Howdy, y'all! The thing is, last week was special. Macworld Tokyo, remember? And Steve Jobs intro'd those new iMacs. Well, I was not pleased (to say the least). But then something happened. So this week there won't be any Stupid HTML Tricks or Day-to-Day Digest. Instead, I've reverted to an ancient format and delivered a long-winded, all of-a-piece column. Fool-drool,"Mac lit," whatever. You aren't paying for it anyway, so don't complain if you're offended. God bless America. (Yee-haw!)

OMIGOD WHAT HAS HE DONE?
When Apple posted the pictures of the new Flower Power and Blue Dalmation iMacs, I knew the end was near. "Jobs has lost his mind" I screamed out loud, for there could be no other explanation. Ugh! Yuck! Blech! I sent an email titled "Doom" to a small circle of Mac writing colleagues. Apple was finished, I wrote: the new machines were a joke! Had some weird evil fairy switched the real products for fakes? I was sure we were witnessing the End of All Things Apple. This was historic, like the crash of the Hindenberg, a day we would all not soon forget even if we wanted to. This was the day that Steve Jobs's string had run out. I was so depressed, I could only shake my head and moan. I couldn't write a single word about the new iMacs. Just posting the Apple press release was a chore, and I swore that I would keep my mouth shut as long as I could. As far as I was concerned, the new colors were a complete, unmitigated disaster.

Strangely, however, here and there amidst the reactions were a few hints to the contrary. One MacWEEK reader wrote that his little sister wanted a Flower Power iMac. My brother wrote to predict his lovedly and talented daughter would want one. Oh well, sure, I thought. There's always one or two in every crowd. A few people said the Japanese would love them, and remembering the hideously styled Japanese cars of the late '60s and early '70s, I thought maybe they were right. And that name! By calling the one color scheme "Flower Power, " Apple was making a direct reference to the '60's. . . Um, the '60's? (Watch out!)

What were they thinking? This was asking for trouble on several fronts. For some time now Generation X, Y, or Z had been shoveling scorn and ridicule on anything having to do with baby boomers. The boomers had fathered and given birth to these spawn, after all, and had there ever been a generation that didn't reject its parents? This was part of growing up, a way of defining what you were not.

There was more to it than that, of course. Conservative politicians, pundits, and preachers had co-opted the boomers' kids (whether they knew it or not) into their all-but-lost war against cultural awakening and liberation. The counterrevolutionary surge made it edgy and cool to be against the broadly humanitarian and idealistic trends we'd set in motion years ago, and crimes committed in the name of "business" were exalted to the level of common sense and righteousness. Without indulging in further unprovable and argumentative blather about why things are the way they are, I'd just like to say that now that the 1950's have returned with a vengeance, we need that up-against-the-wall spirit more than ever!

ANTEDILUVIAN TROGLODYTE MORONS
Thanks to Nader the Antichrist, G.W. Bush and his zombie cast of resuscitated drones now threaten to wreck the wilderness, condemn hundreds of millions of third world women to sexist misery, spend what's left of the national treasury after tax breaks for the rich on a useless missile defense system, and let Microsoft off the hook, among other crimes. Pretty scary stuff, but 30-some years ago things were arguably worse and we somehow survived, evolved, and prospered, up to a point. The thing is, we forgot to go deep into the caves and kill the pods (all we had to do was disconnect the life-support systems and let them shrivel up). We should at least have bulldozed over the crypts and blocked off the air vents, but we were too busy making money and raising ungrateful brats, so now They Walk Among Us once again, their pockets stuffed with oil leases and unread Bibles. There's evil mischief afoot, mark my words.

You know what this means, I hope. Yes brothers & sisters, it's time to detonate the Love-Bomb once more, and this time nothing less than Total Liberation will do the trick! I'm not talking about fighting, you understand. I simply mean allowing the apparently interrupted transformation to proceed. There are global psychic tectonics at work as well, so maybe no one really needs to DO anything except unclench. . . I really hope that's the case, even if the current crew of carpetbagging opportunists makes me want to reach for the garlic and crucifixes. I mean, eeewww!

STAY 'WAY FUM DAT MAN!
I hope you're at least entertained at this point, even if you're lost in the ozone or deciding whether tor not to call the cops. This is still a computer column, believe it or not, and the spew at hand started with my incredulity at what I regarded as the suicidal design strategy unveiled in Tokyo last week. I was wrong, of course!

Hopefully you understand the big picture by now, so I can lay the gist of this revelation on you: those of us who gave up on Nixon, Agnew, and the American Way longer ago than most of you were born STILL BELIEVE, as do millions of others, that the way to save the world is for everyone to transform his and her own consciousness.

And amazingly, astonishingly, unbelievably, that's what Steve Jobs is driving at with the new iMacs!

What's going on here is a glorious leap into the heart of a paradox. Apple has redesigned the computer by not designing a "computer." We don' need no steenking "computers," gang, or oil wells in wildlife refuges, for that matter. What is about to happen is nothing less than a transcentdental shift. ("HEY GEEKS, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE HISTORY?") Make love, not war! Turn on, tune in, drop out! And don't trust anyone with a beige box! This has little to do with style per se, of course, but everything to do with liberation from old belief systems. Yes, little girls will want them, hahahahaha! Bill Gates is done for. Geek chic is kaput. Hey, you think Macs are toys? Well, guess what: toys are UNIVERSAL! Show me someone who doesn't like toys and I'll tell you to put the lid back on the coffin or run like hell. "Boo-hoo, businesses won't like them." Screw business! Business sucks. Plant a tree, dance naked in the sprinkler, get real.

FILTHY LUCRE?
Of course, I could be wrong. I usually am. This may have nothing to do with evoking the transcendental, transformative powers of human consciousness. Maybe all that happened was that Apple ran the things past a bunch of focus groups and decided they could make a a frickin' fortune, but I don't think so.

"I was there" when flowers and polka dots first appeared on faces, naked bodies, cars, and everything else. I had an old 16mm projector and a TV set that I painted up myself, without really knowing why. During a famous anti-war demonstration, someone took a photo of a protestor poking a daisy into the muzzle of an M-1, an image that's resonated ever since. Do you see what I mean here? "Flower Power" iMacs are rolling off assembly lines, and I think anyone concerned about who's going to buy them is missing a much bigger picture. You don't really have to like them, though I'll bet they'll grow on you. Jobs knows what he's doing, all right.

These things are subversive as hell!

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr has more than a few fond memories of ALL KINDS OF THINGS stuckup twits will always be too scared to try, but don't ask him to jump off a bridge wearing a big rubber band. He also wants everyone to visit his FotoFeed daily image feature at the Zoozone and tell their daddies to syndicate it so he can pay for more dental work and get a new SUV.

And remember FARR SITE? There's a BRAND NEW one up up and running at the Zoozone called "Where I Am Now." (You can also find lnks to newly-formatted classic episodes on the Zoozone's Farr Site Menu page.)

Audio Credit: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

.