I want to be a force for good. Doesn't everyone?
Which is why I was delighted to be moved by the words of Microsoft's Bill Gates during a CNBC TV special in which he and Warren Buffett discussed the meaning of life. Or something similar.
Asked by an audience member what he thought of Steve Jobs and Apple, Gates began with an insouciant smile.
Then he tossed garlands of roses and pearls of praise at the Apple co-founder.
He said: "He's done a fantastic job."
Which was charming in itself. But he continued to describe how Jobs saved Apple: "He brought in a team, he brought in inspiration about great products and design that's made Apple back into being an incredible force in doing good things."
So, from now on, everyone who happens to be a fanperson of either brand should seek out one of his or her supposed mortal enemies, hold hands with them and see if, together, they cannot try to be a force for good things too.
Sometimes ads run where they shouldn't even loiter.
I once was involved in a TV spot that was clearly meant for later viewing (it featured a CEO in a restroom, reading a newspaper) that suddenly aired at 6 p.m. to howls of uproar. We were mortally upset, of course. The media buyer was showered with, um, beer.
Which is why I wonder just what the creators of an ad for Grandin Road, a purveyor of furniture and other domestic items, must have wondered when their ad for happy Halloweeny items became entangled with a Wall Street Journal article about Steve Jobs' return to Apple stage performance.
(Credit:
Wall Street Journal)
You see, the Grandin Road ad features two skeletons. And some perhaps insouciant soul at The Wall Street Journal had decided to place it opposite the Steve Jobs coverage which happened to enjoy a picture of the still very slim Apple uberpresence.
Jobs' health problems have been well-documented, and one might have imagined that someone might have noticed the unfortunate symbiosis of the Jobs picture and the one in the ad.
The chosen picture of Jobs makes it seem as if he is declaiming to the skeletons, offering to sell the bony ones a new iPod or two. In fact, it looks as if the skeleton on the right is somewhat aghast at something Jobs has revealed. The new pricing, perhaps.
It all makes for a peculiar conjuncture of editorial picture choice and ad placement.
My fanciful, hardened heart wonders whether it could have been some enterprising, well-connected PR person's attempt to get the ad talked about. But my left brain is sure this was not the case.
So it's very possible that no one at the Journal noticed. These things do happen, even to the very best. But is it also possible that someone did and thought it, in a fleeting moment of whimsy, somehow amusing?
I've never died, but I can't imagine it to be a terribly enjoyable experience.
So I can't imagine why death's proximity might encourage someone to go on working until they are grimly reaped.
That seems to be the case with Steve Jobs, however. His work seems to be his life. The Apple logo seems to be his heart. And, even with several bites taken out of his health, he appears to want to carry on being Apple until he enters the second life.
The hopeful, perhaps mythical one, rather than the virtual one.
After his pancreatic cancer surgery in 2005, Jobs gave a speech to Stanford University students who were about to embark on their own journeys through life's inequities.
He told the audience: "Remembering I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
I was always told by those who claimed to know (which would be people at Microsoft) that Bill Gates was an obsessive, ruthless automaton whose need to crush all before him (in a business sense) was limitless.
Yet somehow this supposed machine in a man's body decided to unplug his working life at Microsoft while he still had his health and to dedicate himself to philanthropic pursuits. He even managed to laugh at his own supposedly cold persona in a couple of excellent ads for his old company.
It all makes one wonder whether Gates would have bothered to return to work, if a life-threatening illness had befallen him.
Some might say that when he walked into a calming sunset, Gates had nothing left to prove, while Jobs still has.
To which my question would be: "What?" He's been largely responsible for directing technological innovations beyond many people's imaginations. But much as one might love what he has created, at heart these are only gadgets.
They cure nothing but boredom. They take time just as much as they make it. And while they help people communicate with each other, they also contribute to helping people be a little more obsessed with their beautiful selves.
Is spending your time creating another lovely gadget as valuable, as enjoyable, as satisfying as, say, wafting up Mount Kilimanjaro? Is it as challenging as waking up in the morning, looking out at the dawn and having no idea what you might do today?
Of course, now that Jobs has been declared healthy, the worldly and the wise have felt free to write of his supposedly old-fashioned, dictatorial management style, even, in the same Harvard Business Publishing article, his utterly disrespectful attitude to parking.
At the core, though, is one man's heartfelt need to continue making gadgets. You can call it art. You can call it obsession. You can call it madness. Perhaps it's all three.
"Steve Jobs is not dying! That means I can still make some money out of his ass!"
Jerque Rathbone, 10 years in Wall Street and perhaps another 10 in emotional years, expressed his feelings a little louder than a normal person might have.
