Tourists or simply curious citizens can soon journey into the bowels of Norway's capital. Oslo's department of water and sanitation are planning an adventure center under Frognerparken in response to insistent demand to tour the city's nether regions.

"We have noted great interest in tours of the sewers. Architecture students and school classes have visited (the sewers). People have arranged their stag parties and other celebrations in our underground areas. We have also had a theater performance here and a request to hold a wedding," the department's function leader Svein Hole said.

Until now events were only held on private initiative, but now the department believes they have a market demand to meet. The plan is to turn the city's largest pump station at Frogner Park into a public attraction - a sewer safari park - in about a year's time.

C'mon, tell me you don't want to take the ride...

And in kinda related news-




Three Oslo teenagers have been on a secret private visit to pop idol Michael Jackson at his pleasure park Neverland Ranch in California. After police raided Neverland Tuesday morning with a warrant for Jackson's arrest on suspicion of sexually assaulting a young boy worries have run high in Oslo, newspaper VG reports.

One of the mothers said she was waiting to hear from her son, and was considering calling Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Two youths were invited along to California by Jackson's Norwegian-Pakistani friend Omer Bhatti, 19.

Bhatti, from Oslo's Holmlia district, became a celebrity of sorts after Jackson discovered him in 1996. Bhatti was standing outside Jackson's hotel in Tunis dressed like Jackson and bearing a red rose in his hand.

Okay, only sorta related. Both from Oslo.

BUT, seriously, what kind of parents would let their 12-year-old son meet up with The King of Pop bearing a red rose? The kind of parents who've been planning a big, fat civil lawsuit against a very wealthy man, that's what kind.

'Cause, seriously, when there's been a law passed that prevents the wealthy from buying their way out of heinous crimes, and it was passed BECAUSE of The King of Pop, that's really not the kind of man that you want to offer up your child to, is it?

Read on, children-

LOS ANGELES Nov. 20 — The prosecutor in the Michael Jackson case praised a law that can halt civil lawsuits during related criminal cases, saying it would prevent a scenario where the singer's accuser accepted a settlement and then refused to testify in the criminal trial.

The state law was passed because another child backed out of a 1993 molestation case against Jackson after the singer reportedly paid him a multimillion settlement, Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon said.

"It is an irony. The history of the law is that the L.A. district attorney's office carried the legislation as a direct result of the civil settlement in the first investigation," Sneddon told The Associated Press in an interview.

Sneddon had baffled legal experts Wednesday when he seemed to imply at a nationally televised news conference that the new law lets prosecutors force minors to testify.

"The law in California at that time provided that a child victim could not be forced to testify in a child molest proceeding without their permission and consent and cooperation," Sneddon had said. "As a result of the (first) Michael Jackson case, the Legislature changed that law, and that is no longer the law in California."

And, of course, here's the latest glam shot of the one-fisted wonder-




Ye Gods & little fishies. He looks like Joan Rivers.

Bah. Out for booze. Talk to you later.