beautiful, funny, sad & true

Apple just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Macintosh, and I thought it would be fun to scrounge up the original television ad for it, from 1984.  It’s a classic.

The ad had a bit of a resurgence in 2008, when a parody of it was used for the Obama presidential campaign.

Here’s the first real life introduction of a Macintosh computer, hosted by the ubiquitous Steve Jobs, but the Mac speaks for itself, both figuratively and literally.

Before that, in 1983, there was a super-weird industry event called the “Macintosh Dating Game,” which was emceed by Steve Jobs, and which featured three software CEO’s, two of whom have become historical also-ran’s, but one of whom is someone who you will no doubt recognize.

It’s interesting in hindsight that Apple spent so much time taking pot shots at IBM, when Microsoft was the company they should really have been paying attention to.

There’s so much more I could share about all this.  I find the early days of the personal computer industry endlessly fascinating, because that’s when it was all being born, and I was just the right age to be interested in all of it, and what’s more important for this entry, just the right age to remember and be able to share it these many years later.

Now, as back then, Macs comprise about ten percent of the market, but as Douglas Adams famously said in an ad (which I’ve so far been unable to scrounge up), “They may have only ten percent, but it’s clearly the top ten percent.”  Well said, Douglas, well said.

If you’re so inclined, here’s an interesting collection of articles called 25 Years of Macintosh for you to share and enjoy.

Happy birthday, Mac!

Star Wars geek-out beginniiiiiiiiing. . . . . . . . . . . now.

Ackbar! The Star Wars Talk Show

Every time you hear someone talking about the song “Since You’ve Been Gone”, you probably think of the song by Kelly Clarkson. . .

. . .which is a really great song, I’m not gonna lie, but I always think of a very different one, by the much-underrated band the Outfield.

When I was finding these, I came across videos of many other songs by that same name (click the links) of versions that I’d never heard of before, by the old English hard rock band Rainbow.  Yes, that Rainbow, with Ritchie Blackmore on guitar.  There were tons of covers of this version, including one by Brian May of Queen, and a fairly crappy live one featuring Yngwie Malmsteen, which looks as if he may have actually played with Rainbow for a while.

Those three are by far the most famous songs, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find another one by Weird Al, and a really cheesy soul one by Day26.  The one that stood head and shoulders above all the others was by Aretha Franklin in her prime, on a Swedish TV show from 1968.

This weekend we’ve had quite the snowstorm, which is extremely unusual for Portland.  I’ve lived here for almost thirteen years, and I haven’t seen snow like this before.

Yesterday I was supposed to go to a Christmas party in an eastern suburb of Portland, so I got my car all scraped off and warmed up, and it drove fine (six inches is not a lot of snow), but the air was so cold, and there was so much blowing snow that the windows kept freezing over, and I kept having to stop and scrape them off every few blocks.  That got old really quickly, so I called my friends and said, “I’m gonna have to veto this trip.”  They actually persevered and drove out, but ended up staying overnight (which RockShowGirl and I weren’t prepared to do; luckily we stayed home), and I just got a call from them saying that their car was stuck and that they were waiting for a bus.  Luckily, they just now caught one.

Earlier this afternoon, I wanted to take a walk and get some pictures of my neighborhood, on my way to ApparentlySafestGrocery, since this much snow is so uncommon.   The pictures I took didn’t end up being very compelling, but here’s what the neighborhood looks like.

Some good Samaritan took the liberty of pulling lots of the wipers off of the windshields of cars, so that they won’t get frozen when the freezing rain starts.  Wait a minute. . .what am I saying?  It’s already started.

Most people are heeding the advice of the weather forecasts and not driving.  In fact, I saw lots of people who appeared to be out walking in the snow just for fun.  One family had a young son who decided to ski, and I thought that would make a nice picture, so I grabbed my camera, and as soon as I did, the kid fell face first into the snow.  I’m not gonna lie; it was hilarious.

So I ran my errand, bought my ingredients, and came back to make dinner, which consisted of mushrooms, red peppers, onions and garlic cooked in red wine, butter, salt and pepper.  The vegetables were then served over a bed of linguine.  (I’ve always wanted to say ‘bed of linguine’, can’t you tell?)  It may very well have been the best dinner ever.  You should totally try to make it yourself; it’s easy, delicious, sexy, and totally improvised.  You just start adding ingredients and seasonings to your own taste, and it’s perfectly acceptable to taste it while you’re cooking to see how it’s coming along.

So now I’m in for the night, but I’ll leave you with a short video to show you what it was like today outside my apartment.   The snow was falling, and the wind was blowing, and it was all very pretty.

The Plan for this evening is to get all bundled up and walk out to Broadway, to take some pictures of the snow and the Christmas lights.  Wish me luck!

OneYearAgo

As you know, this is not normally a political blog, but I saw something on CNN today while I was at lunch that completely floored me, and I knew I had to share here too.  My friend and I were in a newly renovated Vietnamese restaurant (it was excellent, by the way; much better than it used to be), in which they now have a flat-screen television mounted on the wall, showing CNN, just like McDonald’s does.  (This restaurant also displays a small bust of Jesus on the wall, right next to the bar, but that’s neither here nor there.)  Normally, I’m fundamentally opposed to televisions in restaurants, because television is ubiquitous already.  Do we really need to be constantly distracted and entertained while we’re attempting to eat and converse with our friends and/or family?

We weren’t even able to hear it, anyway, because they had cheesy Christmas music playing over it.

Having said all that, this ONE TIME I’m actually glad that they had the television in the restaurant, because it allowed me to see this footage:

I haven’t laughed that hard at anything in quite some time, and I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in my entire life.  Apparently, the Arabic translation of what the shoe thrower (who, incidentally, is an Iraqi journalist living and working in Egypt) yelled is, “Here’s a farewell kiss, you dog!”  This guy had the courage to do what it seems that many Iraqis (and, dare I say, many Americans!) would love to have done also.

Here’s one account of the story; here’s another.  Here’s another.

Enjoy!