Mike Johnson, Jerque's lunch companion, knew how to handle situations like this. A web designer fallen on penal times, Mike had once known the good side of Jerque and these days he pretended it was still there.
"But Jerque," he said, "isn't that a little, um, harsh? I mean the guy's a human being. Don't you feel bad about squeezing the last dollar out of a sick man?"
"Feel bad?! Feel bad?! You kidding me?!" said Jerque with a shriek that threatened the wine glasses. "Apple lied through their teeth about his health! What was it they said?! He had a bug?! Bug, my ass! Jobs had to tell the truth in the end because Wall Street made him!"
"So you think Apple is nothing without Steve Jobs?" asked Mike, as innocently as he could muster.
"Apple is Steve Jobs! Steve Jobs is Apple! He's the whole damn Granny Smith! He goes down, it all goes down!" decibeled Jerque.
"Because you'll decide Apple stock will be worth less?" asked Mike.
"Worthless! You bet! I'll buy IBM, HUD, whatever the hell three-letter friggin' companies are out there!" declared Jerque, as if he was suddenly making a speech to undecided voters.
(Credit:
CC Mr. Bill)
"Hold on, let me see if I understand this. He announced he's not dying and the Apple share price goes up. But by doing that, what you're really telling the world is that you don't think he has anyone in place to take over from him. It's a negative statement. How do you know he has no succession in place?" said Mike.
"Because if Wall Street hasn't been told, it doesn't exist!" explained Jerque, his face contorting in something that strangely resembled pain. "You tell Wall Street what's going on and Wall Street makes its bets on what you say! On a daily basis! On an hourly basis! That's how it works! We don't take real risks! We take calculated risks!"
"Calculated on the basis of what?" wondered a confused Mike.
"Of knowing everything that's happening, so that we can be sure we'll make money! This guy is so self-obsessed, I bet he thinks he's gonna live forever!" wailed Jerque.
"So he has no right to keep his illness secret? I mean, it's not as if his performance is slipping all that much, is it?"
"He has no right to catch a cold without Wall Street knowing about it! Who does he think he works for?!" hissed Jerque, still loudly.
"But when you had the inside of your nose replaced with that new plastic gizmo, did you tell your bosses? Or your clients?" asked Mike, hanging on to his innocent tone like a child gripping his last cookie.
"None of their damn business! I'm not a CEO of a public company! I'm just a guy trying to make a living in a world populated by cheats and liars!"
"So do you hold out any hope for Apple without Steve Jobs?" asked Mike.
"I didn't until this morning! Did you see the footage from Macworld?! The guy standing in for Jobs! What's his name, Diller?!"
"Schiller."
"Yeah, right! I think he might be a good bet!" chirped Jerque.
"Yeah?" said a surprised Mike.
"Yeah! That guy's carrying at least 25 pounds over! No way he's got some hormone imbalance! We'll need to know his cholesterol numbers, though!"
Nike, having already collaborated with LCD Soundsystem on the creation of music that might enhance running performance, is now commissioning more young musicians to create tunes specifically for your sweaty ears.
A key in finding music that will improve your performance, some experts believe, is Beats Per Minute (BPM). The more beats in every 60 seconds, the more strides you are likely to take.
However, I understand that aerobic performance might also be enhanced by the rearrangement of a song's lyrics.
The Taylor and Francis Journal of Sports Science published research that concluded: "When selecting music for an individual, the effects of personal associations should be considered. For example, a boxer may have conditioned him or herself by listening to a certain piece of music prior to fighting. Where possible, practitioners should attempt to encourage the formation of such personal associations and harness their power."
If you make the lyrics more meaningful to you, then you will experience a heightened emotional involvement which will drive your body to more intense action.
Indeed, several of the more influential personalities of today's troubled world have been trying to find an extra edge through their ears. Some have, allegedly, commissioned well-known lyricists, producers and performers to reimagine existing works, specifically to improve their aerobic efficiency through their iPod-coddled ears.
I understand that Steve Jobs himself has had the Village People's YMCA reworked by Coldplay. The new personal jogger version has a much faster tempo and, in honor of Apple's successes when recently presenting its case to the recording industry's association, is entitled RIAA.
It includes the new lyric:
"R-I-AA, it's fun to play with the....R-I-AA.
You can make them congeal.
you can threaten their deal.
you can do anything you feel."
John McCain, who is said to take regular power walks up and down several of his homes in his singlet and shorts, managed to persuade Latino star (Mave)Ricky Martin to redo the Beach Boys' classic Barbara Ann.
