Making comebacks after the clock stops ticking

Nothing's further from career suicide than actually dying. 2Pac has been able to release music twelve years after his death, and Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2008's "The Dark Knight." So when the King of Pop's triumphant comeback tour came to an unexpected end, his actual comeback lived on. He's number's one and two in Apple iTunes album downloads, and his name is tops on each search engines hot searches.But the memory of another recently deceased celebrity also goes on, though his star is significantly lower.

Pitchman Billy Mays died in late June, leaving products and infomercials without their friendliest of faces. But just as Jackson's legacy goes on, so does Mays'. Medial Enterprises will air commercials of Mays selling their product, Mighty Tape, just 30 days after Mays' death. "Our feeling is, everyone wants to have Billy go on," Bill McAlister, president of Media Enterprises, told the AP. And what better way to "go on" than doing the same song and dance that made you?

Some may say it's tasteless to exploit the image of a deceased man for a profit, but I say why not? If we celebrate the memory of a great singer by watching him sing, then we should do the same with a man who made a living out of hawking inventive devices at us all hours of the day.

While a comeback for Mays is certainly less substantial than one for Jackson, I doubt we'll all be reciting the word for his OxiClean commercials 25 years after they first aired, it is still a nice piece of remembrance. How Mighty Tape does commercially is irrelevant to me, everyone time I see the commercial, Mays' last hurrah, I'll treat it as his memorial, because he didn't get the big L.A. burial.