Thursday, July 2, 2009

Grief-a-Thon

Owen Good reports some Xbox Live news:

The Michael Jackson Grief-a-Thon rolls into its fourth big moneymaking day. Except that "Thriller" is being offered free for the rest of the weekend on Xbox Live Marketplace. Ordinarily it goes for 160 Microsoft points.

"Beat It," "Smooth Criminal" and "Billie Jean" join Thriller in the top 10 of the Most Popular in XBLM's Marketplace right now. The former three videos are the standard 160-point price. They're all in standard def.


With all respect to this week's events, grief-a-thon seems a strangely appropriate word for the current news coverage. I think of children getting donations and walking in circles to raise money for their schools, and then I think of the media pundits running in circles and giving up-to-the-second reports on departed celebrities to raise money for their networks.

Note: Most of Michael Jackson's music videos are accessible for free in slightly less than standard definition.

2 comments:

Pete Abbate said...

I still can't make myself feel that upset about the death of Michael Jackson. To me, he was just a very strange human being. I suppose I'm guilty of not being that interested in pop music.
Neda Agha-Soltan being gunned down on the Iranian streets? There's a death worthy of a Grief-a-Thon.

Josh Knox said...

Agreed. I wonder if there's a way to co opt the Jackson frenzy to bring attention to Iran.

For instance, if a group of people resolved that any time they heard someone mention Michael Jackson, they would say Neda. Not loudly or rudely, but enough to be heard. If the word was ignored, fine, the action was a memorial in itself. But if asked about it, they would commit to tell the story of Neda Agha-Soltan and state their opinion on the relative significance of their deaths.

Maybe it would do some good. Maybe it would just make a lot of ackward moments at parties.

Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. ~Fredrich Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty