Schrödinger's Jacko

I had a very weird media experience on my way back from Germany. Having been cut off from electronic media since Thu afternoon, I arrived at Paris Fri morning and looked through the newspapers, both French and international ones. Only one of them (it may have been Le Figaro) had Michael Jackson's death on the front page.

I thought that was really weird -- surely, if he had died he would be on all the front pages, and it would be very difficult for one paper to get the story exclusively? Might they have been caught out by a hoax?

Unable to resolve this in situ, I took the Eurostar to London with a kind of Schrödinger's Jacko thought on my mind, wondering how he could be dead and alive at the same time. By the time I arrived at London, though, all the British papers whose early, Jacko-alive editions I had seen in Paris had changed their front pages, and he was all over the place. On the Guardian front page, poor old Farah Fawcett had to be dropped to make space for him.

So if future generations start asking where were you when you heard ... I'll have a more interesting story than on similar occasions (there are at least two catastrophic events which I heard about while sitting on the toilet, having walked past the radio and switched it on for the morning news!).

Anyhow. I can live with or without him and don't have strong feelings about his music one way or the other.

More importantly, I'm very excited that the first single from Shakira's new album is now online at her Myspace site. It's called "loba" (as in female wolf) and features her howling like a wolf :) Check it out.