Dissonance in the global village

We've been travelling for the last week, explaining our light posting. This took us to the East African highlands and northwestern Europe, but sadly, not the homeland. Anyway, we know that stories about the weird conjunctions created by globalisation are a dime a dozen, unless they're told by Tom Friedman, in which they're worth millions, but we can't decide which of the two following experiences along those lines is stranger:

(1) A hotel restaurant in East Africa; Terri Schiavo has just died and the many hotel TVs are showing CNN International in full Breaking News (sic) mode. The hotel band is doing Hakuna Matata, jollity all round.

or

(2) Watching Italian TV (RAI Uno) while the Pope is gravely ill but not yet dead. The somberness is interrupted for a video/photo montage of the Pope's life, the musical accompaniment being "What a wonderful world" by Louis Armstrong. Some photos of Louis are mixed in with those of JP2.

Item (2) is ultimately the stranger bit of media-induced conjunction we've seen so far, but we'll be relying on the blog GUBU to keep us up with Irish TV antics in the coverage, and we hope to blog about the US equivalent ourselves.