost certainly oob. Think about it.

Error cards can be worth a lot of money if the company that manufactures them catches the mistake early enough and withdraws the cards from circulation, thus limiting the number available. But if nobody notices until it’s too late, the market is flooded with the damn things and they’re more of a curiosity than anything else.

Which brings us back to Aurelio Rodriguez…or should I say, “Aurelio Rodriguez.”

When Topps’ photographer showed up at the Los Angeles Angels’ spring training camp in 1969 to snap pictures for that year’s series of cards, he was told that Rodriguez was a young guy who could barely speak a word of English. Unfortunately, the Angels forgot to point out that the very same thing could be said of Leonard Garcia, their trusty batboy.

Nobody really remembers if Garcia realized what was going on, but he knelt down and posed for the photographer, who then marked Rodriguez off his list. Whoops! However, according to my friend, Richard Ticho, the owner of baseballcardcollectors.com, the card isn’t worth very much because Topps printed a shitload of them. It turns out somebody wasted two pieces of perfectly good plastic on this one, unless they can unload the "rarity" on a collector who doesn't know any better and has too many bucks in his pocket.

I guess there was no harm done, though, except that Rodriguez missed out on his first opportunity to appear on a baseball card. But was on lots of other cards over the years. He certainly got off better than Billy Ripken (the considerably less legendary brother of Cal) who made a regrettable mistake when posing for his Fleer card in 1989.

Here’s the card. In case you’re having trouble seeing what it says there on the knob of Billy's bat, a close-up as been thoughtfully provided:

It's been reported that Michael Bay's "Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen" has raked in $200.1-million after a mere five days in release. This is the second biggest five day box office total in movie history.

In a related story, a man screamed at the top of his lungs while shaking a set of car keys in front of a baby; he is confident the baby will want to see the keys again because it now knows the plot. He also thinks he can sell the baby a t-shirt with a picture of a set of car keys on it.

Paul Tatara

And he was taking such good care of himself, too.

I won’t even attempt to decode the riddle of the Sphinx that was Michael Jackson’s psychological makeup, but I may end up being the only one. Rest assured that millions of words will be written about the gloved-one in the coming weeks, and none of them will even come close to getting to the bottom of, for lack of a better phrase, what the fuck happened.

This isn’t Elvis eating too many bacon sandwiches and popping a rainbow of pharmaceuticals, although it seems likely there were more than a few pharmaceuticals involved. Somehow, Jackson started out as a child who seemed like a man, then, as a man, slowly collapsed inward until he became a perverse parody of a pixie dust-addled child. Tack on a degree of megalomania that’s usually only seen in Eastern bloc dictators, and it was a disturbing, ridiculous, often ugly thing to see.

Was he an extraordinarily talented person? Yes. He was. There’s no denying that. But, as time went on, he was also scary as shit. Sane people, no matter how gifted, don't dance on the roof of an automobile, in front of the press, during their child molestation trial. And that's just the first incident I can think of. Sift through your box of memories for your favorite.

So now the pajama party is over for good. Jackson will be impossible to forget, of course; in the mid-1980s he was as popular and as ubiquitous as a person could possibly be. But you can bet there are people right now who are desperately telling themselves he didn’t really die, that he’s secretly stowed away to an even more private Neverland, one full of llamas and ferris wheels and soft-serve ice cream dispensers and go-karts and a million other things that no one in their right mind should have to have in order to be happy. These people, regardless of how they view themselves, weren’t his fans. They were his enablers, the screaming advocates of a self-annihilating train wreck.

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Everyone will carry a personal version of Michael Jackson in their head now, and there won't be a new, surgically altered one to replace it. There are a lot of unnerving options, but when I think of him, this is the Michael I want to remember— this astonishing little kid who was so bursting with life, joy, and genuine, butt-shaking soul:

The tragedy here isn’t just that a man, a father, died at the age of 50. The tragedy is that something pivotal about Michael Jackson died 10 or 15 years ago, if not earlier, and his body finally caught up with it. And we all sat there and watched.

Is this a sick country or what?

Paul Tatara