JSON - from JS to PHP

[nevvermind]

All right. It's my turn to cry and weep in despair.

FF 3.6.11, Firebug 1.5.4, PHP 5.3.1.

I hate JSON, btw.

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    url: "joaca2.php",
    data: '{"name":"George"}',
    dataType: "json",
    success: function(response){
        alert(response);
    }

});

That's the JS part (with some HTML, ofc. Everything works fine in that doc).
I've tried {name:"George"} also.
Here's the monstrous PHP code:

printf("<pre>%s</pre>", print_r($_POST, 1));

Here the POST'ed data in Firebug: http://i56.tinypic.com/71l1r4.png
And here's the HTML response: http://i54.tinypic.com/2ptqfi9.png

What's wrong? json_decode? Nah, it just shouts that the first argument needs to be string, "array given".

I lost a whole night with this damn JSON and I won't give up until I get something right, no matter how little.
Thanks, as always.

[bradgrafelman]

What do you see on the PHP side if you do this:

var_dump(file_get_contents('php://input'));

[nevvermind]

This (xdebug formatted):

string 'name=George' (length=11)

LE: I've gone to jsonlint and it told the format was wrong. Instead of data: '{"name":"George"}' it gave me this:

{
    "name": "George"
}

Same error when using data: {"name":"George"}.