Unless you live under a rock in Uzbekistan, and probably even if you do, you've heard that yesterday was one of those days of coincidence that happens every now and then. You know, one of THOSE days, when people try to attach some significance to the fact that two very public people died on the same day, forgetting that 1) It's only random coincidence, and 2) 300,000 OTHER people died yesterday too, 50,000 of them from hunger. But I digress...yesterday was all about Farrah and MJ.
Farrah I expected, as we all did. MJ went down differently, as we also should have expected. I was at the local pub when the news of MJ came to me via an SMS from Heather. I told the waitress who became very distraught and asked me to confirm it before she told "everyone". A quick trip to Twitter left no doubt: various words related to MJ's death had shot to the top of the feeds, and bumped #iranelection right off the top ten. Even "CPR" was up there.
In fact, this news was dominating everything else on the planet. If a nuclear war broke out at that instant, nobody would know about it because servers everywhere were taking a pretty severe MJ beatdown. I'm not kidding, a CNN.com headline from this morning reads "Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him".
"Yes", I told her as her eyes welled up in tears, "It's true". Minutes later the whole pub was talking about it.
It is difficult to imagine being known like MJ was. The entire world knew him. I mean, Farrah was well known, but Michael was a worldwide superstar. There were a hundred new posts about him every second on Twitter, in dozens of different languages.
As I pondered all of the philosophical angles of yesterday, as I am known to do, I came up with an interesting connection.
MJ made the best selling album in history, and Farrah graced the best selling poster ever printed. I'm sure others have made this connection, but it's not just trivial, they were both hugely influential icons of my culture. I think the world without them is a little less than it was with them.
