The FAT Website est. 1999
Jen came down to visit me in Sydney on Friday. She just left to catch her flight a couple of hours ago 🙁
It was great to have some company on the weekend and we took the time together to wander around and eat at some of the city’s many cafes and restaurants. After a weekend of seafood platters, Belgian chocolate cafes and Japanese cuisine, I’m now completely immobile, lying on the couch here, feeling sorry for myself.
I’ve got a week left in Sydney before I head back to Brisbane and then the countdown is really on for the wedding. For the record, the cake lady still hasn’t got back to us and is now eight weeks late. Also, I need to finish writing my wedding vows and I need to start preparing my wedding speech too.
On The FAT Website news front, I’ve added Angela and Matt’s Twitter feeds to the site and trimmed them down to showing the 5 latest entries. I’m also going to start doing ‘5 Second Reviews’. Basically, instead of writing a mini-essay for all my gaming and film reviews, where appropriate I’ll just write a bite-sized summary instead. I’ve started out with a few games: Flight Control (Iphone), Rhythm Heaven (Nintendo DS) and Peggle (Xbox Live Arcade).
Aside from the hasty copy and paste job on Friday, I haven’t really had a chance to chime in with my two cents on Michael Jackson’s passing so I’ll do that now.
Personally
I was a big Michael Jackson fan as a kid. The first CD I ever bought was Dangerous and, like Sam, I found that when I revisited it years later, its not nearly as good as Bad or Thriller. Having said that, I can remember how much I loved that album as a kid and I think the younger you are the greater appreciation you’ll have for the saccharine overload and shameless optimism that is Heal The World. Bonus points if you watch it with the Superbowl video at the same time.
I was very sad to hear of his death. I wasn’t a lifelong fan but its the association he had with my childhood that made it so sad to hear. Also, I was definitely in the camp that believed the child-molestion charges were rather obviously bullshit money-grabbing exercises from some of the parents of the Neverland visitors.
I’m curious what will happen to Blanket.
Michael Jackson: Considerate of elephants
His Music
Like a lot of other people, his death lead to a weekend of revisiting some old favourites on iTunes and YouTube. One observation I had when watching the videos was that Michael Jackson seemed to be the last of the music giants that had such an effect on his fans that many of them would actually pass out at the sight of him. Its a phenomenon also commonly associated with The Beatles and Elvis but I can’t really think of an contemporary artists that have this effect.
When discussing it with some colleagues at work, a friend of mine observed that this is probably due to the level of exposures contemporary stars have with their audience, whether it is through Youtube clips, Twitter or Myspace. When he first became popular in the Seventies, it also pre-dated Walkmans, VCRs and MTV. Many of his younger fan base couldn’t necessarily even afford an outlet to listen or watch Jackson perform on demand.
In this environment, my friend reasoned, seeing the guy live was such a monumental event that probably caused you to stop pumping blood to your brain and thus, you’d pass out from excitement.
Its an after-effect of doing a media studies course at university that I find this so very interesting.
Also, when browsing Wikipedia, I raised an eyebrow at how many copies of Thriller he sold. It is estimated to be around 109,000,000 copies. Christ! I don’t see that record of Best Selling Album being broken any time soon.
