So she woke up

There'll be a few bleary eyed clerics on Sunday morning, with the news that a U2 gig will be streamed live on Sunday at 3.30am UK time

that's me in the corner [if cricket was a religion!]

I was looking online for a quotation from Snoopy that I once got in a birthday card a long time ago from an ex-girlfriend, which is going to be the basis of my post - Ashes post next week, and I found this. Enjoy

I can't be that much of a loser as I have at least managed to get the embedding code to work (kind of)!

They're out to get you, better leave while you can

There were 65,500,000 hits on google for Michael Jackson this morning. The entire Internet will soon be overloaded with stuff about his death. It is literally unbelievable, but we said that about Elvis, Lennon, Kurt, Freddie, Bon, the list goes on. I'm sure there will be conspiracy theories hatching even now. It's just a shame that this will distract us from Iran, Afghanistan, Darfur, etc. One death gets lots of attention, other go unnoticed.

I'm not normally one to take celebrity death to heart, and was going to do an "EJ Thribb" for Farah Fawcett today. However, Michael Jackson was such an icon, and he did have quite an influence on me in the early 80's.

I was 16 the year "Thriller" came out. I didn't buy it, but I didn't have to - everywhere you went, every radio station, every TV music show, every disco for most of the 80's would play something by Michael Jackson. At that time I really only listened to rock music played by blokes with long hair wearing denim and leather, and I listened to it very loud. Dance music was not in my repertoire, and I wasn't alone. There were many youth club or school disco's (apostrophe for abbreviation, Lynn Truss fans) at which the girls all danced to one type of music, the boys to another (well, danced is a bit of an exaggeration).
then This happened:



"Beat it" provided dance music for the girls, and rock guitar for the boys. Ironically I guess Michael Jackson is almost solely responsible therefore for my discovery of the opposite sex.

"Thriller" also opened my mind to a much wider variety of music, which enriched my social life no end. It should be an interesting Glastonbury for cover versions.

I was a youth worker in the early 90's when the allegations of inappropriate behaviour against him started, and it was weird to be responding to young people's prayer requests - please pray for Michael Jackson ...

Moving seamlessly from nostalgia to cynicism, like Princess Diana before him, there will now be a sustained period of hysteria, conjecture and then eventually exploitation of the brand name. Poor bloke. At least the suicide rate will dip.

If I shed a tear it is more for my own youth that is past, than for the death of a talented but flawed musician. I should think his funeral will knock Diana's into a cocked hat.

My top 5 Michael Jackson Songs?

Beat it - see above

ABC

I want you back - what a bassline

Earth Song even if only because of Jarvis Cocker's moon

Don't stop til you get enough - almost the title of this post.

Would you still remember me?

Well, that didn't last too long.
Following Obamageddon last week everyone was talking about Twitter.
I thought I'd have a little go, so I signed up and sent a message to an old friend, then started following Stephen Fry after reading about him on the BBC website.
Some of you may have noticed I even put a widget in the sidebar here (reminds me of a Chas'n'Dave lyric but that'll have to wait for another post), but that was a pain as it asked you to sign in every time you looked at this blog. Sorry about that.

So after about 4 hours and at least one stranger started following me, clicked the wondrous "delete my account" button and that was it. I was as free as a bird.

I suspect I was suffering from Facebook envy, as my wife has 87 friends, and I wanted to see if I could catch up by twittering but it wasn't to be. In the end I've got more and better things to do than spend ages clicking on "find a friend" - what i really want to be doing is getting up off my backside and finding some real ones!
As I thjought about my expoerience, I was reminded of the comedown from an inital encounter with Friends Reunited (you don't want to go there so I won't do a link) when we all suddenly thought, "what's the point of this? I already know where the people I want to stay in touch with are!"

We had an interesting discussion at an Arrow residential (a course that my wife is on and I get to go as spouse) about the definiton of the word Friend on Facebook, because its not the same as the meaning of the word in the real world.