a glimpse of what's to come
Let's get a few things out of the way:
- There are going to be a lot of radio stations playing a lot of Michael Jackson songs in the coming days. (Evidence: four hours after his death, the two seconds of radio I listened to all day were one of his songs.)
- There will also be a lot of ridiculously sentimental memorial images made of him, with his birth and death years, like this one. (Can always count on CNN for this.)
- These will be offset by all the inappropriate jokes that people will be telling. (Evidence: Damien, 60 seconds after breaking the news to me: "Well, he did look a little pale.")
- You can easily judge how much bigger a celebrity he was than Farrah Fawcett by the disproportionate coverage of their deaths and obituaries.
- You will get a bunch of email forwards about Michael Jackson, probably most of them humorous.
- You can actually get a pretty accurate time of death estimate by looking over your friends' Twitter posts and finding the point where they all suddenly start talking about him.
- I'm sure the Iranian people are thrilled to find their bloody and life-changing uprising overshadowed suddenly by the death of a celebrity. And they thought they were finally beginning to understand America.
