SUMMER HUMMER BUMMER

"Well you can do anything,, but stay offa my blue suede shoes!"

-- Carl Perkins

What, you expected another Macworld Expo report? [snort]

Heck, I've got lots more important things to talk about first, like dead hummingbirds. Just take a look at the picture below and tell me this isn't more compelling than a zillion PowerMacs, cubed or not. This poor little fella, a rufous hummingbird, committed suicide by flying into my window maybe 2 minutes before the picture was taken. Yes, I know, it happens every day. But this is my turf, dammit!

Things this beautiful aren't supposed to die needlessly or be casually abused (like Carl Perkins' shoes). They do and are, of course. I remember the first time I looked under the hood of my dad's '54 Ford station wagon after a long summer trip and found all the dead butterflies stuck to the radiator: oh, the horror! Or maybe it was the waste that depressed me. I was building a collection of butterflies at the time, or trying to, but I never could kill them, you see. My idea of a collection was a big jar full of live butterflies. That's right, your Farr Site curmudgeon is an old softie. I even stopped fishing 15 years ago because the fish were too pretty to bash on the head.

I don't know if they have hummingbirds in Europe, but my wife just reminded me that we saw Queen Victoria's hummingbird earrings in London in 1983 (I'll be damned if I can remember such a thing). Being queen and empire being what it was, she could have gotten her birds from just about anywhere the sun shone back then. All I know is that if you Euros have hummers, there aren't any in France, har-har : those people will eat anything. . .

Me, I like pigs. If there's any animal ever designed by the Creator specifically for human consumption, it has to be the pig. Why Middle Eastern cultures eschew the delectable swine, I'll never guess or care. Just don't ask me to butcher one. Yes, I know there's a contradiction here, but when the pork chops are sizzling in the pan, consistency goes out the window. (Come to think of it, an extended period of imagining a nice fresh slab o' bass battered with yellow cornmeal, seasoned with lots of salt & pepper, frying away all poppin' and spittin' like it does if you have the burner turned up hot enough, is almost enough to make me reach for that old pair of pliers I used to keep in my tackle box and. . .WHOP!)

Anyway, pursuing the subject of things that are too pretty to kill for unless they taste good fried, we have: Da Cube!

As predicted so insightfully on this page just last week, Apple is cleverly marketing the gorgeous little boxes with lovely new flat-screen monitors (by cleverly making the monitors impossible to use with anything but the new G4s), and they should eventually sell enough of the things to almost rise to the cosmically-important level of a dead rufous hummingbird. Regrettably, da Cubes will not taste good fried, no matter how highly seasoned they are, and hot lucite probably stinks. Speaking of frying, however, let's all promise to boil in oil anyone raising phony "issues" like "boo-hoo, you can't stack 'em like the rumor sites' pictures showed!" The truth is that any damn thing can be stacked, especially the guts of a PowerMac Cube, if you've a mind to do so. But as far as piling the boxes up like so many Leggos, my number one question is "Why?" Oh yeah, that's the first thing I'd like to do with my new $1,800 computers, see how high a tower I can build. And to dispose of the rest of the naysayer silliness concerning the new hardware, let's see: Apple puts two G4 processors, gigabit Ethernet, and huge hard drives inside the new desktop PowerMacs, all for the same old price (including a new mouse and keyboard), and we have kvetching -- like that of the author of the Upside Today article, who calls the slick new optical mouse "superfluous". . .

(My first version of this column suggested a possibly obscene alternative method of working the desktop probably employed by the writer -- who no doubt uses a touchscreen -- but fear of encountering the editorial knife brought me to my senses just in time! Ooops, I forgot for a minute there. This is the Macintosh Web: we don't allow ourselves to be edited, hahahahaha!)

"Die young, and stay pret-ty..." -- Blondie

So Apple's doing fine, at least!

Too bad I can't say the same for the hummers. Besides the stationary hazards, they also have to content with our landlady's cat, Pearl. This clever feline has devised a routine of hiding down low in the flower bed and leaping up to grab hummingbirds when they come by. Our house guests have seen her catch and eat 3 hummingbirds in the last 36 hours! (My spontaneous inspiration of dumping mothballs into Pearl's lair has temporarily halted the carnage.)

Not only do they keep bouncing off the house, but last week one careened inside through an open kitchen window at mach .75 and smacked into another pane of glass trying to get out. This one was stunned, and I picked it up to carry it outside. Before we reached the door, it woke up and started cheeping like mad. I stepped outside, opened my hand, and it took off like something out of Star Wars! At least this story had a happy ending, and I felt so damned virtuous and heroic, I decided to celebrate the onset of the zodiacal sign of Leo and my upcoming Significant Birthday by buying myself a new bicycle.

I highly recommend such a purchase to anyone who's been spending too much time sitting in front of a computer, like I have. Besides, it's lots cheaper than a G4 cube, and you don't need a monitor. You might need a doctor, though. I just tried to ride up the hill to the main road, and discovered to my shock and dismay that my quadriceps have completely disappeared!

And I know I had some, the last time I looked.

John H. Farr edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past two years' worth of columns. John also writes his WebFaust column for MacAddict.com and a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM. And if you liked this week's column, you'll want to look at his latest project, Zoozone News.

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