* Dangerous – 2005 article on The Urban Fox (click)

Please excuse the (temporary) ads on the Urban Fox site, which are for a silly reason I won’t bore you with, and the fact that it’s impossible to tell when there’s a link in comments on this site, without bolding it. I should look into the CSS jiggerypokery of it sometime.

On other matters, I was just re-reading your old Fox post on Michael Jackson, which has long stuck in my mind. I really liked the way you put it together with all the pictures – every one was worth the uploading hassle – and the way you talked about his physical self-destruction, deracialising and apparent inability to understand how a grown man ought to relate to kids… layers of tragedy really, I suppose.

I wasn’t a big Jacko fan as a kid, but I liked the way you’d written about the fallibility of a childhood hero too. Well, 50 is a young age to die… but it is his pained, sad, messed up life that makes me feel sad rather than the actual death somehow. I dunno, it is like the thing about not having been a Jacko fan, but the things you were writing about in that post were some of the things about him that did matter in my mind. I’m not explaining this well.

Oddly enough, I’ve been listening to a bit of Jackson 5 recently, after a mate planted “I want you back” unshakeably in my mind, and it attached itself to a bit of a situation I’m in at the minute (don’t try guessing from the song – it’s not that direct!). So Jackson has died just at the moment when his music means more to me than it ever had before.

Looking at your post again, I’m surprised to find I never left a comment at the time. Maybe because I was new to blogworld then… but sometimes something hits home about things where I’ve got strong feelings but I’m not very good at talking about. Subtle, mixed up, double edged things…

That is also why there’s no comment on your Days of our lives post, by the way. But you have a bit of a splurge from me here.

(I haven’t linked your post, cos I’m not sure if you would want to do that. But you can drop a link in yourself if you want with the magic power of wordpress. Or delete all of this – maybe I should have made it an email.)

Oh.

*illusions shatter all over floor*

It is a fab colour though.

British people can’t take compliments, by the way. We just go magenta and stare at our feet. FACT.

Cue 100 Brits lining up to say I’m talking tripe.

Did I mention Brits are also argumentative?

Cue 200 Brits lining up to say no we’re not.

…Etc.