board77

*E*V*E*N*S*T*A*R* wrote:

Oh, I loved him so much as that character!

I never listened to his music--I was just a kid when he was at the height of his popularity and none of our parents would let us listen to anything like that. Still, we were all aware of him and his name was the first to come up when we needed an example of someone that was cool or something that the bad teenagers did ("he even says he's bad right in the song!"). So even though I was never a fan, it still feels a bit like losing a word from my vocabulary, or a symbol from my mythology.

I'm glad the Jeff Goldblum thing was a rumor!

As for Michael Jackson, I was a middle schooler when he was at the height of his career. I was never a huge fan, but he was a big part of my childhood culture.

I am in mourning. I told my boss I have to take my three days leave.... seriously.

My staff and I are wearing black arm bands and we brought in our CDs.

I'm more a fan of Weird Al's parodies of Michael Jackson's work.

I dunno...

I was young enough to remember him as the little kid in the Jackson Five, I remember when he premiered "Thriller" and other state of the art videos back in the eighties, but then he just got stranger and stranger. Seriously weird. From then, it only got worse. In a way, I am not surprised that MJ died, he seemed to have a serious disassociation between what was real and mattered and what he wanted to believe in, and I think that did get the better of him, living in a self made fantasy world.

What happens now with those kids? Their moms are nowhere in the picture, and it sounds as though his estate will likely be bankrupt.

From Wiki:

News of Jackson's death spread quickly online, causing many websites to experience technical difficulties following the unanticipated swell of users. Google announced technical difficulties after a sudden increase in searches for "Michael Jackson" led the company to believe it was under attack from hackers, while social networking site Twitter reported a crash after record numbers of users used the site to spread the news of Jackson's death. AIM, an instant messaging service operated by America Online, collapsed for forty minutes. The company called it a "seminal moment in Internet history" and added "We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth." Wikipedia also experienced technical difficulties, and crashed at 3:15 PDT, reportedly due to excessive edits and user overload.

In the hours following Jackson's death, his record sales increased dramatically. His album Thriller climbed to number one on the American iTunes music chart, while another eight have made it into the top 40. In the UK, where Jackson would have performed in less than three weeks, his albums occupied 14 of the top 20 places on the Amazon.co.uk sales chart with Off The Wall topping the chart. Nine of his albums were featured on the American iTunes Top 10 chart, including Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, and three compilations. In the UK iTunes store on June 26, thirty-nine of Jackson's songs were in the Top 100 best selling songs list, in addition to four Jackson 5 songs. Eight of his albums took over the top ten downloaded albums and the top five video downloads were all Michael Jackson videos. Along with this he also entered into the top top ten single downloads with "Man in the Mirror".

So many numbers. *mind boggled*

I know livejournal crashed because of ONTD. Which sites were y'all responsible for killing? I only went to google for the Jeff Goldblum thing, while mom was posting about MJ and Farrah on her facebook lol.




*E*

Very well said Wilma.

I'm not a famous artist but MJ had a significant influence in my life. I was bit of a rebel when I was a kid and I had to save some of my allowance just so I could have my pants altered similar to MJ's which was not a good idea since I go to a strict Catholic boys' school wherein the teachers check the length of your pants. (Well, MJ stared this fashion trend and every rebel in school was doing it so they started random checks.) I had my ways of getting out of that jam (one of them similar to the way kids wear their pants nowadays.). My mom thought the dryer shrunk my pants. I have a somewhat similar red jacket he used in Thriller which I begged my dad to buy (it was expensive but my good grades compensated for it) and similar penny loafers from Billie Jean. I think I still have the silver gloves somewhere which I made myself. I learned and practiced how to dance/sing and even got myself a small role in an inter-school musical. My friends and I even performed Beat It, Billie Jean, Thriller, Off the Wall etc... during school programmes and family friends. Maybe if there was a contest "The Best American Dance Crew" that time we would have auditioned for it.

Remember the 80's was the New Wave era (The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, Depeche Mode, Tears For Fears, Duran Duran etc...) and yet he was able to break into this era with his Thriller Album. The videos were really amazing which made me become interested in film making in which my friends and I got an award for in an a short animated film for students contest among the schools in Ontario. Like most of the people here have said, despite his weirdness you can't deny he was a musical genius that influenced a lot of people.

IMHO, I still have yet to see an artist in this generation who I can compare to MJ, sadly, I still haven't seen anybody who can take his place. Even my parents were in schock when they heard the news and they are from a different generation.

Rest in Peace, MJ.

Billy Mays died last night. Link. I don't know how well-known he was outside of the States, but he was a very famous spokesperson here in the US. He was 50, the same age as MJ.

I just saw that!

Just saw something on the web that Natalie Portman may have died while filming in New Zealand. Anyone know if this is true?!

No, but it sounds suspiciously like the rumor that was going around by Jeff Goldblum.

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/cliffdeath.asp

Jeff Goldblum

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colber ... -be-missed

Karl Malden, 97.

Unacceptable.



EDIT: okay, Harve Presnell too. What the fuck @ this week.




*E*

Lidless wrote:

Jeff Goldblum

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colber ... -be-missed

Now, that one turned out to be a hoax:

Jeff Goldblum: "I'm Not Dead Yet"

Lalaith, would you mind if this got moved to the Symposium...or have all this debate part split off into the Symposium? Generally when people come to the Turf they aren't looking for a debate so to me not all of this belongs here.

Yes, Eru, feel free to split off the debate stuff into the Symp. Thanks!

Ugh....well frak. I messed your thread up royally. I don't understand what happened as it seems posts I didn't select to be split off were split off. I don't remember splitting topics to be difficult on the old board and I never had a problem.

I'm really sorry Lali. I've really got to get to bed now so I'll try my best to fix it all later.

No worries. Get to it when you get to it, and if you can't, no biggie.