Memories of MacWorld, Fond Ones!

The news that Apple is about to introduce another revolutionary product that I can’t afford has made me remember how much, at this time of year, I used to look forward to MacWorld at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. Acres of Mac-related products as far as the eye could see! You’d walk around loading huge, colorful department store-style bags bearing this or that software company’s logo with free magazines, free floppy disks, free whatsits and trinkets beyond counting. You’d ooh and aah at demonstrations of dazzling new software, and sip complimentary beverages. You’d buy more memory.

Whole legions of badly dressed, often rat-faced former members of their high schools’ ham radio and audiovisual clubs buzzed and vituperated like callers to talk radio sports shows about What [Steve] Jobs Was Gonna Say at his big State of the Mac address. And you should have seen them when a software demonstrator made known that he’d be tossing free T-shirts into the crowd. Their pupils would dilate. The dark spots under their arms would expand, and appear damper. They’d moan, and tremble. Their tics would become more pronounced. Free T-shirts, just for correctly answering the demonstrator’s questions! Free T-shirts!

One year, it was as though you’d be arrested for using the word software; everything was a…solution. You wanted to lay out a brochure on your Mac? Well, Company A had a desktop publishing solution. You wanted to figure out how much you owed Uncle Sam? Company B to the rescue, with an accounting solution. It was really obnoxious! I related the phenomenon to the celebrated columnist Herb Caen, and he put it in his San Francisco Chronicle column, but without attribution, though I did get a nice signed note that I proudly archived beside my Pete Townshend, David Bowie, Tipper Gore, and Vin Scully letters.

I think that was the same year one software company hired a bevy of lithe young beauties to hang around in front of its exhibit in luminous latex catsuits. I spent a lot of time investigating their various…solutions; oh, did I! I am reluctant to plug The Onion, which, whenever I've suggested that I join their writing staff, sniffily inform me that they’re not looking for anybody, but I absolutely must share with you the funniest thing I’ve ever seen related to the Mac!

One year Kai Krause, namesake of the Kai’s Power Tools suite of Adobe Photoshop plugins, made an appearance. The crowd couldn’t have been more excited if he’d been Elvis, returned from the dead and carrying a naked Marilyn Monroe in his arms. Kai revealed during his presentation that he had 256 kilobytes of RAM on his own computer, and I, who had six, and a 40MB hard drive, very nearly fainted with envy; the iMac on which I’m writing this has 2GB of RAM, around a billion times more, by my calculation!

These are wonderful times in which we live, and I am using a great many explanation points today, but just try and stop me! The Lexapro may finally be working!

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Last Thoughts on Tiger

After this, I promise to say no more about Tiger Woods. But don’t deny an old boy his parting shot.

Nike and all the rest of the corporations that pay him obscene amounts of money for his endorsement will probably all forsake him now. Because the few compensatory endorsements he’s sure to be offered by the manufacturers of prophylactics and antifungal crèmes won’t pay nearly so well, he might have to offer on eBay one of the Third World countries Nike gave him.

I honestly don’t get it. Golf is very much the preferred sport of corporate wheelers and dealers, a great many of whom are surely unspeakable dickheads who, learning that Tiger cheated on his gorgeous young wife, felt envy rather than distaste, and wondered how they might cheat more effectively on their own gorgeous young wives. They’re going to stop buying preposterously overpriced Nike products manufactured in Third World sweatshops because of the scandal? I strongly suspect the opposite would be the case, though I understand that Nike might tarnish its glowing reputation by being seen to exploit that realization.

We’re quite comfortable as a society with politicians condemning Special Interests even while welcoming their campaign contributions, but we become all discombobulated when they lie about sex. I’m all in favor of the lives of homophobic gay hypocrites like Larry Craig being ruined when they’re discovered playing footsy in airport restrooms, but must confess that I don’t really see much point in reflexively trying to banish to perdition someone like Elliot Spitzer, the disgraced governor of New York, when he’s discovered to have patronized a whore. Had I liked Bill Clinton a great deal more than I did (centrism sucks), I wouldn’t, in view of his not having made condemnation of extramarital fellatio a cornerstone of his presidency, have minded in the slightest his getting blown by Monica Lewinsky.

I want in office non-hypocrites who are also effective politicians, regardless of how kinky they may be on their own time. If there’s somebody out there who can, for instance, implement universal affordable health care, what do I care what he or she does in the bedroom (or atop the dining room table, or in the shower, or in the back yard (assuming impressionable young neighbors won’t see), and with whom (over the age of consent)? If somebody can revise our insane drug policy, or make legal abortion inviolable, or offer tens of millions of underprivileged children genuinely equal opportunity, it’s A-OK with me if he wears a butt plug to work, or chases chubby, or likes crosseyed Asian women in latex catsuits to use his mouth as an ashtray. As who, if we're being honest with one another, does not?

[From the blog For All in Tents and Porpoises. Enjoy the archive and subscribe at http://johnmendelsohn.blogspot.com]