To a fast, repetitive and haunting beat, the words assault the ears and make the listener run for the hills. But they are not the "Ba'mb, Ba'mb, Ba-Ba'mb Iran" lyrics with which Mr. McCain once regaled an audience. No, no. Instead we have:
"Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba-Barbra Bush.
Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba-Barbra Bush...".
Strangely, the verses include the line:
"Went to a dance,
looking for romance,
Saw Barbara Bush
and my insides turned to mush....".
You see, aerobic exercise and a traditional view of love really do go together.
Barack Obama is not one to be outdone. So it is not surprising that he has jumped on the personalized iPod running content bandwagon. Apparently, he managed to persuade Stevie Winwood, a star from quite a long time ago, to recreate his hit "Valerie".
Some of the words make for very moving listening:
"Hillareeee.. Call on me.
Hillareee, Call on me..
Come and see me...
I'll be here in the morning at three...."
Clearly, it helps to have the right connections to create your own jogging accompaniment. But perhaps Apple will consider allowing anyone to recreate their own performance-enhancing versions as part of the iTunes service.
More royalties for the artists. More loyalties for Apple.
I, for one, have a new version of the Vengaboys' Boom Boom Boom Techno Trance Dance Mix that I'd like Radiohead to have a look at.
Perhaps you, too, would like to share the ways in which you would like some of your favorite songs rewritten and rearranged for performance-enhancing purposes?
I was in a bar in New York last weekend and the man next to me looked vaguely familiar.
Glasses, friendly, drinking a lot.
To me, these are all the hallmarks of a journalist. But he might have been a doctor, I supposed.
His first words? "I just can't take it any more. The pressure, the accolades. And all the adulation. Man, have you got any idea how stressful adulation can be?"
He introduced himself as Dan.
He kept talking, either trying to convince me of something or, I preferred, to convince himself.
"Most journalists become famous by sucking up to people. You know, that Bob Woodward, he even sucked up to Bush. But I became famous by doing the opposite. Pissing off one of the only people in the world even more powerful than Bush."
"Oh, who's that?" I said cradling my first drink while he snatched at his fourth.
"Steve Jobs," he replied.
(Well, actually, he slipped a middle name beginning with 'F' in there.)
"Oh," I said. "And why did you do that?"
"Because he's not funny, so someone had to be on his behalf," he said with a large sip. Of scotch.
"So it was charity work?" I asked.
"I never thought of it that way, but yeah. I suppose it was. I mean, the tech world doesn't always have a sense of humor," whispered the man who called himself Dan. "They think they're changing the world, but they don't stop to experience the world at all. They don't stop to enjoy it. Some of them are so unfriendly. Especially to us journalists."
(Credit:
failquail)
"It can't be easy being a journalist," I ventured. "On the one hand, people are always watching you. On the other, they're always making a show of ignoring you."
"That's it. That's it," he said, spilling his scotch onto his crinkly chinos. "They're afraid you're going to screw them. But, at the same time, they're afraid you've got something, something that they really, really would like to have. You know, like information. Or charisma. Or the address of a really good, cheap lapdancing club."
"Brigitte's," I blurted out automatically.
"You know Brigitte's?" he said, with an unusual lightness.
"No, no. My girlfriend told me about it," I explained.
"Oh....right.." he said, looking momentarily more confused.
Then he changed the subject. "So I'm going to give up being Fake Steve Jobs. I'm going out at the top. Going out while Steve is still alive and my fans still love me."
"But won't you miss it?" I asked.
"Of course I'll miss it," said Fake Dan. "But I've got a more serious job now. I'm going to Newsweek. Before I was merely a soldier of fortune at Forbes."
"So you're going back to being just a journalist? Won't that bore you?" I wondered
"Not at all," he insisted. "All good things come to an end. Then other good things begin."
That's when I knew this Dan was a fake.
The real Dan Lyons would surely want to have kept going. Wouldn't he have wanted to develop the Fake Steve Jobs character? Wouldn't he have wanted to keep on loving his readers to the point of pant-wetness?
I mean, JK Rowling didn't walk away from Harry Potter just because the actor who played him in the movies suddenly went on stage and did some full-frontal scenes with a horse.
When Real Dan was being Fake Steve, this was surely the one time that he could really be himself.
By all accounts, open, charming, uproariously funny.
Which is why Fake Steve Jobs must continue. For Dan's sake as much as the whole tech industry's.
No one with the remotest humanity in tech can allow Mr. Lyons to suffer the remainder of his days being a mere journalist.
Please, Mr. Lyons. Reconsider. Reconsider right now.
Otherwise, Fake Dan Lyons might rear his ugly head again.
And, from my one encounter with his depressing, narcissistic, depressive, downtrodden being in that New York bar, this would not be a good idea at all.
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