top fives: bad things

So here are the things I won't miss about 2009. They are a bit of a random mishmash of personal/worky/other, so they probably look a bit odd piled up next to each other like this. 1. my son being in hospital There have been a few difficult things on the personal front this year, but none more so than my baby boy spending time in hospital. Three times in 2009 with breathing difficulties. (Apparently they don't say it's asthma until you're a bit older.) So the fact I've had a heavy cold over Christmas has meant I've pretty much spent the whole time scared that he would have to go in again...and that I'd be responsible. Thankfully, that hasn't happened (hope I don't have to say "yet"). Here's to a healthier 2010, Milo. 2. michael jackson During the summer I found it really weird that there wasn't more of a conversation around Michael Jackson on the planning and creative blogs. He seems to have been knocking around some of the really big cultural shifts of the last five decades. As a performer, as a brand, as a social phenomenon (I found out on Twitter before it was on the news - you probably did too), it didn't really feature. But as an uber-fan, maybe I'm just being a bit precious. 3. losing too much time to free flash games OK, it's not the biggest thing in the world. I got hooked on sites like Kongregate for a bit in the middle of the year. And then moved on to Canabalt, which is awesome. But if you add up the total time I've lost over the whole year, you'd probably laugh at me. And life coaches would offer me their services for free. Seriously, it must be four days or something. 4. brands trying to show how social they are Making ads like this. Rather than behaving socially. 5. felipe massa's accident OK, so formula one is my not-so-secret guilty pleasure. There are lots of good reasons not to like it, but I can't help it. Somewhere along the line I managed to invest myself in the story of it, and I've been hooked ever since. When this happened, I was absolutely gutted. Felipe should have won the championship the previous year, when it was claimed by Lewis Hamilton. (The driver was the consistent side of the partnership in Ferrari, the team was at McLaren. If you don't agree I will fight you on this.) That image I have of him beating his chest on the podium in Sao Paolo, knowing he'd won the race but lost the championship by a single point, holding his head up high...that's one of the most inspiring sporting images of the last decade for me. To be hit on the head by a spring from someone else's car the following season, whilst travelling at 162 mph, that just doesn't seem fair.

mj

I've always been a massive Michael Jackson fan. So I wanted to post something short and sweet about the impact his music had on me, and how I think he as a person/brand/postmodern phenomenon affected the world. (I find it a bit odd that lots of the creative and planning blogs I follow don't talk about people...just ideas and work. Which is ironic when you consider that brands really spend a lot of their time aspiring to be people these days.) Except that I realised that lots of my favourite tracks of his have less great videos. And lots of the great videos are for songs I favour a bit less. And where there's an overlap in the Venn diagram, embeds have been disabled. What's more, the music's pretty ubiquitous at the moment. You're all probably listening to it on Spotify anyway. So for demonstrating impact, these two do it nicely. You've almost certainly seen them before. The first is the Filipino prisoners doing Thriller. I'm not even sure I need to say anything about it. The second is Ian Brown's cover of Billie Jean. I think this comes close to the ultimate expression of artistic fandom. The song's simply too good not to cover; at the same time he knows that he simply can't reach the level of the original, so much so that he's almost celebrating that fact, paying homage. Sorry the video's a bit rubbish.