If you haven't read the roundtable discussion on the theme "Is Microsoft Evil?" in the first issue of Slate, I'll wait while you go do that. It should be at http://www.slate.com/, in the Compost. While they're away, I'll give the rest of you a preview of the musical I'm writing, based on My Fair Lady. It recounts the hilarious attempts of a world-famous linguist to teach a Newton MessagePad to read proper English, and it has lots of great songs, like "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Interface," "I Could Have Scrolled All Night," and "The Rain in Spam Stays Manila in the Islam."
Just then, the door flew open and my cousin Corbett walked in. "Table the Islam," he told me. "I need some advice on existentialism."
"Shoot," I said, hiding the cookies.
"Okay, now Sartre says that Hell is other people, right?" he asked, finding the cookies. "But in another place, he says that Hell is a long corridor of rooms decorated in Second Empire style."
"Sounds inconsistent to me, Corbett."
"Eifher fhat, or he meanf fhat ofher feofle are a corridor of roomf decorated in Fecond Emfire ftyle."
"It's hard to understand you when you talk with your mouth full, but in my experience a long corridor of rooms decorated in Second Empire style..."
[Monica-No, I didn't make it up. I found that Second Empire quote on page 28 of the May 1996 issue of France Today.
Back already? Interesting stuff in a publication founded and funded by Microsoft, eh? James Gleick and James Fallows really pile on poor Steve Ballmer about the leaky Chinese wall between the OS and apps groups. Others get bashed, too: I liked that line of Fallows' about "the flatliners running the company" at IBM. I'll be watching to see if Slate can really retain its editorial integrity. As to its content...
I'm sure you realize that what I'm doing here is playing with levels of interruption. You should have five topics on your mental stack now: Slate, My Fair PDA, Cousin Corbett, Monica, and this one: <a href="http://www.cruzio.com/~mswaine/moreofcolumn">
That was six.
</a>
"...is the Magic Cap user interface."
You do get France Today, don't you? You could probably expense it; it has a regular column called "Web Watch" about you know what.-Mike]
Eliza, the heroine of the story, is the PDA's handwriting-recognition software. Her namesake mother was a Rogerian therapist, but our Eliza supports herself and her "retired" sugar-water salesman father by working as an order-entry clerk and dreams "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" if she could spell.
...a fair amount of Slate's first issue consists of writing about writing and analysis of analysis. I fear that if I write about it here, it'll just be writing about writing about writing and analysis of analysis of analysis. And who knows where that might lead?
"Hell," Sartre said, helping himself to my cookies, "is a stack crash."
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mswaine@cruzio.com