Cool Mac Gear

Yes I am too part Irish
Sometime in the late 1700s, Henry Farr left Wales on his way to Big Flats, New York. For reasons known only to him, he stopped off in County Antrim , Ireland, and left with a bride, one Jane Quinn. So there you are. Whatever part that represents is still there and gives me the right to celebrate St. Paddy's Day in the way I've always joked that one should, by throwing a Molotov cocktail wrapped up in corned beef and cabbage into the nearest bar and yelling, "DEATH TO ALL PROTESTANTS!" I suppose that's rather in bad taste now. Always was, actually.

But this St. Patrick's Day is different. I suppose it would be in even more bad taste to point out how, so instead I'll just pass on this email I received from the president of the BMUG (Baghdad Mac User Group):

"Please tell your readers how happy we are to have our useless families, homes, jobs, and cultural heritage destroyed to free us from the evil Saddam. Liberation is a wonderful thing! May we now ask of our new American friends that they bring us the head of Richard Perle? Our P.O.W. camp soccer tournament starts today and we have no ball. Thank you, and take all the oil you want!"

I got the column headline from the email sig of another email, this one from Australia (thank you, Christine!). Good ole Oz, where the wallabies and wombats roam. George Bush is so popular there, Canberra sent a force of 2,000 men to the Gulf, a contribution to the war effort that certainly beats out Bulgaria's. (Besides, these guys know from deserts.) While I'm on the subject (and leaving it fast), does anybody remember a war the Bulgarians actually won?

Are we men or mice?
[NOTE: I originally had the "caw-caw" set to loop indefinitely, in recognition of all the crows, ravens, buzzards, and other carrion eaters soon to be celebrating. ART ISN"T ALWAYS PLEASANT, y' know. Unfortunately, I'm getting emails asking "How do I turn off the crow sounds?" from Mac users who want to keep music playing in the background. Having better things to do today, like pray, I have reset the sound file. Read on to see what you missed!]

By now everyone has turned the sound off on their computers. If you never had yours turned up, why, by all means do so now and have yourself a thrill. I call it "direct action sound file embedding," because you'll have to DO something to shut up the raven. "Why dat bird him squawk so much?" Maybe because of the next part of our program, a true Blast (sorry) from the Past, namely the February 2, 1998 Farr Site column originally published here at Applelinks. I can't link to it because when we migrated all the old content to new servers, something happened (?). But for some reason, I choose to tell you all about the infamous MOUSE RATTLE all over again. I don't know, it just seems to fit. See what you think:

High on a shelf out in my studio building, the place I did my welding and bronze casting until I got lost in cyberspace, was a small cardboard box I'd been saving for some reason. One summer day I went out to the hot, closed-up building to retrieve the box and was dismayed to see that a mouse had chewed a hole in one end, which probably meant that I had a nasty mess to clean up inside. Not so: a mouse had crawled inside, all right, and died; but the heat and dryness had mummified the corpse. There was no smell at all, no real unpleasantness, just a tiny, stiff, hairless, tan-colored little leather mouse, dry as a bone. When I picked up the little guy, wondering if the rat poison or the heat had done him in, I heard a strange, ethereal rustling, a fine, far-off, tiny, hollow rattling sound. As I pondered the source of this phenomenon, something fell onto the tabletop. "What in the world? BONES!"

That's right, a little heap of impossibly small vertebrae and assorted other itty-bitty bones. I looked at the mouse, shook it gently, heard the noise --and watched several more vertebrae fall out of the posterior end of the mummy. Egad! Somehow the heat or some unknown process of decay had dissolved or consumed all the flesh and organs, leaving the disconnected bones to rattle around inside the thin, dry husk. Yes, a mouse rattle!

Which way to the front?!
Sometime last week there was a minor boomlet of appreciation on the Mac Web over the fact that there was at least one TiBook going into action with the troops. I figure there have to be more than that, but whatever. Well, you know what? You shouldn't be waving the logo over this, you should be grieving. Haven't you seen the pictures of what those sandstorms can do? Take my computer into that environment and you'll have a real war on your hands! Oh wait, this is a real war, even if the other side doesn't fight back (at least I think that's right).

As far as the coming week is concerned, I think it's fairly safe to predict that there won't be any new Apple hardware introductions. I also hope North Korea doesn't take advantage of our being distracted to drop any kim chee warheads on Cupertino. You know, to give us a taste (hahaha) of what else could happen (they have missiles that reach that far). In the meantime, l hope everything goes swimmingly, that nobody gets killed, that the Iraqis welcome us into their homes (and let us out again), and that the quotation about there being "no safe place in Baghdad" was just some idiot 's idea of talking tough to scare Saddam out of his bunker. I'm sure there's a place for him on Microsoft's board if he wants it. You know he'd be safe there, because working for them is like having a permanent "Get Out of Jail Free" card. He doesn't have anything to worry about anyway. As of this writing, an ultimatum's been issued to the United Nations, not to Baghdad.

Finally, speaking of mistakes, you'd think somebody would have prevented the taking of the picture below. I mean, really. ("The Three ... ") I expect by now there are at least 3,000 different satirical iterations of the image being circulated online and through emails. What I want to know is, where's the president of Bulgaria?

Oops! I spoke too soon. Here's another image with a mystery stateman in the background. That may be what's-his-name from Bulgaria, the one they didn't tell to wear a blue tie. Needless to say, the Independent didn't identify him. Why not? Well, isn't it just the least bit embarrassing that the Anglo-American allies are Spain and Bulgaria? Does this make us feel good?

What if Apple announced it was forming a business partnership with your local funeral parlor and the guy who fixes lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners in his garage?

Hello???

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr , trying very hard to laugh to keep from crying, lives for peace, love, rib-eye sandwiches, and free software. Bring him any of the above and he'll follow you home. ("Eeeewwww!") Okay, forget that. How about three acres and a yurt, and he won't stay for dinner?

Salon Weblog: Anything goes!

Getcher ebooks right here:

Like pictures of el Norte?

Other stuff by John H. Farr:

And don't forget this photo-essay: "What It Is About El Rito," (Me want to live there.)

Cool Mac Gear