[Am-info] Back From Whence It Came (5/22/03)

[Mitch Stone]

http://www.appleturns.com/

Too easy. Way too easy.  "Shooting fish in a barrel with a fish-seeking 
barrel gun" easy.  Man, sometimes the challenge in producing this show 
isn't adapting reality into something a little more dramatic; sometimes 
it's trying to come up with something to say beyond the obvious cheap 
shots which Microsoft is so famously adept at setting itself up for.  
(Yes, we're so excited that we just ended a sentence with not one, but 
two prepositions.  We believe we just heard the collective pop of every 
single one of our junior high and high school English teachers' heads 
exploding.)

So here's the set-up: faithful viewer Paul McGill notes an article in 
The Salt Lake Tribune which reports that a whopping 937 boxes of 
internal Microsoft memos and email messages-- that's 3 million pages, 
or 37,480 pounds-- subpoenaed in various antitrust lawsuits are now 
headed for the shredder.  And just what will become of the recorded 
thoughts and ideas of Redmond's Best and Brightest after they've been 
"vertically reordered"?  Well, according to Cathy Keetch of the Recall 
Secure Destruction Service, "ninety-nine percent of our shreddings are 
made into toilet paper."

See what we mean?  How perfect is that?

Gee, maybe Microsoft can buy it all back to stock the iLoo .  (Oh, 
wait, that was a hoax .  Oh, wait, no it wasn't .)  In any case, the 
next time you're in the can, you might derive great satisfaction from 
the knowledge that you may well be doing unspeakable things to a 
repurposed Bill Gates memo on the importance of Trustworthy Computing.  
As for us, though, we can't help but wonder whether our toilet paper 
might contain documents formerly handled by Steve Ballmer-- which means 
we can never, ever go to the bathroom again.