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This article and accompanying Bertoon appear in today’s edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday (28.06.09).

I was a hundred per cent certain that the first time I had heard Bob Marley sing was on a Xandir Malta re-run of the Banana Split Adventure Show. That would have been some time in the late seventies or early eighties. I am not usually a pedant when it comes to this type of trivia but I did look for the actual reference to a Split episode that contained the Legend from Jamaica and guess what… there never was one.

The Splits show folded in 1970 and that must have been a good ten years before it appeared on that wonderful vehicle of people’s choice programs known as national TV in socialist Malta. I was convinced that I had seen (or at least heard) Bob Marley on the Splits because of the “Wo Yo Yo” tune that is world famous. The tune is actually to be found in the song Buffalo Soldier -released (posthumously) in 1983, a good thirteen years after the last episode of the Splits was filmed. So was my mind playing tricks?

Actually no. All I had to do to find out was google “Banana Splits and Bob Marley” and hey presto the answer was before me in the form of a BBC news item. What actually happened is that the Banana Split theme song – titled very unceremoniously “The Tra-La-La Song” is uncannily similar to Bob Marley’s refrain in “Buffalo Soldier”. So similar as to cause confusion among unprofessional listeners like myself – and not only. Speculation is rife as to whether the Great Rasta actually plagiarised the theme song. Apparently it would have been very hard for Bob to have heard the Split’s tune – he was not, after all brought up in an island with one TV channel for choice that was regurgitating decade old programs for the entertainment of its youth.

This is not the J’accuse obit. It is one of those “reflections” on how the pop world, pop culture and the internet-driven global village will “deal” with the passing away of the  King of Pop (“self-styled” -as some radios are insisting). Bereavement won’t have much to do with this. Sure, some fans (and that some is an understatement) will miss Michael. Others like myself, whose generation was, for a long period, marked by Thriller, the moonwalk and “being bad” and who still live in a world where it matters if you are black or white will probably not know how to describe the feeling of emptiness (not a black hole, but that nagging feeling that something is missing).

What J’accuse is interested in observing for now – before the real reflection on Michael Jackson’s death – is the reaction. It’s the world’s latest opportunity for a not-so spontaneous manifestation of mass “mourning”. I think the words of a Los Angeles editor interviewed by the BBC might be an interesting indicator:

“I feel this is the biggest celebrity story in a long time and has the potential to be the Princess Diana of popular culture.”

It was raining in Glastonbury as BBC crews interviewed those who were already on their feet in their steady downpour. The news story was not any public shows of prayer or remembrance for the man who thrilled millions. Nope. It was a story about what to expect once the thousands of festival goers crawled out of the tent in the mud and slush and once they were told that Michael Jackson – THE Michael Jackson – is no more.

If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with. -Michael Jackson “King of Pop” b.1958 d. 2009

ADDENDA (from BBC report):
Google reported an upsurge of “Michael Jackson” searches that led the company to believe that it was under a cyber attack.:

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.

Google might have avoided a crash but the same was not to be for Twitter:

The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service. Searches for topics related to Michael Jackson peaked at 3PM Pacific. Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches. But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its well-known outages. Before the company’s servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that “Michael Jackson” appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates.

Thanks to Ettore Bono for the pointer.

We are back. Work priorities first but expect a few early posts by the beginning of the afternoon. Despite the ugly weather on Sunday we reached our political objective by the end of the holiday…

Yes, we tanned.

This article and accompanying Bertoon appeared in today’s edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday (21.06.09).

From the point of view of a Maltese citizen living in Luxembourg, this week’s most newsworthy event happening in Malta was undoubtedly the expensive day-long blackout. Smart Malta still being in the process of being dragged kicking and screaming into the century of the iPod was plunged into a well of darkness. Shop shutters slammed shut, office workers strolled out of their hot cubicles and business came generally to a standstill. It was an eerie feeling to be able to perceive all this from a window on the net.

You see the main effect on the net of an island without electricity is the silence. I don’t mean an audible silence (or should that be inaudible) but a dearth of activity of the trawlers of the ether, of the netcombers, trolls and elves who have now begun a permanent fixture in the as yet not so diverse constellation of the Maltese corner of the Internet Universe. Us expats probably only got to know about the “darkness” in real time thanks to a generator or two and the few comments that were still turning up throughout the day came from laptops still seeping the last few drops of energy out of their batteries.

Veil of Ignorance
“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” (Terry Pratchett) The day Malta’s energy grid went flat allowed me to reflect on the “silence” that this produced. It was like that silence that ensues when the persistent jackhammer that had gone on all day suddenly goes quiet. You suddenly become aware of all the “noise” that had almost begun to form part of the background (even giving you that beginning of a migraine). The chatter and the twitter of the internet is also the result of a very public and immediate interaction at many levels.

The truth is that this twitter and chatter is also a form of empowerment. Whether we like and agree with what many of the people say is not the issue. The issue is that there is this new outlet for expression and that it is there to be used. J’accuse has already documented elsewhere the wariness of governments on the power of the internet. Without donning the cap of a conspiracy theorist in Dan Brown style one can safely say that even the most libertarian of governments is tempted to regulate and control the newfound levels of freedom that the internet and the tools used to propagate it afford.

This blog is about to undergo a period of temporary hiatus of three days*.

It’s National Day Weekend in Luxembourg so Jacques packs his bags and rushes to a place of sun and sea (hopefully). If, like “Charles Cauchi”, you think you will miss me in my absence, no worries – the usual fare of 2000+ words of long-winded, egomaniac but tasteful thoughts will be available on Sunday on The Malta Independent.

This Quality Blogger (c) will be thinking about you from the wild shores of northwestern Sardinia. May the force be with you. (That, and hopefully also a constant supply of good old alternating current).

As we always say… merda taurorum animas conturbit*

*Links provided for the benefit of the linguistically challenged (saves time from reaching for the dictionaries). In the case of period we are referring to the third definition on the link in question.

** Good luck on this one Charlie.